No, you don’t have to go to Denver to “chill out”. There is plenty of fun to be had in this city.
On Sunday, I was downtown with Summer, David, and Sim, when we got to talking about spending vs. being thrifty about hair, clothes, etc. We went to Idoru downtown, where I shopped for expensive jeans. Alas, no jeans there were perfect, but this only prepared me for an amazing experience at Gloss, a denim bar up north at Briargate. I went Monday with Ford and Angela, who could bear to spend less than half an hour in this wondrous store, for unknown reasons (probably relating to money?). You know it’s a denim *bar* as opposed to just a *store* when there is a mirrored stage, and they offer you a beverage (like salons do) while shopping. A dozen plus pairs of jeans later, the girl working there and I, using mad teamwork, had narrowed it down to two pairs too good to turn down. What a great inaugural designer jeans experience.
Last night, between the point at which I came home, realized Ford was asleep, and followed suit shortly after (i.e. at midnight), I had some sort of craving for bubble tea and translating. Unfortunately, 11pm was not the time to indulge this craving, so I waited patiently for tonight. I did my research and ended up downtown at the Coffee & Tea Zone (new favorite place). I couldn’t help drinking a large portion of my green tea bubble tea before taking this picture… so good…
Hung out there for a while and translated manga. It was glorious. A group of teenagers came in ~9pm, and were very loud and obnoxious. One of the kids in the group kept saying, “I’ve never had tea!!” Ummm….how can you never have had tea?!? He didn’t mean he’d never had *bubble* tea, just ANY KIND OF TEA. ?????? Weeeeird.
Anyway, just thought I’d let you know, if you thought you were stuck mountain biking, rock climbing, or hiking in this town, there is still hope. You can spend ridiculous amounts of money on pants and consume delicious beverages as a healthy alternative!
For the past day (5pm Friday – 5pm Saturday), I was able to explore some awesome Colorado things, thanks to the suggestion of David and the cooperation of Dale (I had to be picky about no difficult hikes, etc.) Anyway, Angela, Casey, Dale and I departed, dropped off a raft in the happening metropolis of Fort Garland, ate dinner at a place that seemed to be flustered that there were more than 2 tables full… and caught this sunset:
By nightfall we made it to the sand dunes, and found an unoccupied campsite. After setting up camp, we went out to the dunes — miles and miles of sand. Pretend you are looking at mountains. Except no, they’re now made of sand. That’s what it was like and it was AWESOME. We saw the moon rise, and by moonlight we hiked the sand, the four of us literally the only people out.
We didn’t make it quite to the summit dune, but got to the top of a fairly tall one (certainly 500+ feet) by walking on ridges mostly, and Casey+Dale doing a lot of waiting for me to catch up. Everything was all lit up by the moon, great shadows, but unfortunately no pictures — please just add this to your to-do list: sand dunes, full moon, midnight. We didn’t have any sleds or cardboard to sled down the sand either, so once we topped out, we just ran down the steep slope, essentially tumbling down. Dale and Casey had run down to Angela and from where I was standing, they were tiny specks. Then, I ran down to them, and they ran down again until they were tiny specks. This repeated again, at which point we were finally down to the dune foothills. I couldn’t even believe how far we had climbed up, based on how long running down took. Crazy. Definitely the coolest thing I have seen in Colorado so far.
This morning, we went out again to the dunes, but not to hike them (way too hot+sunny+crowded). Instead we played in the river that is created by melting snow off the nearby mountains:
Sand dunes, you can see the people hiking up:
Diverting the course of the river. Curiously, this also diverted the course of the tourists, who wanted to be in the water.
Dam[n] maintenance!
Next we saw the nearby Zapata falls. Seeing the actual falls would have required more climbing on wet rock than I was prepared for, so my photos are a little insufficient. Sorry.
Shoes of my companions, walking through to see the falls.
The last place we visited was Bishop Castle, which is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. So basically this dude decided to build a castle all by himself, and all he does is build it and have tons of tourists showing up.
View from one of the towers:
The signs say “enter at your own risk” for a reason… don’t fall down.
Also, since it’s all unfinished, you get random ladders hanging off stuff, bridges that drop off:
Tuesday night, Panida and I ventured north to Denver in order to see what turned out to be quite an excellent Feist concert.
