saturday night i was introduced to daikokuya raumen in little tokyo. from their website:

"What Makes Daikoku Raumen Special?
Daikoku Raumen is noodles, boiled egg, seasoned bamboo shoots, bean sprouts, and green onions in pork soup"

that's pretty much spot-on. mmm mmm good! the place was so crowded (and so tiny) and has such a cool atmosphere inside. it's very proudly run and the soup was so tasty; i can't wait to head back there again. after dinner we headed over to kazu and amy's and enjoyed some frusions, caramelized bananas and vanilla ice cream while watching kazu play silent hill. while working out the lesson plan for their class taking place the next day, we paid a visit to the beyond comics website... which is always good for tears from laughter. seriously, check out the link and watch as many videos as you can. unbelievable.

today i headed out to gnomon with danny to meet up with jennifer, jennifer 2, tran, and amy to catch the character design class taught by kazu, chris and khang. we just sat outside and joked around for a couple hours before catching the last hour of their class which was pretty cool. it was great to watch chris paint and hear them discuss the purpose, motivations, techniques, story and communication of good character design. very inspirational. the night concluded with some good food at the tofu house, where danny and i were given a few lessons on the food. it seemed like we were doing a lot of things wrong - being reprimanded for passing out the rice too early and improperly, missing chopsticks, etc. clutzes. but it was funny.

i guess it was pretty much a perfect therapeutic weekend (which also involved several meetings involving potential video game projects). tomorrow i'm heading over to nucleus to pick up a book i ordered (koji morimoto's orange) whcih i simply cannot wait to read. that reminds me, this weekend is the nucleus christmas show which should amount to some jolly good times. christmas is in the air and its exciting!