Imagine my surprise when I got an invitation to Echo Park Hospitality Night.
What?
My ideas of Echo Park come from years of conditioning, experience and old social affairs. Echo Park at the time I was growing up, wasn’t exactly – hospitable. It was a gang town, kinda like, Atwater. But nowadays it seems that these towns have been gentrified big time, so imagine my hesitation when someone said, we’re gonna party in Echo Park. Not that I have a problem with that, my history suggests that I can hang, but it wasn’t exactly at the top of my list. Maybe right next to drive by shootings, slapping some bitches and fuckin some ho’s, which is always a favorite past time of mine.
I thought it was a street festival of sorts, but I got it wrong. It was really a vintage boutique shop coming up with a creative way to promote their store – it succeeded, by confusing people. To their credit, it worked. My friend scored a gorgeous dress, which by the way looks stunning on her and we got free booze. Not to mention that we got cheap drinks at Shortstop, who my friend described as a half cholo and half hipster joint. She was spot on. Seriously, spot on. We went to some other place I can’t remember, although I do recall putting so much charm on someone her man came by and swept her away, boo shenanigans! We capped the evening when our stomachs cried bloody murder and beer fuzz so we hit up Arriza where I scored a very gritty tripas burrito. Yep, even too gritty for me and I’ll eat almost anything. Still good though, just a lot of grit, but that awesome hot sauce, sawesome if you will, they have, holy shit my mouth waters just thinking about it, will pretty much make everything magical. Emosweater can attest to this.
The plan was on Friday, that I was going to stay in and get in some R&R and maybe catch up on some TV. I know it’s a Friday, but I was ok with it. But another friend was in the west side so I joined her to alleviate her inbetween time before she bounced over to downtown for a bar hop of sorts. Well that didn’t happen. We ate at Alibi then skipped on over to Big Foot West and stayed there until we realized we were both pretty drained and called it a night around midnight.
Saturday we crammed a tiny noraebang at Max Karaoke, wow that was an ethnic butchering of a sentence*, for our friend’s birthday surprise. Got drunk in the room, hightailed to downtown to his place to continue what was a very surreal experience; cracked out fashion models all sitting on a bed while others are shooting guns off at sleeping people surreal. Don’t read too much into that last sentence, it’s supposed to sound like that; welcome to Saturday night.
*Noraebang is the Korean word for karaoke, often room style, as opposed to the entire venue. Max Karaoke is Japanese run in Little Tokyo.
Tags:
Arriza,
Echo Park,
Karaoke,
Little Tokyo 
