Sun, May 25 - Downtown, Little Tokyo

10.35am - It's official: this is the very last of Nadya's oranges. Lovely fresh juice, as always, but also very nice in some Orange Pekoe. At home, with Ritesh.10.47am - baked beans w/ maple syrup on toast, fried egg, grilled tomatoes, at home, with Ritesh. I'd had a hankering for baked beans ever since I read about them on Run for the Hills. Hadn't had any since the old undergraduate days in England.

16.04h - roadtrip to downtown LA, which is about 12 miles east from where we live. This is the downtown skyline from the 10 freeway, hence the blur, but the sky was too good to pass up.

16.22h - stumbled across this great hole-in-the-wall Mexican place on Broadway between 7th and 8th Street: 2 excellent, excellent tacos w/ carnitas, salsa and cilantro. Daniel Alarcon, a Peruvian writer living in LA likes to say that LA is really a Latin American megalopolis, not a US city. And it's of course a fact that the Hispanic population outnumbers all the rest of us. You sometimes forget that on the Westside, but thankfully Downtown is always there to remind you...

16.23h - a pupusa de queso ( a Salvadorean corn tortilla made w/ masa de maiz, filled with cheese spiked w/ chilies), w/ some cabbage salad and a spicy salsa, at the same little hole in the wall place. In fact, the best way to find it is to look for the Salvadorean lady frying up these pupusas on the sidewalk outside the restaurant.

16.36pm - a paleta (Mexican ice cream) from the Paleteria "La Michoacana" - the reason for our drive out here. This one is walnut ice cream covered w/ chocolate and coconut. Ritesh got pecan, which was also very good.

16.52h - fresh mango w/ salt, chili and lime juice, from a street vendor on Broadway, with Ritesh.

17.17h - Japantown is just a skip and a jump from Downtown, so we headed over to Little Tokyo for some more tasty adventures. I got these mochi-skewers w/ teriyaki glaze, and Ritesh was not happy because he wanted me to get the fresh pancakes w/red bean paste. Next time, love!

17.29h - we reconciled over frozen yogurt (pomegranate-raspberry and acaiberry, with almonds, mochi and blackberries) at the Japantown CeFiore, a big player in the LA Yogurt Wars. Forget Pinkberry, this one wins hands down.

18.17h - the house ramen at Daikokuya in Little Tokyo. We were relieved to find that it was nowhere near as good as Satsouka's, just because Satsouka is so much closer to our house...