My visits to Sweden and Long Island were followed by another long flight over to our friend Joanna in Los Angeles. I was there for four days, and we packed a lot in.

We relaxed on the beach after a long bike ride.

We witnessed Carmageddon. In fact, I arrived in the middle of it.

Actually, that picture is totally misleading. Media reports that Carmageddon was a total non-issue were completely right. People really did stay off the roads, and there wasn’t any traffic at all.

We went for a beautiful hike in Temescal Canyon, overlooking central Los Angeles, the shoreline and the Pacific Ocean.

We visited the amazing Getty Museum. Joanna and I took an art history class together in the spring, so we’re sort of experts in the field, and the museum was really neat. Our visit to the “free” museum began with a $15 parking fee and a tram ride up a steep hill to the beautiful campus.

The museum is spread through a few buildings, and the setting and architecture are as notable as the collections. The museum is wrapped around a large garden that is itself an art installation.

Of course, the food tour continued, too. We sampled the local cuisine at one of Joanna’s favorite Mexican restaurants.

And the other, equally important local cuisine, too.

Most notably, though, I made my triumphant return to eating Asian food in the U.S., with visits to a great Thai place and a Korean barbecue. Los Angeles was a great place to restart my ethnic eating. The city actually has the largest Thai population outside of Thailand in its Thai Town neighborhood. We ventured in past signs written in a familiar but incomprehensible language to Sanamluang Cafe, whose namesake I guess I visited, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time.

We started with a papaya salad, which was one of my favorites in Thailand but only thanks to Emmy’s affinity for it. In fact, I’m not sure I had ever had it in the States. And while this papaya salad was delicious, retaining the tangy spice of the original, it definitely wasn’t quite as good as the real thing. We also had crab rangoons, which were very good, though I’m always skeptical of how amazing something deep-friend can be.

My yellow curry, though, definitely matched the best curries we had in Thailand, and its spice had me sweating. Joanna’s pad see ew was also state of the art. I guess both dishes are relatively easy to export, since they’re not too complicated.

We left Sanamluang very satisfied, and I was particular reassured about my culinary future in America. Even after being in Southeast Asia, I’m still perfectly happy to eat what’s available right here.

The Korean barbecue was not only also a great eating experience but also a new adventure of sorts. I had never had Korean barbecue before, and the restaurant we went to — Hae Jang Chon, in the heart of Koreatown — was like nothing I’d ever seen before.

Hae Jang Chon serves all-you-can-eat barbecue that you cook at your table on a little stove. We chose four meats to start from the list of nineteen choices, and though that was more than enough food for the two of us, a larger group could easily have kept ordering.

They started us off with a couple little appetizers and a whole host of sauces and other accompaniments for our meats. Of course, we immediately had to ask for a tutorial, and our main course — the one we were supposed to cook ourselves — hadn’t even arrived. The young Korean couple seated nearby looked on with glee.

Once our meats arrived, we got to it. We ordered beef brisket, short rib, barbecue beef, and chicken. At first, we didn’t really know what we were doing, but we figured it out before too long. It didn’t hurt that really all you had to do was keep checking the meat to see if it was done.

The two in the background were putting us to shame with their barbecue skills.

The meats were delicious, and the only thing I regretted was that we were only two people. The entertainment aspect of the experience would have lasted much longer if we had had a larger group and thus, the stomach capacity required for more courses. But the meats we did have were very interesting, and very different from anything I had had before. Like steaks in the U.S., everything about these meats was designed for them to be eaten alone, and yet the flavor was as full as anything you would find in a more composed food. The flavors themselves were very different than I’ve tasted in other Asian food, too.

After our meats, and after our waiter teased us for not ordering a second course at an all-you-can-eat restaurant, he prepared fried rice for us right on our little personal stove. It was delicious, though at this point, I really couldn’t eat much more.

Los Angeles was a great reintroduction into ethnic eating in America after my time abroad, and a wonderful place to visit too. Thanks, Joanna!