Thursday, May 2, 2013

Post exam

Finished my exam. Hopefully will never have to do surveying again. Felt that the exam was easier this time around but will have to wait until June to know the results.

Haven't done much last week. I want to get all my life stuff in order. Haven't had time to do much these past few months with moving and coming back. I don't foresee having very much spare time right when I get back to HK either. At some point, I need to finish up that research project for work. Way overdue now. Not sure if I should go into the SF office to run some models.

Just spent Monday and Tuesday catching up with friends. I was in SF on Monday morning and had lunch with the Arup geotech group. They seem to be doing well. There are a lot of construction in the city. It seems like the economy is definitely getting better and people are building again. There are a several high raises going up as well as other small projects all around the city. This is good to see. The excavation for the Transbay Transit Center is still going. They have reached the bottom in some places and are putting in the tie-downs. Very closely spaced struts.

After visiting Arup friends, I took the train down to Stanford and started eating a lot. I had a big lunch to begin with and finished that up with a drink from Starbucks. These mobile apps make things too convenient. I used their app to find a store and pay for my drink. I met up with a friend to have frozen yogurt at Yogurtland, which opened right after I left Palo Alto! They have an app too, btw. Then I met up with another friend for dinner at the dining hall. We went to see if there was any water in the lake and of course it was bone dry. Then I went to visit another high school friend who is living in Mountain View. There is so much more daytime here that I don't realize it's getting late. Used to the sun setting promptly at 6:30pm.

The next day I took public transportation back to Stanford and had breakfast, chilled with another friend, lunch with a former roommate, and then grapefruit with a fourth friend. So had a very productive couple of days. I don't want to go into all the details because that would take probably a few posts to cover. On the way back, I stopped by a Whole Foods and picked up things like steel cut oatmeal and Cliff Bars, among other things to take back to HK. I am generally okay with HK food but you really need to keep some things from home. I also ordered a few things from Amazon to take back.

This time around, I really felt like I am just out to do friendship maintenance. After being away for two years, I really feel that my HK and US lives are very separate. There is almost no overlap and the two groups of people are kind of like parallel universes that I jump back and forth between. But their lives go on without me and I think at some point, I need to choose which of the two "parallel universes" I want to really live in.

1 comment:

docey101 said...

Nice seeing you. Hehe, you don't have to choose between lives, all your experiences are a part of the whole you. There might be a third/fourth universe somewhere, who knows where you will be one or two years from now because you don't know all your choices/options yet. :)