Saturday, December 25, 2004
Blame It on Confucius
We arrived last Saturday and I am sitting down to write for the first time...eight days later.
We flew Eva Air's economy deluxe class. The seats are nearly as spacious as in business class and the service is friendly and the foo dmore than passable. It's actually better than many business class expereinces I have had on United and other American airlines (sorry to say).
A quick transit through Taipei (in which we learned that if you are an Eva frequent flyer card holder you can use your miles instantly to gain access to the biz class lounge), then we had a several hour stopover in LA.
Now we had just come from Saigon, so what did we do? Hopped in friends' cars and drove down to Garden Grove! We ended up eating in a Korean BBQ place, though, so the experience was not totally redundant of being in Vietnam
Plus I rode from a friend's house to the BBQ place in Brian's Mercedes convertible. The thing can put the top up (or down at 30mph) and it is so well designed you can talk at 50 miles per hour with the wind lightly blowing through your hair. Brian said he buys a new car every three years because...well, because it is LA, and LA people are in love with their cars. I don't blame him.
On the way back Thu insisted that we stop in South Coast Mall to get shoes for Callie at Nordstrom. They disappeared into the Christmas shopping crowd and Cal&I found ourselves stuck there. We found a Borders bookstore in the mall annex and Cal bought a hardcover edition of Arthur Waley's Analects (Confucius) and another nice hardcover of Augustine's Confessions. I looked at my watch and realized we had had our noses in the books for way too long, so we ran back to Nordstrom, could not find Thu and company, and then we heard frantic shouts from the front door. It was Thu and our friends screaming for us to get into the car and get to the airport. Of course the low gas light came on in one of our friend's cars, and there was a traffic jam right before the turn-off, and we only had ten minutes before the flight departed. We ran through security (the TSA people looked at us and saw a frantic rather than a fanatic look in our eyes and let us pass fairly quickly) and were the last ones to board.
We flew Eva Air's economy deluxe class. The seats are nearly as spacious as in business class and the service is friendly and the foo dmore than passable. It's actually better than many business class expereinces I have had on United and other American airlines (sorry to say).
A quick transit through Taipei (in which we learned that if you are an Eva frequent flyer card holder you can use your miles instantly to gain access to the biz class lounge), then we had a several hour stopover in LA.
Now we had just come from Saigon, so what did we do? Hopped in friends' cars and drove down to Garden Grove! We ended up eating in a Korean BBQ place, though, so the experience was not totally redundant of being in Vietnam
Plus I rode from a friend's house to the BBQ place in Brian's Mercedes convertible. The thing can put the top up (or down at 30mph) and it is so well designed you can talk at 50 miles per hour with the wind lightly blowing through your hair. Brian said he buys a new car every three years because...well, because it is LA, and LA people are in love with their cars. I don't blame him.
On the way back Thu insisted that we stop in South Coast Mall to get shoes for Callie at Nordstrom. They disappeared into the Christmas shopping crowd and Cal&I found ourselves stuck there. We found a Borders bookstore in the mall annex and Cal bought a hardcover edition of Arthur Waley's Analects (Confucius) and another nice hardcover of Augustine's Confessions. I looked at my watch and realized we had had our noses in the books for way too long, so we ran back to Nordstrom, could not find Thu and company, and then we heard frantic shouts from the front door. It was Thu and our friends screaming for us to get into the car and get to the airport. Of course the low gas light came on in one of our friend's cars, and there was a traffic jam right before the turn-off, and we only had ten minutes before the flight departed. We ran through security (the TSA people looked at us and saw a frantic rather than a fanatic look in our eyes and let us pass fairly quickly) and were the last ones to board.
