Saturday morning Heather and I went for a breakfast at Mimi’s café, where she had a low-carb breakfast and a muffin and I had a muffin, and egg, and tea. The hot tea came with a selection of tea bags and a number of plastic pouches with honey, which after the experience on Friday immediately made me snicker uncontrollably as I contemplated a honey squishy. After our langorous meal we drove out west again. We were to meet up with my friend Mizuho, whom I know from the Japanese church I attend when in the Tokyo area, and who had just moved to L.A. to start an exchange year at UCLA.

What neither Heather nor I had bothered to think about was how to get to UCLA, so we took 10 to Santa Monica, where it turned into US 1 going north along the shore. Obviously we were a bit too far west at that point, so we turned up a random road (Temescal Canyon road) and turned right on Sunset boulevard. At the next gas station we asked for directions for UCLA. The attendant moseyed on over to his supervisor, conferred, and returned to tell us to drive on Sunset for a while and then to turn left into Westwood boulevard, before retiring to sit in the shade again. We drove off, intent on following his directions and calling Mizuho again when we got there.

Alas, directions need to be correct in order to be followed. His weren’t. We passed a Westwood Plaza on our right and continued on in blind faith, when it later turned out that would have been an entrance to UCLA. Westwood boulevard doesn’t even intersect Sunset. Our drive continued on through all the ostentatiousness of Beverly Hills and on into West Hollywood, where Mizuho’s friend Yoshiko called and we decided we’d gone well beyond where we’d wanted to. We stopped at another gas station and this time I went ahead and bought a map (and more fizzy water).

Oh, how the world becomes a better place once you have a map. Not only do you know where to go and how to get there, but you can figure out a shortcut and amuse yourself by trying to figure out where you’ve come from. The only little difficulty we had getting to the Japanese center on Sawtelle was that we passed it at first and had to circle around the block, avoid the valet parking, and find a space in the subterranean lot across the street. Yoshiko and Mizuho soon arrived and Yoshiko, whom I’d last met during my internship at Nippon Steel Corporation six years ago, obviously knew the place and guided us to a Vietnamese restaurant with a Japanese waitress. Although among each other we mostly spoke English, I consistently spoke Japanese to the waitress just for the sheer oddness of it.

After lunch we crossed over to the market because Mizuho craved Japanese reading and had spied the Japanese bookstore. Heather bought cute stationery items, Mizuho bought two books, and the rest of us meandered through the shop commenting and chatting. I talked Mizuho into buying Endo’s “The Samurai” and I hope she ends up liking it as much as I did. After rifling through the CD and DVD section of the store we ambled on to the coffee shop where they were out of Assam and the only other unscented choice was English Breakfast; Yoshiko and Mizuho both had tapioca bobbles in their drink and couldn’t understand why Heather and I saw no redeeming attributes in sucking chewy spheres up with one’s tea.

We bade each other farewell and Heather and I drove back. On the way I tried to use my credit card to pump gas, but the pump station wanted me to enter a five-digit ZIP code. I tried 04053, which resulted in an error and a message that I had to go see the clerk. He took my card, authorized the pump, and kept the card while we pumped. Am I the only one who thinks it’s odd to require a ZIP code when the card has a PIN code, the only one who thinks it’s provincial to insist that every country have a five-digit ZIP code?

We stopped at a grocery store for something Heather needed to get for her friend Jessica, and I bought orange juice and a can of Easy Cheese (made with real cheese). At the checkout counter the girl voiced her surprise that the half-gallon of OJ cost less than the little can o’ cheese. I told her I wanted the can to take home, because we don’t have anything like that in Switzerland. “You’re from Switzerland?” she asked. “That’s so … interesting!” At a loss for words to craft an intelligent response that wouldn’t hurt the feelings of the sweet-tempered cashier, I paid up and took off.

Heather and I drove to Jessica’s house, where we not only got to hang out with Jessica in a room that contained two sofas, a 40-inch TV, and two loudspeakers nearly as tall as Jessica herself, but got to meet five of her cousins ranging from age two to age twelve. The kids seemed most excited that the two-year-old could already use words I’d rather not repeat on my blog. He also kept wanting to swing a RCA jack cable that the kids used as a jumprope, and managed to give Heather a good smack in the face early on. I hope I won’t be around when he gets bigger.

We dropped off our stuff at Heather’s and headed into town, where we met a number of Heather’s and Kurt’s friends at the Royal Falconer. I got to talk to a girl named Laura who is also a dental hygienist from Loma Linda University, like Heather. They seem to be spawning somewhere. Aside from the folks that we were supposed to meet up with, half the bar was apparently populated by people they used to go to school with and hadn’t seen in ages, even though the bar was quiet due to the car show in San Bernardino. We had a cheese lavosh and far too many drinks, enough that I had to get up in the middle of a jetlagged night for a glass of OJ and one of water. By that time I was wide awake and ended up snapping a few shots of the dawn before crawling back under the covers.