Celebrating!
This year, we decided to go to Universal Studios – Hollywood for Janette’s birthday! We’ve never been and have been curious about it for a while, especially with the addition of Super Mario World!
Fun at the Park!
We decided to spend 2 days at the Universal Studios theme parks; many sources told us that 1 day should probably be enough for everything if you rush or if you want to take your time, 2 days is perfect. Two days were in fact perfect! We were never in a rush, we got to do everything (with riding a few rides multiple times), and had plenty of time to sit down for snacks and bites as well!
With the addition of Mario World, 2 days was probably better to get more time trying to do as much of those mini games as possible. A “powerup” band is in fact required for a lot of the exploration done in Mario World, but, it is worth it, especially if you’re there longer than just the 1 day (if its only 1 day, i might reconsider).
Mario world is super immersive with plenty to do, assuming you got the power up band, otherwise…sad to say that there really is only 1 ride – Mario Kart.
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We also got see many fun characters all around the park! Scobby and some of the gang, Hello Kitty in her Chinese new year outfit, a few minions, Dracula, Bart, Krusty, and a few others!
LA Zoo
Since we were pretty close to it, we decided to also take a walk around the zoo. To be honest, it wasn’t our favorite zoo, but we did get to see a few animals we typically don’t see, which was very exciting. Unfortunately, we got there towards the end of their day, so many animals were heading bacjk
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New Friends and Old Friends
Part of Janette’s surprise was meeting one of her all time favorite content creators, Karina. I reached out to her about a month in advanced and she was really cool about it and agreed to meetup for some coffee! Closer to the date, she said that a friend visiting from Korea will also be joining the meet – Nathalie, another of Janette’s favorite content creators!
The day off, there were some problems with where we wanted to go and ended up in some other nearby coffee shop. As we were waiting for our new friends to arrive, we saw our old friend from high school, Lance (aka, Lando Chill). Out of all the coffee shops in LA, we landed at the one he happened to work at – a nice surprise for us both.
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Really great people, we hope we get to hang again in the near future.
Food
Overall, food was pretty good. The theme park food was tasty, the hotel food was particularly nice (the drinks were REALLY good), but a couple of my favorites were definitely RedWhite Boneless Ramen and Easy Street Burgers!
These are the kind of places that make me a little sad that they don’t exist back home 
. Still, they were a treat and look forward to them whenever we are back in the area!