The venue — mid-sized, not too crowded. Ate a very salty pretzel here… yum.
Leslie Feist has a great voice. The set list was mainly from her most recent album, The Reminder. The concert t-shirt I bought matches the opening of the show, which looked like this:
Most songs live were done in a fairly similar way to the album versions, with the exception of a rather extended and excellent rendition of 1234.
It was interesting to hear her talk about her music, which she did almost as much as make jokes about being Canadian… I feel like most songs are about love changing as you grow up. However, based on her comments, her life (and all of ours) are movies, and she is writing the soundtrack. For example, she told a story: you are tearing it up on the dance floor as My Moon My Man is playing. Following that, the guy you’re dancing with takes you up on the roof. As you’re walking up, “The Limit to Your Love” is playing. There was a third song for when, six months later, you still haven’t told the guy how you feel about him, *really*.
Anyway, total sweetness. Ben Folds style forced-audience-harmonization was also involved. Here’s some of My Moon My Man:
This weekend, I made a brief journey to the west coast to visit joey. First time in the bay area, and it was pretty nice. On Thursday I arrived and visited Apple, Inc. and couldn’t take any pictures, but did have some tea.
Friday Joey had to work so I took the Caltrain over to Palo Alto, and spent the morning exploring Stanford. There were swarms of Japanese tourists everywhere, so I listened in, and went on a tour (in english). Being the seasoned college tourist (on both sides — tourist and guide) that I am, this tour left much to be desired. My tour guide was up to your standard tour-guide quality, but the tour itself was light on the concrete examples and heavy on the Stanford pride. I.e. she was very enthusiastic (just like every tour guide at every school) but I wanted to see a classroom, a dining hall, a library, a dorm, or at least go *into* a building besides the church. At least they did a good job showing off the fact that we were in sunny California by never going inside.
Palm Drive:
One of those college brochure kind of shots (+trashcan):
Hoover tower:
View from tower:
In Palo Alto I walked around, looked in stores, ate lunch, and came upon a substantial iPhone 2.0 line. I did not attempt to buy an iPhone, but I saw some successful shoppers up and down University Avenue.
The rest of Friday was spent going to San Francisco for dinner. We found a good place in chinatown and ordered way too much food. San Francisco was pretty great, and in general it was refreshing once again to come upon street corners where two different groups of people were speaking different languages that I didn’t understand. That situation is hard to come by in Colorado.
After dinner we visited a couple famous San Francisco places — Lombard St., Union Square:
And the Golden Gate Bridge, where it was extremely cold and windy, but there was a convenient rock on which to perch my camera:
Saturday morning we went to the Computer History Museum which had some pretty crazy stuff. The Babbage Difference Engine was extremely sweet, and looked extremely difficult to operate (not to mention how difficult it was to actually build, etc.)
The rest of Saturday was spent going first to Half Moon Bay, buying organic fruits on the way, and shopping at a really cute yarn store (acquired some good wool), and then heading down the coast on Highway 1 past Santa Cruz to find a beach. On the way we stopped at Pigeon Point Lighthouse:
We eventually found Sunset Beach, which was nice, relatively empty, or so it seemed at first.. until a giant army of birds showed up. First there was just one bird:
But that was merely the harbinger of the other million:
So, a more Hitchcockian sunset than anticipated…
So an excellent weekend in Pacific time, but I have now returned to Mountain.
Just for clarification, in case anyone was wondering, here are some of the things I *don’t* care about.
The colors have no meaning, but the big red “C” shape is “RULES” if it’s hard to tell.
And, John Mayer wouldn’t normally be deserving of his own category, but I have been enduring peer pressure in the past few days to like him, due to the fact that he is one of the headliners at the Mile High Music Festival. Unfortunately, I listened to him today and felt like killing myself.
Some girls can dream up an ideal boyfriend: his looks, his personality, his hobbies, etc. But only one girl, Riko, gets her ideal boyfriend delivered to her in a box. And he comes with a user manual.
In this summer’s drama, based on the Yuu Watase manga of the same name, 絶対彼氏(Zettai Kareshi — Absolute Boyfriend), Riko (Aibu Saki) gets essentially tricked into a trial of the company Kronos Heaven’s robot, designed to be the perfect boyfriend of the customer. Riko selects physical and personality attributes for this boyfriend-to-be — apparently her ideal boyfriend looks exactly like Hayami Mokomichi — and a few days later a large box shows up in her apartment.
