Notes from Afield in Palo Alto

[nibot]

Hello All.. I'm in Palo Alto and I found a computer with a modem, so you know what that means: full report of where I am and what I've been doing.

On Saturday we drove from Mission Viejo through San Jose to Campbell, a "suburb" of San Jose, I guess. The drive was pretty uneventful, consisting mainly of a straight highway though the San Joquin valley, through rows and rows of agricultural fields with an occassional disguising California cattle farm preceded by an assault on the nasal passages and olfactory organs. Eric drove for a good length of this and found it tremendously boring - put on the cruise control and hold the wheel in one place. I was sitting by Sharon (that would be shar`OWN [roll the R], Eric's little sister of almost six years). In the past, ie, on the way home from UCSD, she has been known to TORMENT the other occupants of the car, especially those sitting next to her (ie, me) with endless poking, pesting, and various other annoyances. Well, this time she was remarkably calm, which we were all very thankful for on our eight hour journey. Near the end, we got to listen to her donald-duck-and-mickey-mouse disney disco tape a few times and the story of Bambi as well, and I had to sacrifice a few pages from my notebook for her to draw on, but it was well worth avoiding the alternatives..

We stayed with some of Eric's family's friends in Los Gatos, which is some part of Campbell, which is a suburb of San Jose. It's an interesting place. There seems to be no Zoning requirements, so there are really nice houses next to houses with corn growing and chickens running around outside in front. There are a lot of trees, the sky is clear, and it is nice. The streets are strange, however. Apparently they just redid the street names and rerouted some of them, making new culdesacs, closing some streets, and other wierdness. The result: all the streets have new names. (sounds like a U-2 song) Saturday night, the girl who lived here (Shanee) had a friend and her friend's cousin spend the night. The result: staying up to 2am watching HALLOWEEN V. Disney is an interesting company. It's July, and since July lacks big holidays which Disney could otherwise capitalize upon, they seem to have created a new "Christmas in July" as an excuse to run all their christmas movies in the middle of summer. Eric and I tried fairly unsuccessfully to fly a two-stringed kite out front, but there was about as little wind as there could be. After this we went exploring in the neighborhood, and poked around the local high school. Curiously, at this high school, the Computer Club and the German Club are one in the same. Sounds familier... The first natives we encountered were poultry, running around in someone's front yard in a virtual shanty-town, but the next natives we ran into were the teenage, human kind. They did not seem friendly. One had a mohawk, another long, bleached hair. chains, profanity.. hmm.. The operative language in the house where we were staying was fluently spoken Hebrew, of which, I of course, understood none. Eric translated occassionally, but other than that, I was completely oblivious to what was going on.

On Sunday, I managed to somehow regain consciousness after getting altogether too little sleep. I even managed to check my mail, but not to reply to anything... We spent the day exploring Santa Cruz, 22 miles from Shanee's house. Santa Cruz has a wonderful campus: Driving up, it seems like a rancho or something like Rancho Las Flores. Once you get onto the campus, it's all situated on hilly terrain amidst a forest of coastal redwoods. Very nice. Unfortunately, it seems that Santa Cruz is not an engineering/math/science type school, otherwise it would be very nice. Tea (Te`AH), Shanee's mom, seems to have a good idea what all the local colleges are like. Her other daughter got a scholarship to UC Davis, and an internship at Intel. Her description of UCSC: Best campus there is, only a school for skaters, surfers, and drifters. Seems to be pretty accurate from what we saw around the city of Santa Cruz. We saw only two or three people at UCSC itself. We spotted more than one Carl's Junior "Eat MEAT!" bumper sticker, each with the "AT!" part amputated such that it read "Eat ME." We also saw a number of cars parked at UCSC with "Eat People, Not Animals" or "Free Tibet" bumper stickers.. hmm.

For lunch we stopped at a nice little Falafal shop near the coast in Santa Cruz. Very nice. It was adjacent to a Greek restraunt and across the street from a Brasilian restraunt, so clearly there is abundant culture here. After lunch we went to the ocean. There are lots of neat old houses on the coast. There's a really nice downtown area with lots of shops and such.. Like the promonade in Santa Monica, but in Santa Cruz..

Today we left Campbell and went to Stanford. First we went to an information session of sorts and then went on a campus tour. Eric and I were two of only four Californians there! There was someone from Moscow, and someone from Madagascar. The most important point from the session: one year at Stanford costs approximately $31,000.00. Stanford has a nice campus, different from UCSC. It's flat, and where the UCSC buildings look modern and present an image of glass and steel, the Sanford buildings are built of stone (on the outside at least) in a combination roman-spanish architechture. The weather was very nice as well; sunny, where jeans and a T-shirt seemed quite comfortable, maybe a bit on the cool side. Very breezy. Their cafeteria was a bustling zoo, though, and there were lots of people around. There were lots of elementary-school age kids, probably in some summer program of sorts. The standard lunch price at Stanford seems to be $3.94. This could get you many things, and there were a lot of various ethnic foods.. I had a nice rice-black beans-curry-beef-in-a -red-tortilla creation. very nice. One neat thing at Stanford (it's probably not restricted to Stanford) is that they have a machine shop open to student use anytime..

There's a really nice downtown area near Stanford, too.

I'm in Palo Alto right now staying with Eric's friend Avishai. Palo Alto is really nice. The streets are lined with big trees of various sorts, and the houses are all nice and unique - unlike the Mission Viejo / RSM motif of mass-produced houses in four models and four shades of beige. An otherwise successful flight of the two-stringed kite terminated in one of these nice trees, a tall and healthy Liquid Amber tree. I might just want to move here someday.. it's expensive, tho.

Tomorrow morning we're driving up about 100 miles to Davis where we'll see my Davis-relatives and UCDavis. Then on wednesday we should see Berkeley and come home wednesday night or thursday (more likely, I think).

I am now eternally jealous: Avishai's high school has a Robotics club. With corporate sponsors. Xerox. NASA. !!!

Anhow, gotta run, going to go see AirForce One with Avishai and Eric...

Tobin
from Palo Alto