Back in the US! Last post

Hey all,

Right now I'm sitting in the Portland airport, playing around on their wireless because my flight isn't leaving until 3.5 hours later than I wanted :-P. This is going to be my last post, now that I'm back in the US.

So, what has been happening the last few days? I left off late Wednesday evening. There isn't too much to say about Thursday. I got to work fairly early in the morning and after spending a last little bit of time doing creative work, I started collating and summarizing everything that I've done this summer. Silly me, I didn't really do this *at all* as I went along, so it was quite a chore. I also played a whole bunch of ping pong with Rob (I'm getting pretty good ^_^. I hope to keep up playing some with the table in the LAC at Mudd), and Tracy and I took a trip to the UPS store to ship books. It turns out that this was a really good idea, because I had 16 kilos worth of books to ship back (OK, so I went a little nuts at the cheap bookstores....) and my luggage is packed pretty tight as is. The people at the UPS store were *really* nice, and did basically everything for us. All we had to do was sit around and chat, which was really really nice ^_^.

Thursday night I went to my last dinner at New Shanti Sagar with Rob and Tracy, which was a really nice last dinner to have with my friends (Friday night was a dinner with just the Crypto group). After dinner I ended up staying up till about 3:30AM working on finishing up documenting some parts of what I did.

Despite staying up late on Thursday night, I woke up early enough on Friday morning (last day of work!) to make it in by 9AM, when I was supposed to meet with Satya. This meeting, as usual, got pushed back a bit, but I had a good meeting with him and put together some final (or at least summarizing/progress report ) thoughts on my work. The afternoon was spent in a 5 hour marathon LaTeXing session (interrupted by only 1 ping-pong game), writing up the theoretical work that I had done this summer. This ended up being a 13 page long document, which made me feel a little better about the amount of work I had done. I finished this up just in time to say goodbye to all of my friends at work who weren't in my group, and head out to dinner at "Tai Tai" (a Thai place) with the crypto group.

It took us about 45 minutes to reach Tai Tai (partially because of a long delay caused by Abishek... ^_^). The starters were delicious (and I reminded myself that margaritas are *wonderful*!), but the meal was a little bit of a disappointment. The really fun part was when Vijay asked me what I had ordered and I (like always) couldn't remember. He noticed my (empty) margarita and started making fun of me, and asking for drunk stories from college ^_^. I didn't give him any drunk stories, but I did tell the "Doom" story, which is the source of the "Evil Jason" nickname freshman year :-) (something I have to tell in person. Certainly not something I would commit to text and be able to do justice to). I also told the story of me getting assaulted on the street by the random dude that wanted to know "Country!".

After dinner I said goodbye to the crypto group and headed back home to make sure, one last time, that I had everything packed. I spent my last few hours in India just hanging out at Tejus Nest with Tracy, chatting. An excellent way to end the trip ^_^. The cab showed up at 10:20PM, and I headed for the airport! There were basically *no* lines for the baggage check, which was weird (and two guys tried to pay them like 100Rs. each for helping me with my bags. I gave them 10, told them I'd been around for a while and that they should go away. Definitely a difference from my first experience at the airport). I got through security and passport control fine, then spent a while making international calls to wipe out the last of my Hutch cell phone minutes.

Not too much else to report about the flights. I spent basically all of my time in Frankfurt in lines and almost immediately got on the plane (20 hours of nearly unbroken time on planes gets a little bit old...). I sat next to a really nice interesting lady from Oakland, CA on the Frankfurt -> Portland flight. Apparently she had been doing traditional Greek dance classes and northern Greece for the past two weeks!

I've fed myself with a turkey sandwich and fries (first American meal in 3 months!) here in Portland, and am just waiting for my flight. I think that really is all folks! Thanks for reading my blog and I hope that you've enjoyed it! I know that I've enjoyed my experiences in India, and have been glad to share them!

Cheers,
Jason