July in Cali

Switching gears now from China back to current life here in LA. My time here is nearing an end already! Sad, but also excited to see friends back in NY who I've missed so much throughout the past 6 months! Wow-just realized its been exactly 6 months since I've been in NY. Crazy. I had a feeling the past 6 months would be the quickest 6 months of my life-and I was right! I have less than 2 weeks left of my internship. All the ithacans here besides me will fly back the 28th or 29th, but my parents, sister and niece are coming to visit me on the 29th, for about a week. I'm so excited for them to visit. I haven't seen any of them besides my dad in 6 months! I'm so excited to be able to spend so much time with my sister and niece too-so rare! We're taking Sophia, my niece, to Disneyland :) On August 4th we'll fly back to NY! I'll spend a couple weeks catching up with friends around home, and then its off to Ithaca for my senior year of college. WHOA! I'm SOOO excited to see my college friends! I'm also very sad that we'll be beginning our final year at Ithaca-even though it will be one incredible year. The house I'm living in next year is filled with most of my best friends-I get so insanely happy thinking about it!

But back to the here and now. The past couple weeks have been a blast, as the entire summer here has been. A couple weeks ago I got to hang out with my Semester at Sea friend, Daniel, who lives in LA! It was on his birthday, and we went with a couple of his friends to a Salsa Club and then a regular club-Tru. We danced our butts off the whole night. We were drenched in sweat. It was awesome. Then all of us came back to my place and hung out at the hottub until the wee hours. It was such a great time, and it was so great seeing Daniel. The Salsa club was such a cool experience. It was on Hollywood Blvd and even though it was a Monday it was PACKED. We made our way to the bar and and as soon as we got our mojitos, a guy comes up and takes my hand and brings me to the dance floor. I tried my best to dance, but I must've been a sight to see up against all the latin pros! A few other guys came up to me and offered their hand throughout the night-I got quite a workout and had a blast.

A couple days later was July 4. It was my first 4th of July out of Andes, and it was the best one yet! We went to Daniel's friend's cookout and had a great time meeting new people, chatting and even dancing. One of his friends whom I met spent a couple years in Ghana! What a small world! We talked about Ghana for about an hour-it was so great. One of the girls at the cookout actually graduated from Ithaca in '09-crazy how small of a world it really is. We came back to Oakwoods for the fireworks and watched them from our apartment balcony. It was wonderful. There were ones for Burbank, near us, and then in the distance we saw like 15 or so different sets of fireworks going off in the distance across the valley. SO COOL!

 

View from our balcony, when there were actually a few clouds in the sky for once!

 

Last weekend Paige, Julianne and I went to San Diego for a night. We went to the 710 beach club during the day and night, hung out with my Delhi San Diego friends, and Amber. During the day we took a nap on the beach. It was a nice little retreat. That Tuesday we went to a taping of The Price is Right. They choose the contestants by the group interview process. There were about 15 of us and a producer went through everyone and asked us "What do you do," and then if he liked your answer he'd keep talking to you. We had quite the exciting time on the Price is Right...I suggest you tune in November 12, when it airs. One of my bffs was one of the first one called down, first one on stage, and might just have won a lot of stuff. You'll see me jumping up and down freaking out...oh what a day that was!

The past couple weeks I've been giving my Supervisor's daughter swimming lessons. Shes 4 and is oh so adorable. She is a very quick learner and surprises me everyday! She LOVES swimming lessons, so it makes my job not only easy but fun!

This past weekend I worked at 2 weddings! The one on Friday was on Long Beach and was just beautiful. On Saturday the wedding was at USC. So I had quite a busy, tiring weekend! It was an interesting and eventful one..as I was walking back to my apartment on Friday night after the wedding I dropped my phone and the screen shattered-pretty sucky-and it was Friday the 13th. Saturday night after checking out a grand opening of a new club in Hollywood, Julianne and I went to the Playhouse, where we've been many times before. Nick Cannon was DJing, and we had such a fun time dancing to the awesome music.
 

 

Wedding in Long Beach

 

Just Married sign I made!

The next morning I got up earrrly to go to church at 9AM. That evening Julianne and I went to a restaurant/bar on Sunset Blvd called Happy Ending and met up with her friend from Ithaca who has lived here in LA for a few years now. We ended up staying and chatting for 3 hours!

Tonight I'm going to see Sam Adams at the House of Blues with Paige. I can't wait! Julianne and I went to see him in Ithaca last year, and I had probably the most fun I've ever had at a concert.

A week and a half and Julianne and Paige will leave :(, I will move out of this beautiful apartment, and my family will come visit me and we'll have a blast! We're going to Catalina island, hike at Griffith Park, the Grove and Disneyland for Sophia! I have just 1 wedding left-next Friday.

2 weeks left-time to live it up!