hanging out in the funbox

you know how much we love a good pop-up instagram-worthy "museum," yeah?  well, there was one called the "funbox" that was open for a few months way out in woodland hills.  that's like an hour and a half away from home, and while their posts made it look like a really good time, i still wasn't really feeling the drive to get there.  and so when they announced that they were picking up and moving to a new location somewhere in l.a., i kept an eye on their social media posts to see if they might come a little closer.

sure enough...their new location was super close by - santa anita mall, to be exact.  woohoo!  we bought tickets for their first day in business and headed on out once the old lady finished her workday.  it's located on the first floor, near the food court in what used to be a furniture store (and a borders bookstore before that).

after we checked in and had our tickets scanned, we got to pick a teddy bear out of the box:

and then got to go through the teddy bear tunnel.

on the other side was a whole wall stuffed with teddy bears.  the old lady and her special friend posed first:

and then he stopped for a shot with his other girlfriend.

of course, i had to get shots with both of my girls:

and then we moved on to the next scene.  super random, but we didn't care - we posed anyway.

actually, most of the backgrounds were pretty random.  whatevs.

the upside-down room is always a good time.

the special friend lost his head in the flower tunnel.

and just in case you forgot where you were:

the bubble party room was next.  the rest of us opted out, but the bean jumped right in.

the old lady thought this was hilarious:

and the bean and i both decided to have a seat on the rainbow throne.  it was like they ran out of time or money or something here, with one wall that stayed completely blank.  you can't see it in the picture if you go inside to take it, so i guess it doesn't really matter.

i really don't have much to say about these...they're just random as all hell.

we ran through the human car wash:

the bean had been doing the potty dance for a little bit, having asked a staffer if there was a restroom and being told that no, there wasn't.  i found that a little odd, but no one seemed willing to tell her otherwise.  i was hoping that she'd be able to hold out till the end, because when we checked in we were told that once we went through, we couldn't go back.  this told me that if we had to leave for the restroom outside, we wouldn't be able to return.  and so she held it as long as she could, but as soon as we got through that "car wash" she was out of there.  she ran over to the restroom in the food court while the rest of us looked through the rest of the place to make sure we didn't miss anything.  the next thing was this giant version of that toy that's made up of plastic pins and you can stick your hand or something through to see the imprint of it on the other side.

and the giant cereal bowl that the kids passed on, but i had to get in at least for one picture.  because, duh.

the next time i saw them post something on instagram, i replied with a suggestion to have the staffers at check-in let people know that there wasn't a restroom available inside and mentioned that we'd had to rush through because the bean had to go.  of course, their response was "oh, you could have taken her to the restroom and we'd have allowed you to return."  i was so irritated, because the staffer that we talked to inside mentioned nothing like that.  all she said was "no, there's no restroom in here" and left it at that.

ugh.  so while we'd had fun, it would definitely have been better had we been able to get the bean to the restroom when she needed to go and then come back to fully enjoy the rest of the experience.  oh well.