Hey all,

For some reason Blogger isn't letting me edit my title, so I guess I will do without! This past weekend has really been a lot of fun. After having been to Hampi the weekend before, I stayed in town for this one. On Friday a whole bunch (me, Nels, Rob, Tracy, Christian, Prasad) of my friends from MSRI headed across town to party with the astrophysicists. We hung out in Sonnett & Natalie's appartment (which is *really* nice), chatted, drank, played some fun games and heard some interesting stories over "Nevery Have I Ever". Overall it was a really fun night that we will hopefully repeat again in a few weeks!

Saturday I went into work to get a few things done in anticipation of having less time once Dad gets here (which is in like 36 hours now!). While I was roaming around the office in search of a printer that wasn't malfunctioning in some sort of creative new way I ran into a couple of interns who had just started this past week. Their names are James and Dan and they are MBA students at Cambridge. We chatted a little bit and the dinner on MG road was proposed for the night!

After working the rest of the afternoon I headed down to MG road with Tracy & Shalin, and we met up with Dan & James at the McDonalds (yup, quite a landmark. We were just standing in front of good 'ol Ronald). It took a while to get the whole group together, and I got to chat with Dan a bit, which was really fun. He is Mormon and spent the two years of his mission in Thailand in '95 and '96. According to him Indian & Thailand are kind of like Switzerland & Germany, fairly similar but still really quite different. Apparently the food is spicier in Thailand, and putting your hands together (like one was praying) in front of your chest is the common greeting there (with the height of the hands denoting the level of respect).

Once we all got together we headed over to the Cariabe Club, which is the Trinidadian/Spanish/Cuban/I-don't-know resturant that I went to a few weeks ago with Christian and Nels. It has *fantastic* food and it was really fun talking to everyone there and hearing a little about the MBA program at Cambridge. That about wraps up Saturday.

After going out on both Friday & Saturday I didn't feel like doing much on Sunday. I slept in, went into work for a few hours, had lunch at a soup & salad (though my salad ended up being something that *I* would call a soup) with Nels & Rob, then came home, fuzted about, and read for the afternoon. Very relaxing ^_^.

However, Nels got back from work around 8:30 and suggested that we all go out to a club called "Zero-G" (its on the 10th story of a skyscraper downtown). Tracy, Christian, & Rob all came and we met up with Sonnett & Natalie there. The view from the club is *really* spectacular, and the place itself is very cool looking: cool colored lights, modern art type furniture, a (sketch) pool in the back... a very nice place. Getting to Zero-G, however, proved to be a bit of an ordeal. Christian & I shared an auto, which started off going *incredibly* slowly, basically just coasting (Christian asked if they needed us to get out and push). After a bit they pulled over, got out to look at the engine, and it turned out the accelerator handle (same thing as a motorcycle) was broken! To work around this they just pulled out the cable that ran to the engine, the driver wrapped it around his hand and pulled a various levels of tension to accelerate!! It took him a while to get the hang of changing gears with the new means of speed control.... That is probably the sketchiest and most dangerous experience I have yet had on the roads.

There were a couple of other amusing stories from the night too. Nels had a glass of wine when we got there and when he finished it he asked for "another glass", so they brought him an empty wine glass... ^_^ Apparently at many bars in the US there will be some 21 year old girl who brings around shots to various tables, at Zero-G the 21 year old girl was a 30 year old, slightly overweight, guy wearing a sombrero (though this is probably due to the fact that there were no females working at Zero-G. I know I've seen cashiers at the supermarket that are female, but other than that I don't know how many I've seen that have jobs in shops or that sort of thing [unless they are family run], something I need to start paying attention to). The final crazy thing about Zero-G was the Indian dancing. I also noticed this at the MSRI resort a few weeks ago, but the Indian style of dance at parties is markedly different than the American style. I can't really describe it, but I recommend that you watch a couple of Bollywood movies if you want to see.

That ended a quite full and fun weekend. Not too much has happened today, except that a chipmunk *fell into our office*! There is a small hole in one of the walls and somehow a chipmunk managed to go through it and fall down!!! It was freaking out, running around, and made it down the stairs and to the ground floor before anyone caught it. It was a little bit surreal, and highly amusing. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures :-(.

Well, thats all for now! G'night all!

Cheers,
Jason