At first Riko is creeped out and annoyed at this robot following her around everywhere, and saying awkward things like, “Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Riko’s ideal boyfriend. I love Riko!” causing interesting conflicts at work and in Riko’s social life (especially when Riko’s “friend” Mika falls for robot-boy). Of course Riko attempts to keep the fact that he is a robot secret, and only those closest to her eventually discover the truth.
This picture is misleading, because Hayami Mokomichi never actually looks like a robot in the show, but here it is nonetheless:
The subplot is that Riko really wants to be a pastry chef, and eventually earns the chance to go to Paris to study, along with other (human) love interest Soshi (Mizushima Hiro), who has to fight for attention with a robot for 11 episodes:
This was by far the best role I’ve ever seen Mizushima Hiro in — his character was well-developed in his outward coolness, stemming from his dissatisfaction in the direction his family’s company was going, and his undying, but subtle, and not overly persistent devotion to Riko. He also took rejection rather well, given the odd circumstance of finding out that *your* dreamgirl has just turned you down for a robot.
Throughout the show, Riko struggles with her own feelings towards Naito (the name she gives to robot-boy) — she wants to feel unattached, but somehow can’t bring herself to give him up in any of the situations where he may be taken away from her.
Naito himself is also an interesting character. Being essentially a beta-version of a robot boyfriend, he is certainly not bug-free. He doesn’t have very good battery life (and has to recharge every night in the bathroom), he often overheats, and is programmed so well to love and protect Riko that he puts himself in a lot of danger, which can be seen as a positive or a negative attribute. His architect, Namikiri-san, often shows up to do maintenance or fix a bug, and is himself shocked at certain things — like when his hard drive is wiped, and yet he still remembers Riko, or does other things that were certainly not programmed into him — a lot of machine learning was going on anyway, with new words that aren’t in his internal dictionary, but emotional growth was certainly also going on.
However, interestingly, the show didn’t take the robotic emotion thing too far. The characters essentially treat him like a human (even though, as stated many times throughout the show, he was “just an appliance”). They don’t even really remark about the potential breakthrough in robotics that’s going on here (besides the architect, Namikiri-san, of course). Without being too silly or too serious, the robot character was important for what he was worth, but not the complete center of attention, or the real hero, which would be Soshi of course. Zettai Kareshi was cute and well-done, and totally avoided falling into its potential Pinocchio slump — definitely worth watching.
Sometimes, you go to Red Rock Canyon, just to hang out, play with Sim while David climbs…. and you end up climbing a rock. Oops. I didn’t mean to, I swear.
Belayer below!
Topped out on the climb, and this was my view.
Haven’t fallen to my death yet. Still alive and kicking, standing on a ridge well enough to take cell phone pictures of myself.
Tuesday. Went to lunch with interns and newhires, and then left work super early to depart for Red Rocks to see R.E.M., Modest Mouse, and The National.
Red Rocks is the most amazing concert venue — beautiful, and great acoustics. We experienced ~2 minutes of rain but otherwise the weather was amazing.
Looking back on the path up to the amphitheatre.
We got there super early and parking was easy. 3 rows away from the amphitheatre.
Line to get in.
Trading post where we bought Red Rocks tshirts before the concert.
Tour buses.
Inside, finding seats.
First up were The National. I was familiar with a few of their songs from the radio, and they were even better live. Good use of some trumpets in a few songs, and violins in others… excellent, but essentially no one was there and it seemed that very few people knew who The National were.
Red Rocks begins to fill up…
Waiting… as beer goes on around us.
Modest Mouse was up next. We wished they played a longer setlist and that the audience would pay more attention to them, but everyone was extremely busy getting alcohol. They did play Dashboard, which was nice, but that was the only major hit in the set.
Then R.E.M. showed up!! Yaaay!!!
Everyone who comes to Red Rocks complains about the altitude (no oxygen -> harder to sing), but Michael Stipe seemed to be doing alright.
