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Destination 6: The Silicon Valley 2006-03-01 02/22/06 Aircraft: Boeing 737. The last time I flew Boeing was from Beijing to Vancouver almost eight years ago. I can see now why Airbus totally took over the market from Boeing. Airbuses are just better in every way. ORD: My 7th time to Chicago O'Hare has blessed me with what seems to have become my most popular photo on flickr. Here it is. I must say that I still like the aerial view of Chicago. It is one pretty city. I think I even saw Navy Pier from the plane, that was fun to think that I was strolling around there just a few months ago. United Airline: Alright, if I could give you all one piece of advice about airlines, it would be to not fly United. From ORD to SJC, they assigned two people to the same seat (my seat), and they lost this super old lady's bag. The worst part is, they were not even apologetic about any of this at all. They also refused to let me hang my suit because I was not first class passenger. The plane was the most crowded I have been on in recent memory, and they do not use sanitary one-time pillow covers. To board the plane, you do not even need to show any pieces of ID. On my way back, they canceled my SJC to ORD flight without a call or email. Though I got to fly first class in the replacement flight, so I will not complain more. You get my point. Walk The Line: This was a tasteless movie. I usually try to find at least something good in things, but this movie was just bland and somewhat pointless. Around the World in 365 Days: Looking at the flight magazine on the plane, I realized that I have flown one full circle around the world! That was an exciting realization. Beijing across Asia to Copenhagen to Malmo to Amsterdam across the Atlantic and North America to Vancouver and across the Pacific back to Beijing! Colorado and Utah: Flying over Colorado and Utah mostly felt like flying over Mars. Sometimes the land just looked like rugged hills deprived of civilization and other times it just looked like an endless field of puddles of mud. SJC: Landing in San Jose, I caught the first glimpse of palm trees and the sight of palm trees always gets me all giddy and makes me want to jump up and down. SJC airport is quite run down. I walked down the stairs directly from the airplane and thought I smelt the sweet aroma of flowers, but that just turned out to be someone's perfume. Nice perfume. 02/23/06 The Winter of Summer: A typical sight at this time of the year in much of the Bay area is usually a mixture of leafless trees that belong to the winter and flowers and green grass that belong to the summer. The air in both San Jose and Palo Alto felt quite dry. I think having been to LA first gave me a skewed notion of what the entire state of California is like. The Bay area turned out to be quite different from LA and Anaheim. The Sun: I love the sun. It makes me happy. It also makes really nice photography. The Stanford Linear Accelerator: I can now add to my books that I have visited the world's longest building. I woke up early morning in Menlo Park and set out to take a look at the Linear Accelerator. On my way there I got lost. A lady kindly stopped and asked me what I was looking for. I said the Linear Accelerator. She said oh I'm the deputy director there. I said Great! So by total luck, she hooked me up with a tour. What I did not know was that everyone else on the tour was at least 70 years old. But the interesting thing was: I made two friends! :) Old people are really cute and sweet. Stanford: After my adventure at SLAC, I took the free Marguerite around Stanford. This campus feels much more like a university campus than U of T, abundant in flowers and trees and nice buildings. It also smells nicer and less polluted. The medical centre was, for the most part, open-concept, which reminds me of the building style in Honolulu. Hospitals are as good as any other. Palo Alto: Downtown Palo Alto was a pretty and colorful little town. Aside from the fact that their movie theatre is still showing movies by James Dean, there is not much else to comment. Ultrasound: At night, I went to a mini session on how to use the ultrasound with my student host and I got to hang out with a few medical students and they, being boys, all seemed to be ridiculously girl crazy? Anyhow, it was totally exciting because I got 3 hours of hands on experience on my student host and I learned to scan his neck, heart, liver, and spleen. So now if you want an ultrasound done, feel free to come to me. :) 02/27/06 Headquarters: The night before I left, we drove around Si Valley to check out the headquarters for Google, Yahoo, Nvidia, Apple, and so on. It was interesting. Kind of. Yea. :)
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