And I keep writing
and writing
and writing
because
I must express!!!!!!!!!
Just like that. I love to express. So here goes.
What's happened. Oh my. I wrote up my 2013 the last time. I left off when I was in Chicago, and after following Mohammed's suggestion, I wrote up what had happened during that year. Well....
So Carlos Mazariegos was out of Pittsburgh and visiting Guatemala at the time, but he'd been planning a roadtrip around New Year's along the Northeastern US for months along with Marcelo, Romeo, and Chino. They had made a 2-week itinerary, and they had actually invited me to join them ever since I saw Carlos while driving west through Pittsburgh on my way to Chicago, back in September. But I'd refused politely evasively, since I was fairly certain that by then I'd be again disconnected from my world, or beginning a new life somewhere in China.
Well, that wasn't the case. What happened after was that I finished my Austin project, and I decided to fly to Guatemala for a quick checkpoint, then directly off to Singapore to backpack it up again. But just 2-3 days before leaving for Guatemala, I got a call from Google, and the conversation went something like this:
- Hey, this is Google. Do you still want to work for us?
- Uhhh, what?
- Yes, I see you applied for an internship last year, and I'm contacting you to know what you're up to, and whether you'd be available to pursue an internship, or a full-time job with us as a Software Engineer.
- Uhhh (As I thought "oh my! Google! This is awesome!! But, but, but... Singapore!! This seems eerily similar to what happened in 2007! I was about to head off to Singapore, was *this* close to getting a ticket, and I get an unexpected job offer! The same decision? And it's the same time of year also.... is 2007 happening all over again? is this a 6-year cycle? What's going on?? Oh my oh my I don't want to refuse an offer from Google!!"), yes, I'm still interested.
- Great! What are you up to these days?
- Well, I graduated with my Masters from CMU in May, and I was just about to fly off to Guatemala to visit my family for a few weeks, and my intention was to later fly off to Singapore for personal travel.
- Oh, I see. Well, we'd like to schedule an onsite interview with you - when is a good time for you?
So talks and negotiations began. So now instead of just sneaking off to Singapore as soon as I managed, I had to wait for my interview. So I did. I waited in Guatemala for a tentative interview in mid or late December. That didn't happen, and since it wasn't going to happen in the holidays, my trip to Singapore was now delayed until further notice.
And then I thought of Laura, so I had to fly to Pittsburgh to talk to her. It was just imperative. After we parted ways, it seemed a little redundant to go back to Guatemala directly, so I decided to head to Chicago and visit my dad instead.
So now I was in Chicago! By this time I'd been scheduled an interview with Google on the 10th, and had a PIT-SJC flight on the 8th, and a SJC-SIN flight on the 11th. I'd touched base with most of my family during December, and I had an open invitation for a jolly roadtrip with Guatemalan friends in the next week. So i went for it!
And woot, that was cool! We were all to arrive in Pittsburgh just before midnight on Dec 28th - me from Chicago, them from Guatemala. All of our planes arrived late (which turned out well for everyone), we got a rental car for 2 days, and we all crashed at Carlos' apartment, which was luckily otherwise empty. I took the comfy futon downstairs :)
The next day we picked up Carlos' friend from UPitt, Ceci Lezcano. A cool, pretty, talkative, jolly, and anglicized girl (all the time she would say things like "o sea es que everything's going to be all right you know?"), it made our ride smoother to freshly share stories as we teased each other, and Ceci laughed and told us stories of her own.
We drove up north, and stopped at Johnson Estate Winery near the town of Erie. We stopped by, tasted a few wines, I got to taste the Ipocras wine (which is supposed to be heated and drunk warm), and the ice wine (which is remarkably hard to make, only made during the winter season, and even more extraordinarily sweet than it was expensive). We were all very pleased with the tastes and the service given to us, so between all of us we bought about 9 bottles of wine, and drove off again.
Niagara was the main destination for the day. It was winter time, so the sky was fairly cloudy, the boat and the waterfall trails were closed, and it was chilly! Still, the observatory tower was free to enter, the sight was wonderful, and we took pictures of each other and ourselves and of other tourists since we got there until dusk. Marcelo had his nice T3 camera, so he was entrusted to take some good pictures of the landscapes and the group. I think he managed pretty well.
