My favorite place I've ever been on a Saturday morning was Zagreb, Croatia. I was there in June and July of 2004, and I absolutely loved the vibe of the city Saturday mornings. Everyone came out and sat outside drinking espresso or mineral water, dressed well, and conversed. There were musicians and other street performers all around.

I was staying at the Arcotel, a trendy Austrian-owned hotel that was a pleasant walk from the downtown square where all the Croats relaxed weekend mornings. The staff at the Arcotel were fabulous and treated me like a dignitary because I convinced the people going to Zagreb from my company to stay there rather than the Sheraton, which I really didn't like and which often makes people move rooms because it's considered the only nice place to stay in Zagreb, so when, say, the King of Jordan visits, he gets, like, the whole fifth floor and everyone who was staying on that floor has to go somewhere else. I was working really hard there and getting greasy and dirty and the Sheraton staff treated me like a vagrant, not like someone whose multi-billion-dollar-a-year company was paying plenty of Kuna/night for me to stay there.

So I went one day to the Arcotel and one by one about five other colleagues started to stay there too. I could hardly buy myself a beer there and routinely got free dinner. So, I started to really enjoy the city life in Zagreb. You could get anywhere easily without a car and the vibe in town on the weekend was great.

Today, Scott and Janet took us to LA's Farmers Market, a local Los Angeles institution since 1934. I expected disappointment, or as Dad said on the phone this morning when I was telling him our plans, "huh, that sounds like a one-time thing." But it really surprised me and we will totally go back, probably with our next visitors from Back East.

The first thing we got was some cinnamon buns.



Too bad Kelly's arm's covering her rack. I mean the one on the moose, pervert.

You name it, you can find it at the Farmer's Market.

Candied fruit?



Of course we have candied fruit.

Fresh-made peanut butter?



Yup.

Ground sausage grotesquely formed like a pig?



Why wouldn't we have that?

Got crabs?



Now you do.

Sardines?







But, of course.

The energy wasn't quite that of Zagreb, but it was still pretty cool and it definitely had a sense of place, like you didn't forget for a second that you're in LA.

After shopping for a while we went to Canter's Restaurant/Delicatessen. It's a bit of a landmark and actually appears for a snippet in Swingers, one of Kelly's and my favorite movies to watch periodically and quote randomly, like "You're so money and you don't even know it."



We watched it again Saturday night and found this one scene that we had never really paid attention to before because we didn't live in the LA area. Warning: the F-bomb is dropped.



I have kind of felt that way, not the Jon Favreau part (one in the wife beater), but the Ron Livingston (guy from Office Space), like sometimes I feel like we've made it already.

You know what is so money? Canter's pastrami sandwich. It's still a distant second to the pastrami at Katz's deli near Jeffrey and Heather on the lower east side of Manhattan. But it's pretty freaking money.