Short Beach, Long Beach

Since I am without camera (please be kind to me repair shop) I am going to take this next week to get caught up on posts I meant to post, but never did. So here is (finally) the tale of Bri and my day in Long Beach!

A couple weeks ago Bri and I headed out to Long Beach for the day. She had a friend who had a dance concert out there that evening and we had tickets to go see the show. So we made a day of it and decided to go to Ikea in Costa Mesa and then head to 4th Street in Long Beach for some Vintage shopping. We had a really great day despite some hiccups (I'll get there) and came away much poorer! First up was Ikea. Good lord I love Ikea. I know some people think it's evil or something, but personally I just love it! We'd planned to be in and out of there real quick like, and ended up spending 2.5 hours squealing about how genius the double-sided, lidded cheese graters were, among other things.

Maybe it's just that I love the food. I mean have you seen this Almond Torte Cake thing? It was incredible.

That's toffee on top, covered in chocolate... yeah.

A Hat?

When we got back to the car this was all parked behind me. Bri's theory is that someone saw a Volvo station wagon and figured we'd be there all day so might as well park all their carts behind it. Whatever the reason it was annoying!

This was our haul. I bought a ton of hangers. I still need more hangers... sigh... After Ikea we headed to 4th Street, which was awesome. I bought this, this, and this dress down there as well as one other one I haven't managed to photograph yet. Also the gloves, and barrette from this post were also bought there. I also found a second dopple ganger to this dress! I found on in LA last year sometime. It makes me very curious... My favorite shop aesthetically speaking was Meow Vintage. The dressing room doors were vintage teal and pink refridgerator doors!

Once we finished shopping we went in search of a gas station (which there are apparently only, like, two in the entire city), and then stopped for dinner at this place called the Long Beach Cafe. I have a serious soft spot for diners and diner food (also dives, but that's another story), and this place did not dissapoint! The food was yummy, the coffee was yummy, the milkshakes were yummy, the portions of everything were huge! Both of us couldn't finish anything and had to take it home (where we happily devoured it the next day).

Bri was very excited for our dinner!

For being in Los Angeles County, Long Beach is actually a very beautiful city. There's alot of very pretty arcitecture, and being that it is a beach city people ride their bikes everywhere and there's just a really nice vibe. It's similar to San Diego (but as a native San Diegan of course my home town trumps Long Beach!) in that.

After dinner we headed to the concert except when we got there we found out that not only had they started early, but also had sold our seats. Yep. We did get to watch Bri's friend's piece through a crack in a window, but it's not the same. So we were a little annoyed with that. However when we started going back home and realized we'd be home by about 10 instead of the original time of about 2am, we were not all that upset. And we didn't end up having to pay for the tickets either! So in the end, it was a pretty swell day!