A day of eating, drinking, shopping, and spending time with friends and puppies.

The day starts out with lunch at Dai Ho Restaurant in Temple City with a few of Ron’s friends. I was a bit shocked by the prices as a bowl of noodles was almost $10. The noodles and soup were good but I’m not sure if it was worth $10.

This small plastic container of spicy cucumbers were $4. They were really good though, nicely pickled and spicy… but $4?!

The beef noodle soup.

The minced pork noodles, spicy, for Ron.

Maybe I’m not as familiar with Taiwanese food as I thought but I wasn’t really wowed by this restaurant but check out the reviews on Yelp! for other opinions.

Next stop, pearl tea. Ron’s friend suggested Half & Half Tea House in San Gabriel. I ordered a rose black tea with pearls. It’s served in this huge glass with tons of ice, it really hit the spot on this hot day. Their pearls were pretty good, sweet and chewy (rather than bland and paste-like).

Next stop, to see 5-day old Boston Terrier pups. Both boys and oh so cute! Their eyes are still closed and they can’t really stand yet so they just squirm around like furry worms.

In the evening, we went to Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade to walk around. We did a bit of shopping and took a quick rest at Pinkberry. We missed Pinkberry on our last visit so wanted to make sure we got to it this time. Although I think that Yogurtland is better since it’s self-serve versus the servers at Pinkberry dictate how much topping you get and there are only limited flavors at Pinkberry.

This is original frozen yogurt with granola, mango, and strawberries.

The most exciting thing of the evening is that we saw Pierce Brosnan at Barnes & Nobles! He was there with his family so I didn’t think it appropriate to bother him although there were some young girls deciding if they should ask for his autograph and their father was helping them… I’m not sure the outcome since we walked away. But that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a movie star in real life. I think the most famous TV star I’ve interacted with was when I was around 12 years old and met Martin Yan and have a photo and autograph with him!

Anyways, after Santa Monica, we headed back to the hotel for some dinner and we had to get some shut eye since our flight is at 6am.

Before we went to Santa Monica, we had stopped by SinBala Restaurant to get some take out. We had heard during our previous trip that the shaved ice was good but we were still stuffed with lunch and tapioca pearls that we just ordered a few things for dinner later and some fresh made sausages to bring back to SF.

We ordered a few ba-wan which we found to be very delicious. Not just all starchy and chewy like most, it actually had quite a bit of filling with pork, mushrooms, and bamboo shoots. There was only one sauce, a red one (usually it’s a white and red one), but it was still good.

I forgot what this one is called since I usually don’t like it. It’s a sort of paste that has meat and mushrooms mixed in. I usually don’t like it because there’s too much “paste” and not enough stuff mixed in but this was different, much better than usual.

So ends our trip to Southern California. Tomorrow we fly back early and I go straight to work.

Dai Ho Restaurant
9148 Las Tunas Dr
Temple City, CA

Half & Half Tea House
120 N San Gabriel Blvd, Unit H
San Gabriel, CA

SinBala Restaurant
651 W Duarte Rd, Ste F
Arcadia, CA