mokudekiru

That is the short version of everything that happened during July Surpise (aka oM noM noM 2009) or, to the common people, “this weekend”.

Prologue to the weekend:
Thursday night, I went with Joey to try my hand at curling (yes, that Canadian sport, eh) in Fremont, CA. He’s a veteran curler of 1 year, but this was my first try. It was surprisingly fun (being dragged/slid along the ice by a 42 pound rock is good times! Oh yes, and sweeping). Noam was making her way into SF at the same time to celebrate her birthday weekend in the best place she could, clearly. Originally, the plan was for this to be a surprise, but logistics won out and we carefully crafted the perfect weekend.

eduFire with Koichi
Friday morning, I Caltrained to SF for a visit to the eduFire office. eduFire is basically a social media site for education — you go there to take classes, teach them, or tutor, all with live video conferencing, but I was introduced to the site through the 2nd jblogger conference back in March (I’ve also taken a couple classes). The famous Koichi of tofugu.com, the twitterverse (and eduFire, obviously) welcomed me to the lovely office and showed me around. I did some user testing for eduFire, one intern was around that day, so we all went to lunch at a nearby Caribbean place (yummy!) All in all good times, thanks for letting me visit @eduFire.

Afterwards, I wandered around San Francisco for a long while. Hiked and hiked. Found Alcatraz and a number of other good views. Eventually I ended up at 901 Columbus Cafe, where I had some chai, and later a bagel, while I got some work done. Later, Noam and her mom picked me up and we headed to their hotel room. It was her birthday, yay!! And now we transition to the next celebrities…

Some photos from my walk through San Francisco

of Montreal with Kevin Barnes
Now, I’ve been an of Montreal fan for a couple of years now, and have seen them in concert a few times. I was not going to pass up the opportunity to see them this time around, and the plan was to go with Bhargav, Mukund, and Boyce too, other Bay Area interns from IL. The plan to have a car fell through, though, and we were challenged with how to the concert and then get back to Silicon Valley after Caltrains stopped running.

Thankfully, my phone was still hanging on to dear battery life at this point, and Google transit got me and Noam to the right BART and to the concert. Once we got to the station, it wasn’t necessary to know where the actual concert venue was, you could just be a sheep and follow the masses of indie kids there. We checked our bags and prayed they wouldn’t be stolen, and proceeded to chill in the lobby.

The concert started a bit late, but soon enough of Montreal was doing their thing, engaging the id, etc. However, the party was crashing some of the audience — right as they started playing, some guy who was WAY too high zombie-walked through our group and made it out of the room (hopefully). I had never seen people as messed up at an oM concert, nor as many drag queens (but they seemed to be relatively unintrusive). Surprisingly, Kevin Barnes stayed 100% clothed the entire time. I repeat: he was NOT nude, covered in shaving cream and red paint. What kind of of Montreal concert *is this*?? But it was great anyway. Here’s Kevin:

After the concert, we decided to start heading back. BART taken to Fremont, and then a taxi back home. Again, Oakland’s potential sketchiness was warded off by friendly of Montreal fans. And Noam, who scored an anti-meat brochure. Oh, and it was 11:25 pm.

A few more concert pics

We made it back by 1:00 AM to the total surprise of Joey. Score! (Surprise is the theme of the weekend).

The Sounds with Maja Ivarsson
Saturday Noam, Joey and I ate our way from Santa Clara to Mountain View, experiencing coffee, Turkish food, and dessert. We wandered Mountain View for a while, viewed some Mountains, and headed to the extremely early concert at the Shoreline Amphitheatre (7PM — well, we got there at 7:30). The Sounds were opening for No Doubt, and as The Sounds are one of the best bands ever, I had to see them, even though they were just the first opener and not even printed on the ticket. Alas. The Shoreline holds 22,000 people, and we were very far away, but still managed to party it up as The Sounds played an awesome but brief set. The main opening band, Paramore, was quite crappy, and the lead singer was really patronizing, yelling things like, “DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE!?!?!” (Yes, I do. I’m right here.) and “IN CASE YOU FORGOT, WE’RE PARAMORE!!!” Nice, lady.

at 9:00 the 20 fans of The Sounds lined up for autographs and photos, while the other 21,980 concertgoers waited for No Doubt to come onstage. Finally we made it to the front of the line and got a miniposter signed:

And most importantly, got a picture with Maja!! Yeah yeah it was kind of dark, but look she’s an angel in that spotlight. While I get secondhand smoke from *her* cigarette (#truefan) – thanks to Charlie for making this picture look nicer :)

No Doubt came on, the crowd roared, and they played older hits I actually knew (upon further inspection, they don’t actually have any new songs, so it worked out well). I, having read this article about Gwen Stefani’s abs, was fully prepared for the concert.

We left comfortably early enough to miss the 1.5 hour traffic jam that surely followed (as we experienced from the same theatre on 4th of July).

Finally, the evening ended with introducing Noam to a Tim Tam Slam. You can go investigate that one on your own.

Gilroy Garlic Festival with Fabio
Sunday morning, Joey, Noam, Erik and I headed south to Gilroy for the annual Gilroy Garlic Festival. The traffic was worse than the No Doubt concert and we spent hours in the sweltering heat (the only time this summer when I’ve actually been hot) eating all kinds of garlic treats. YUMMY. I was totally bummed that they ran out of garlic ice cream (this could be my new favorite flavor!) but I did have some garlic chicken stir fry, garlic fries and garlic mustards, olives, etc.

I bought a cute parasol too!

Other than eating garlic and wandering… Noam and I decided we desperately needed to ride the teacup ride (since I missed out on this during childhood). So we made up for lost time, a decade and a half later.

Here are ACTUAL SCREAMS OF TERROR as we rode in this spinning teacup. Note the relative ages of the other people on this ride. This was possibly the most fun thing Moam has ever done.

One of the main attractions of the garlic festival was special guest Fabio (from Top Chef)! Zomg! We got to watch him do a live cooking show, and make fun of himself to the audience for an hour. The best part was that they didn’t have any ingredients or utensils ready before the show started, and he kept complaining that he didn’t have the pepper (and then he had to go unwrap it, break the seal, open it, etc etc.) He kept saying “I know I’m not Emeril, but can someone bring me a colander??” At some point, a man dressed in a giant garlic suit came out to say hi to Fabio, and did nothing. It was all bizarre and almost surreal. No one was allowed to eat the food Fabio made. His microphone kept falling off. The electric mixer didn’t work. Etc. etc. Cooking live is ROUGH. But, the best part was watching Joey be extraordinarily entertained by all of this.

Other photos from the Garlic Festival:

After that, it was:
Gilroy -> Santa Cruz, where we visited my apartment, the meadow, and downtown for food
Santa Cruz -> Santa Clara to pick up Noam’s stuff
Santa Clara -> San Francisco to drop Noam off at the airport
San Francisco -> Santa Clara to pack the rest of my stuff (including bike)
Santa Clara -> Santa Cruz to drop me off at my apt
And for Joey, Santa Cruz -> Santa Clara to go home.

It was a lot of driving.

And an epic weekend. Goodnight.