Santa Monica!

This past week I drove my friend Jasmine up to Los Angeles. 

Jasmine is a writer and soon-to-be publisher author!  She runs her own blog called Eat Move Write and is currently in the works of writing her FIRST book!  I hung out at a local Starbucks while she met with her agent up in West Beverly Hills.  Her meeting didn’t take long and afterward we decided to check out Santa Monica since we were about 10 minutes away.

We ended up walking around downtown Santa Monica.  I was enamored by all the cute shops and loved how the streets were completely closed off from cars, leaving pedestrians free to walk in the middle.  Although they had your staple expensive clothing and high-end stores you would expect from L.A., my favorite stores were a toys and games shop called the Puzzle Zoo and Ye Olde King’s Head, a shop that carried imports from Great Britain.  I bought a t-shirt at the games shop for $5!

We also stopped to eat at this wonderful French country-style cafe called Le Pain Quotidien (The Daily Bread).

All of their coffees were Peruvian organic! *so proud*

I ordered the Chicken Curry Salad Tartine with side of harissa-cranberry chutney.  De-Lish!  I ate about 3/4s because I wanted to save room for…

You guessed it… dessert!  It was a lemon custard made with fat free yogurt.  It was ok.

After lunch, we walked around some more and then headed down to the boardwalk where there were ride, shops, and more restaurants (though I didn’t get any pictures of that… whoops!).

The ocean was absolutely beautiful.  Even though we were freezing cold, we were determined to walk down the entire boardwalk!  When we finally made it to the end, we were in for a big surprise…

Mr. Seal was waiting to greet us!  Say cheese!

It was a fun little trip to L.A., but I’m glad to call San Diego “home” for now at least!

Cheers,

Jess

Tags: Le Pain Quotidien, Los Angeles, Santa Monica