OLD BLUE EYES IS BACK
16 February 2003
We had dinner with Old Blue Eyes tonight.
The place was…again…(again?) Buca di beppo…this one in South Pasadena. We flew here this morning. Schlepped ourselves out to the Sacramento Airport at the crack of dawn and there ran into Ned and Marta, Jon and Joy, and Phil. We were all headed to the Burbank Airport where we would all be staying at the same motel and tomorrow attending the wedding of Steve Erickson, who used to play trumpet in Lawsuit.
The flight was uneventful (Southwest has new seats…and has apparently chosen to pay for them by reducing your peanut allotment to one eency weency packet instead of two). We all rented cars, since we were all going to be doing different things at different times, and we made our way to our hotel.
The Best Western Dragon Gate Inn is smack dab in the middle of Los Angeles’ Chinatown. In fact, this is a part of LA that I am not really familiar with. It’s much larger than it’s San Francisco cousin, but this has more the feel of a real home for oriental people, not for the tourists.
I don’t know what this motel was originally, but it’s not your mother’s Best Western. For one thing, it’s built around a tiny courtyard…a mini shopping mall, with a motel on three sides of it. To get from the basement to the third floor (where we are staying), you take a glass walled elevator so you can look out on the shoppers below.
We checked out some jackets on sale and very nearly bought one just because it said “San Francisco FIFTY-niners.” I’m sure there was a reason for it, which I’m sure someone found very funny at the time, but the joke escaped us.
Our rooms weren’t ready yet, so we joined the rest of the group at a restaurant nearby—Sam Woo’s. We were definitely the minority there, so the food was definitely designed for a local’s palate (we could tell when we didn’t get fortune cookies at the end of our meal!), and simply delicious.
When we finished lunch, we were able to check into our rooms, but it was a couple of hours before we had to be at the wedding rehearsal, so Walt took a nap and I watched a movie (and dozed a bit myself). Then off to South Pasadena where we met the group at a rec hall. Jeri, Ned and Marta are part of the music for the wedding.
