Venice

It was very cloudy when we woke in Alexis’s lovely little house in Eagle Rock. She is a minimalist (unlike us) and everything is beautifully curated, organically in a simple palette with highlights of a rich blue green. I wandered round the garden taking pics but as the sun wasn’t out they weren’t in their best light so I haven’t blipped them. 

We drove into Pasadena for a late breakfast in an old fashioned, so to say, dark wood hotel called The Raymond. I tried to wrangle a London style coffee order but the waiter morphed a flat white into flat wine…three more goes gave us something indifferent but drinkable.   After we parted we went and got a new ear piercing,, something I’d been meaning to do for ages but you know how it is when you’re on holiday.  

In the afternoon we went down Abbot Kinney, a street in Venice Beach that V said used to be sleazy and dirty but which is now a temple to hip retail. The old ‘head’ shops are now legal cannabis stores and I liked this one claiming to have an upcoming range of ‘Christian cannibis’. I must visit one!   

We did some shopping, even some Christmas shopping, and then had tea and cake at Djusto’s a cafe in a big barn.   Dinner with David and Nan, friends of V we saw yesterday and with whom he’s been staying at an amazing new Italian restaurant called Antico Nuevo which was delicious but eye wateringly expensive.  The exchange rate has to hurt when a plate of spaghetti al pomodoro is $44….  We didn’t bust the menu but even so it came to a big ticket evening.  I guess cheaper than a hotel given V has been staying with them for nearly a week.  But, as is the way of these things, exquisite peasant food and a decor based on old village implements cost the equivalent of an agricultural workers weekly wage.  Cynically expensive. .