Saturday, November 20, 2010

Rainy day

Cold and rainy day outside. I think there are a lot of people watching The Big Game right now. Somehow, I'm not so excited about being out in a cold, wet, windy stadium that is sitting on a major fault line. I might stop by somewhere to watch the second half though.

Yesterday was cold as well. I basically woke up and started on the journey to SF to give a presentation at Arup. I know there's 30 miles between Palo Alto and SF but it shouldn't take so long to get there by public transit. It was really relaxing to get there by bus and train though. No directions, left hand turns, or parking to worry about.

The presentation itself went okay. I think we were both out of it. I'm not sure we made a whole lot of sense. And again, there were less questions than we expected. But maybe there's just so much information that people are overloaded. Need to work on this communications thing. Anyway, I'm going to work again starting next week. Just got my first paycheck from Stanford CDC. Very small paycheck, I have to admit but it's nice to have some sort of income. I'm not sure why but I've been using a lot of money since getting back from Indonesia.

We wandered around SF for a bit. On our way to Old Navy, this Green Peace guy started talking to us. By us, I mean Greg. He was talking to Greg. I don't think he even realized we were walking together when he first tried to start a conversation. I swear I would have never been approached by these people if I wasn't with Greg. People tend to be more comfortable talking to people who are like them. And when you have 2 seconds to decide your next target, well, I think you get my point. I just think this is funny. When we went to get cookies from Specialties later on, the cashier asked if we wanted our cookies in separate bags. I really think that if I had been with someone who is Asian, the guy would not have asked. Just pointing out things in my daily life that I think is amusing.

On my way back to the Caltrain station, I passed by this tea lounge that I've never noticed before. The store front is small but I'm not sure how I missed it all of last spring. Anyway, it's a really fancy place where you can have tea and small snacks with friends. I looked on their website later on for prices for these "afternoon teas" and it was super expensive. Not sure who goes to these tea lounges. There were no customers when I walked in. They had loose leaf teas for sale though. And you can open the containers to smell them, something that I think is missing from places like Peets and Coffee Bean. I mean, how can you properly choose your teas without smelling them?? I ended up buying two bags of teas to try out. I've been meaning to get a chai mix for a while and they had a really spicy one. Now I have a pretty good collection of teas. I just need the milk...

I got back in time for dinner with some friends. Eric, who I visited in LA, came to visit and organized a dinner with all his friends. They're very funny and friendly people so I enjoyed the dinner. We went to a Thai place that had really good tom yum soup. I've only ever had Americanized tom yum soup before and didn't know it could be so good. It came in a pot that had a fire thing in the middle. The soup had all kinds of sea food in it as well. Very impressive and definitely worth it.

Watched some Detective Conan and Stargate when I got back. Really wish I had someone to watch these things with and comment on the ridiculousness of things. I watched an episode of Star Trek Voyager this morning. Not sure how I ever got into the series. Everything sounds so scripted and unrealistic! Okay, fine, I still like it. Not for the bad acting and such but because I really like sci-fi.

Still have a lot work to do during this "break." I'm hoping to get some work done today and tomorrow before I go home. It's a futile effort to try to get anything done at home.

1 comment:

yalu said...

Hmm maybe you spent a lot of money because I came down and we traveled a bunch of times to SF ;-) I guess that's only 1 week fluctuation though.

I would love to watch conan with you!! Haha, glad we got to do a little of it when I came down. Maybe if we ever had enough free time at the same time, we could sync. You think it's silly, but we can watch the same thing!