Couple of old friends were visiting me, and we decided to see the bay area in an utterly random fashion - Wake up way past noon, and decide what could be accomodated in the remaining time before sunset. The outcome of that was that we ended up seeing a bunch of stuff we never intended to...LHS, Atomic and I shared credits for the [zero-]planning, and we ended up discussing all of this amidst some hectic PlayStation 2 gaming, generous doses of chocolate/maple syrup, waffles and Atomic's Pongal treatise...
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We saw Stanford, of all places...There seems to be a general paranoia about out-of-state folks about seeing Stanford...I personally cannot find anything awesome about going all the way there to look at a bunch of buildings....Ah well...to each his own.
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This was followed by a rather brief accident prone visit to half-moon bay....All we did was play ultimate, without any connotation to the word 'ultimate'...in freezing weather, and a rather stiff breeze, to complement my quite still-broken leg.
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There was of course the traditional requirement to seek divine blessings...
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We visited the Livermore [Food] Temple. Blessed were we to utilize insider information about the copious 'prasaadham' given to devotees at lunch. We even followed this up by a long drive+trek up Mt. Diablo.
Lol, indeed. Remember "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand?
Santa Cruz was a fun outing too, with the weird "Mystery Spot" thing, replete with a trip to the famous BoardWalk....We still couldnt figure out what was so amazing about the place though.
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I should'nt forget to mention how seemingly mundane gatherings can turn rather engrossing.
Clubbing together with droves of ex-classmates eeking out a living in the bay area was certainly more fun than I expected it to be...
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I even took them to see the center of my world [work, of course!] (and grab a couple of [free] espressos!)...
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Considering my past ravings about Body Worlds(R) at Dallas, people just had to see the second edition on show then at San Jose Tech Center...We spent almost an entire Sunday evening seeing dead bodies suspended in weird angles, sometime to the point of nausea...
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[I know people shall hate me forever for using this abbreviation....but what the hell.]
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And of course no bay area pseudo-tourism is complete without a visit to ol'
San Fran.Incidentally, I also learnt the 'smelly' art of driving on sixty degree slopes on a dumb automatic [-With tire spin stinking up the road-]...