After a few songs, Michael Stipe said, “Who here has twitter?” and Ford and I got extremely excited. Then he essentially retracted his statement, “No, I’ll talk about that after about 5 more songs.” So I was waiting for something about twitter, but instead he was asking about that to see if people had been twittering/received text messages about the Obama nomination. The audience’s reaction was more mixed than I expected, but at least the majority was certainly cheering with Michael Stipe. They played a set of politically themed songs. During one, the lyrics went up on the screens behind them:
WHY?
Megaphone!
The set list had a lot of songs from their most recent album, Accelerate. I think most people in the audience weren’t very familiar with this album since it’s so new, and not as good as their older stuff, but it definitely a few good songs. I had listened to that album in preparation, so seeing those songs live was pretty cool, and then the classic R.E.M. songs were of course awesome.
Also, R.E.M. did a good job of interacting with the audience. Michael Stipe spent a while talking to us at the end of the concert, pointing out various audience members he could see, and commenting on them. The best one was, “Hey, guy with your shirt off — put it back on — I like The Cure too!”
Here was the end of the concert, and this was how everyone felt:
But then they came back, and played Losing My Religion!!!
(And a few other songs)
But I know what you really want is not to read about R.E.M. — you want to hear them. So here is Hollow Man:
Actually, several things out here reminds me of Japan… hiking through mountains, walking to work with my lunch in hand, generally nice weather… and now, CURRY RICE AND MOCHI. Yessss. We made a trip to Asiana Market, which sells mostly Korean stuff but some Japanese stuff. It’s probably a good thing they don’t have more Japanese food or I would have bought it all. But we came out of there with some good Japanese junk food, noodles, ice cream, nori, furikake, and most importantly, daifuku and mochi. I’m really glad that Ford seems to be such a big fan of Japanese food. David, also a fan of the mochi. We were so excited about our purchases that after we bought our food we just chilled in the parking lot, snacking, debating whether to go in for a second run…
Last night, I was watching an episode of Last Friends and two of the characters were eating curry rice. Ford noticed this too and the cravings begun. So, it was clear we would be doing culinary explorations in Japanese curry:
The carrots and sautéed onions were a necessity — celery, for added fun. And I have some nice bright yellow takuan to finish off the meal. Pocky and green tea/red bean ice cream are also in the freezer.
The curry was extremely easy to make (step 1, buy curry), and tasted exactly like the カレーライス in Japan — just the right flavor, and absolutely no spiciness. Maybe curry udon (or soba!) is next up on the list of things to make… or I’ll venture to do some om-rice… yummyyy.
Another great discovery — yesterday Ford and I went downtown (following Summer and Rhonda, who were going to shop there) — we bought some Wigwam and Smartwool socks, then essentially ran out of money and decided not to continue on to Manitou Springs. Instead, we were walking along this street when Ford says, “I’m thirsty…” and directly to our left I saw a sign that said, “Bubble Tea”!! Yessss… we had some nice green tea and taro bubble tea before heading home (and getting lost several times, due to vague instruction from the navigational assistant… its definition of “turn left” is really suspect).
Saturday: Visited Boulder. I was interested in checking it out, and seeing how much of a hippie town it really was. David suggested we also go to the Celestial Seasonings factory that’s a little outside of Boulder, and since I am rather enthusiastic about tea I could not refuse.
Despite being a well-known tea brand, the Celestial Seasonings factory was actually rather small. We went on a tour, for which the ticket is a package of tea, and while you’re waiting you can sample any of their teas for free:
Celestial Seasonings is adorable:
Just like on the tea, quotes and words of wisdom are everywhere:
Ford samples some tea:
The theater where the tour began:
The day we went, the factory wasn’t in operation (they don’t need to operate every day in the off season, aka summer) so it was quiet and we just saw big bags of tea ingredients. There was a tea room for tea that was already mixed, which smelled very nice. The best room, however, was the mint room. The door has to be kept closed as to prevent mint aromas from infecting all other tea ingredients. Walking in was like hitting a wall of mint. 2/3 of the tourists couldn’t handle it and ran out immediately, and the last 1/3 were standing inside inhaling the minty goodness. Sinuses, totally cleared. Apparently, if the factory exploded or something, you would smell mint a mile away. Awesome.
Factory tour was followed by intense Celestial Seasonings shopping.
