palo alto yo.

i'm in palo alto!

so the grad student and his girlfriend whom i'm staying with are nice people. not intimidating or stand-offish considering i'm a lowly undergraduate from the university of oregon and they both completed their undergraduate degrees at harvard and now he's in stanford. they have a piano and she yelled (not real loud) at her laptop cos it wouldn't open a document. that made me happy. =)

palo alto is definitely a lot busier than stanford... more dense, more compact. but it's got a nice quaint, historical feel to it. i haven't gone around stanford yet, but it looks as intimidating and grand as i thought it would. no pictures yet, sorry, but she's been to thailand so she has the adapter i need to charge my camera! another reason why i like them. =) the memorial church jamie and i looked at was gorgeous!

it was so hot today! i think the high was 34 degrees celcius... so i'm definitely tanner already. i think i need more pairs of shorts. jeans would not work, nope. thank goodness the dresscode at bing is casual! and it's a lot browner here than green eugene, but that's to be expected.

oh and i'm gonna go off o a slight tangent here: yesterday felt like the most american day i've had here so far. i don't know if my american friends would agree that it is indeed "american", but it felt like it. i slept in, i actually sun-tanned (for a very short while before deciding that lying in the sun to get darker was too counter-intuitive to my malaysian blood and going back indoors to sit under the fan), and then i had chips and dip for lunch, hung out by a pool doing absolutely nothing, drove around with the windows down while blasting the car stereo, watched a movie (madagascar), baked, iced and ate dismembered gingerbread man-shaped cookies, had tacos for dinner, then hung out with a jamie's friend, kristina's old high school friends (which made me really miss the gang) in a couple of parking lots before calling it a day.

anyway. here we go!