For reasons that I cannot reveal due to the top-secret nature of this trip, I am currently in Irvine for a few days, staying at Hotel Irvine. Although I can’t share exactly what’s going on here or what I’m doing, I can at least share some photos of the area.
Hotel Irvine has a special club in a few of their upper floors. We got our hotel rooms booked by the company responsible for sending us out here, and not everyone got an upper-floor hotel room, but for some reason, my roommate and I did. I’m not sure if it actually comes with all the special club benefits, but at least it has a nice view.
After we arrived in the afternoon, we met up with some of our friends and stopped by one of the restaurants inside the hotel for some lunch. This is a burger from the Eats Kitchen & Bakery:
After our meal, we stopped by a nearby convenience store so we could get a gallon of filtered drinking water and some candy. On our way back, we walked over a bridge and looked down into the San Diego Creek.
Now, because I’m originally from Illinois and grew up in the Chicagoland suburbs, I’m used to seeing tons of water all over the place. Even within my tiny village, there are ponds and lakes all over the place, and there’s a river cutting straight through the land. The neighboring cities have even more water, with huge conservation areas and lakes everywhere.
After moving to California and experiencing the moderate drought, I find myself confused every time I see a body of water on Google Maps, but proceed to see something like this when I actually go there in person:
Yes, that is the San Diego “Creek.” All that remains of it now is just a bunch of sand.
As we approached the hotel, we cut through Park Plaza, where I snapped a photo of Karen looking off into the distance between a row of palm trees.
The Night Market is basically a massive parking lot where shops rent out a little space where they can set up a booth and sell wildly overpriced food. That’s basically all there is at the Night Market – food. I guess there was a concert all the way in the back, and a few other vendors here and there, but the entire place is just mostly littered and blanketed with food sales booths.
There isn’t really a place to sit down either, unless it’s on the ground off in the corner. There are tiny amounts of tiny tables set up, but those are pretty much all already always occupied. Overall, it isn’t really exactly the best eating environment.
I’d imagine this is a fun place to go for people who like to socialize, but for someone like me who doesn’t want to be around crowds of people (at least, not when I’m actually a part of the crowd), it’s just an exhausting experience.
The good part about this trip, however, is that I got to meet my friend’s dog. Parking at the Night Market is just an extra fee to tack on to the admission cost and overpriced food, so instead, we drove to our friend Matt’s house, parked near there for free, then walked about a mile or so to the Night Market.
Here is another photo of the Night Market, closer to when it was getting darker, with Matt smiling in the bottom-right corner; the picture following that is of his dog Diesel, who seems to have a tail of steel.