One more fun fact: The reason there are no strings or paper tags on the tea bags is to save the environment. Saves those trees.
After Celestial Seasonings, we were incredibly hungry and headed into Boulder only to spend like half an hour looking for a parking place. Boulder was packed, partially because of the carnival and outdoor market going on. We went to get pasta, by which point we were too hungry to make any reasonable decisions about food, but somehow we made it. There was also some extremely sketchy Nutella ice cream, which was really just chocolate (major disappointment). After we were fed, we shopped at the outdoor Pearl Street Mall, which was very nice.
There were also two people playing didgeridoos:
After buying earrings and some records on Pearl St., we headed over to the outdoor market and carnival. Ford was totally into the rides, so she did that while I bought even more earrings.
Meanwhile, I was here:
Totally fun day. We passed Denver on the way back:
Sunday: See previous (bruffin) post.
Monday: Skiing at A-Basin. I had never skied before, and Ford had just once, so we were essentially n00bs. A-Basin (Arapahoe Basin) is less a tourist resort than a place where locals go to ski and snowboard, so everyone else there was really hardcore and really good. First step was driving into the mountains.
A good sign:
Since we were skiing n00bs, at first we sucked. I couldn’t turn, I couldn’t snowplow, I couldn’t do anything. But after a little while, with David’s expert training, we improved a lot and got a little more comfortable.
Here’s where I kept getting stuck and sliding backwards. Wow I was bad.
Eventually we improved enough that an actual ski lift was necessary:
Ford totally skied in a tshirt.
Here’s some great videos of us while we still were learning the basics. Note how reluctant I am to actually go down the slope and try to stall:
Ford skiing, no nonsense, down the slope:
Skiing is hard. Sometimes I fell down… and just stayed there:
Ford was pretty good about not falling:
But even she had one major yard sale:
Mountains are so great.
After we went down our first real run (i.e. went halfway up the mountain and then down) we broke for lunch. I suffered from acute mountain sickness.
After we completed a couple runs (Wrangler and Sundance on this map), we had mastered not being extremely scared, parallel turns, and getting up once we’d fallen down. Pretty good progress for one day, thanks to expert instruction, and being pushed a lot. The scariest part was probably all the hardcore people flying by (sometimes literally) as we moved at 2mph being terrified.
By then we were exhausted and needed to return our skiis anyway. Ford searching for the Rental shop:
We said bye to A-Basin and started on the journey home. Next weekend is the last weekend A-Basin will be open, and then it’s closing for the season.
On the way home. Buffalo Peak, at the base of which is the town of Frisco:
A 14er is the class of mountains that are 14k feet high. Here’s the list of them, and Colorado has a bunch of them. The mountain on the right is Quandary, the 13th highest 14er.
The continental divide:
On the way back, we drove through South Park (a park is a big flat expanse of land, surrounded by mountains), and saw the town, Fairplay, that the show is based on.
This looks totally fake, but it’s not. Colorado is so great.
This has been an epic weekend. But I have not the time to blog it right now, so let me just share with you the accomplishments of Sunday (Saturday and Monday were less mellow than this):
-unlocking all the songs on Guitar Hero 2 -the creation of BRUFFINS.
If you are confused, bruffin = brownie+muffin. We accidentally had ridiculous amounts of brownie mix, so we made 2 batches and had a little left over — not enough for a third batch, but enough for a batch of bruffins.
Still confused? Here are some helpful examples:
Bruffins are best served upside-down.
I promise I am doing things BESIDES making dessert, though it may not appear as such. I just seriously need sleep right now.
More details about work to come — too much good stuff to say here when I kind of have to go anyway. However, last night was an adventure in dessert preparation. Ford made brownies a couple of days ago and there was extra mix, so we made some more (there’s still some left though — lots of brownie mix):
Caramel was yummy.
While the brownies were baking we went to buy video games, and now have another guitar hero guitar, bought GH2, as well as an array of other games I’m not really familiar with. When we returned, we did some important things:
-got david to join twitter -prepared for the guitar hero gig that was certainly going to begin shortly -created ANOTHER twitter account for stuff david says so we can tweet about other things…
And then it was brownie time. However, the ice cream was completely frozen around the lid since it was stored upside down at some point in time. Therefore, this became necessary:
You can judge the age of this ice cream by counting the rings in the cross-section.
