Ice Cream and Urban Lights

When Ellen got home from work, we had a trivia competition to see which one of us knew the most about her and was her best friend and I was the champion. *We weren't just being weird -- although we were totally being weird -- she wanted to put it on her vlog about life in LA.

After I was declared victorious, Ellen, Rose and I drove to Diddy Riese for ice cream sandwiches. This was another Buzzfeed find that was on not just one, but two, of their lists. They have more than ice cream -- their specialty is jumbo ice cream sandwiches. You get two pick any two cookies and one flavor of ice cream to get smooshed together in a sugar explosion! Rose and I both got cinnamon sugar cookies and vanilla ice cream plus a brownie for later and Ellen got rocky road ice cream and chocolate M&M cookies. Did I mention that all of this was dirt cheap? Because I got two cookies, ice cream and a brownie for $2.50. TWO DOLLARS AND 50 CENTS for all of that! I can't even get a scoop of ice cream for that in most places and I basically got diabetes in a bowl for less than we paid for parking. The UCLA Campus is right across from this place so I guess it's good I never looked at going to school there because I would have gained 60 pounds and died from a sugar overdose before I ever got close to graduation.

We walked around for a bit and noticed (at 7:40) that there was a movie theatre playing Insurgent which didn't technically come out until today but was playing there at 8 o'clock. This place was a super cute one-room theatre and practically empty, which was really weird since the movie was literally just coming out -- the cineplex near us at school would have half a dozen screens playing this and each one of them would have been full. There was a legit curtain that came down before the movie began and then opened back up for the feature; who does that these days?

Insurgent was nothing like the book. I honestly like what they did to adapt the story -- especially to compensate for the changes they made to the end of the first movie -- but it just wasn't a great movie. It wasn't a great book either so that isn't too surprising but I really don't know how they're going to turn the horrendous third book into TWO movies. TWO! I love Harry Potter, but this trend needs to die, like now.

After that, Ellen said she wanted to take us to her favorite place in the city because we had to see it at night. Now, when Rose and I were making our lists of what we'd like to see, I said that "I wanted to see all of those white lamp posts that they have in movies and stuff because I wanted to know why they had all of those white lamp posts," and this is exactly where Ellen took us! Apparently it is an art installation at LACMA and the lamp posts aren't white, they're gray. It also has a name -- "Urban Lights" -- and was apparently created by an artist from Boston (according to the internet because there wasn't any real signage that I could see. It was really nice to see Ellen's favorite part of LA and a great way to end a really special night.