The final step was to scrape off the layer that touched the saw, and there you have it. The solution to any frozen log of ice cream.
So, it’s completely unclear as to where our great luck came from… but Ford and I are spending the summer interning in Colorado, living with some of the coolest people ever (David, Summer, and Sim)… as my recent tweets have indicated, there are some nice things here that the midwest notably lacks — primarily, topography. I was instructed not to fall off the cliff in the backyard, so I will do my best with that.
The past two days we have spent getting settled in, playing guitar hero, watching tv, chilling out, going to visit Garden of the Gods (see pictures), and shopping for food. Here’s some photos:
Good thing Ford and I were there to hold up this rock:
For more pictures, check out the Colorado photo album which I will be updating, for more pictures. Tomorrow we stop being total tourists and start work!
So I got back from dinner tonight, ready to keep practicing my Japanese speech, which I will have to deliver at my final early tomorrow morning. This speech, the last portion of my final project for Japanese, is essentially about Facebook, and the issue of using your real name vs. being more careful and keeping real information about yourself hidden on the internet. It’s a response to these two articles:
Anyway, before practicing my Facebook speech, I checked Facebook of course (hooray for relevant procrastination techniques), and was surprised to find an invitation to an event in Japan — the Facebook Developers Garage meeting in Harajuku, Tokyo. I suppose I was invited since I participated in the Japanese translation of Facebook. Here’s the invite:
The address sounded a little familiar, so I checked it out on Google Earth:
See that intersection at the top right? That’s the one with corner stores including Jonathon’s, Condomania, and the Gap, and Kiddy Land off on one of the side streets there (where I bought my pink penguin/duck umbrella)… in short I’ve been there several times, when walking between Harajuku and Shibuya.
Unfortunately this event is on May 19th, when I will not be free to be hanging out in Tokyo with Facebook Developers. Alas.
This morning I was surfing, and discovered a post at gaijinguide about TokyoPunch, which looks like it will be an animation about this slug, a brit, in Japan. The trailer clearly takes place in Nara, which is in the Kansai region of Japan, so I’m not sure why it’s called TokyoPunch, but perhaps more will be revealed shortly.
What was amazing was that… while I usually didn’t feel quite so out of place in Japan as this slug does (I wasn’t so put off by the lack of english, for example), this trailer pretty much captures exactly how I felt in Nara. (I, however, didn’t get stuck in the hole in that pillar — safely made it through.)
P.S. if you want to see that youtube video at a more reasonable quality, you should definitely go download Joey’s youtube in mp4 plugin and then watch the trailer again — it will be crispy and wonderful.
Went to a couple of good concerts this week… first up, Monday night it became apparent that my friend was looking to sell his Ben Folds ticket due to unreasonable amounts of homework. After a slightly stressful attempt to meet up and complete the ticket transaction, by noon on Tuesday I had my ticket in hand. Noam came back to town, picked me up after my meeting, and we continued onto a stop at Zorbas and then onto Ben Folds. Ben Lee opened, and he was also excellent. Then Ben #2 came onstage:
There was a particularly ridiculous tambourine player who elicited more applause than Ben Folds, completely mysterious.
As usual, Ben Folds was not what I imagined. His recorded music sounds so sarcastic (I have a hard time imagining that he’s not making fun of Zak and Sara), but not true live. The end of the concert involved the audience singing a three part harmony, conducted by Ben Folds. Probably one of the only times I have successfully harmonized.
Friday night was the Islands @ the IMC. The Headlights, who opened, are apparently local — which I didn’t know, though I knew a few of their songs. More than anything else, they seemed to just be really happy while performing:
Then the Islands showed up, after a long sound check and and even longer period of time after their soundcheck where they just weren’t there… finally they began playing though:
Half the band:
Blurry other half of the band (the violins/ violas(?) were rocking)
Most hardore picture, imo — gotta love the IMC lego guy.
Really good sound — even better than their recorded stuff, I thought. Though until two weeks ago I was unaware that they had other music besides “Don’t Call Me Whitney, Bobby”… now their song, “Swans” has become my official walking-to-math-class song. Don’t know how I ever got to math in the mornings without it.