On the way back from Niagara we stopped at Anchor Bar, a bar in Buffalo which claims to have been the originator of the terms "Buffalo Wings". Their specialty was chicken wings, so that's what everybody else ate. I don't remember what I ate, but I ate well. The inside of the restaurant was filled up with license plates from all around the different states of the US, and then some international ones too. And motorcycles! There were real, shiny motorcycles with brands such as Ducati placed on pedestal-like areas around the restaurant, and they also gave it a pretty great ambience. Plus, I imagined myself climbing up to one, turning it on, and jumping off a window to chase a bad guy, in case an action-movie-like necessity arose, and someone was being kidnapped and needed to be rescued. But that didn't happen, so we just ate and chatted at the table instead.
Then we drove back to Pittsburgh. The high point of that ride was when Marcelo was stopped by a police car for speeding at 80mph in a 65mph area. He got a ticket with an indescript punishment or fine, which simply asked him to declare himself either Guilty or Non-Guilty, and mail the form to an office in NY. I felt responsible, as I had said, only half-jokingly, that the 65mph speed limit was really only a suggestion. But the lenient, tentative punishment didn't seem that bad, so spirits were still pretty high when we returned to Pittsburgh (at a steady 65mph), dropped Ceci off, and went to sleep.
The next day was a Pittsburgh day! Nothing too exciting, as I recall. We explored the Cathedral of Learning, then the giant Mellon Institute (aka the building in the Batman scene), then St. Paul's Cathedral, then CMU, then Mt Washington. Each of these spots was subject to photographical sessions, with people often saying "DARN it's cold!", but you know, in Spanish.
I was still undecided about going on the rest of the roadtrip with them. In Pittsburgh I could just stay at Carlos' place and comfortably study for my Google interview. On the other hand, New Year's Eve was at hand, and spending it with friends seemed like a jolly way to end the year. So I bought my bus ticket that evening. There were no tickets remaining on the bus they were taking, so I bought a Greyhound bus that left at 2AM. We were going out dancing that evening, though, and wouldn't be returning until about that time. So I just packed my backpack compactly for a quick 2-3 daytrip, and took it with me to Seviche, the salsa club we went to.
Ceci was supposed to go with us, but she cancelled last minute. It was fairly boring for me - I danced with one girl during the night, though she was extraordinarly nice about telling me that I was well on my way for a beginner, and that it was harder to start for men than for women. That girl was cool. Then the club closed at 1AM, I said bye to my friends in the street, and walked 4-5 blocks to the bus station to wait for my bus.
6 hours later, I woke up in the morning, 8AM, in Washington DC, and I spent another 5 hours walking around, waiting for my friends to arrive at 1PM. It was alright - I picked up some WiFi connection in the station, and spent my time browsing and DuoLingo'ing. Once I got bored, I walked up to the hotel, only about a mile away, at least to know where it was. Marcelo had told me I looked well with a shaved head when he saw my AsiaTour pictures, so I looked up the nearest barber shop and got it shaved. I walked back to the station when it was about time for the group to arrive, I met them up at the bus, and we walked up to the hotel.
That day was Dec 31st, so we discussed what to do that night. We did a lot of decompressing, showering, and things of the sort too, so by the time we'd decided on a course of action, it was about 4PM.
We met up with two girl friends Marcelo had met at his Masters program in Madrid. What were their names? One of them was Rachel - I remember because she gave me her card, in case I wanted to apply for a job at her company that specializes in optimizing energy distribution through machine learning techniques. We met up to eat at 13th and T street, had a fairly sophisticated and enjoyable conversation, and then we all split. It wasn't far from dark by then, so we began looking for places to crash a New Year's party. We found a bar called Brixton's, fairly British and fancy-looking, which told us that we could get into the party if we arrived for dinner before 8PM. So after a little more looking, we decided to take Brixton's offer.
We got some food, we got some drinks, and we spent our New Year's Eve there. The bar had 3 floors, and each of them had a different ambience. We stayed on the second level, where a burlesque show showed, what do you know, girls taking their clothes off, sequentially one after another. They got buzzed, I got drunk on a bunch on a few different drinks including a White Russian, and was soon jumping and playing around with whoever got in my way. Then it was about 11PM, and I think I passed out.
I was woken up at 1AM, when a few bar people saw me sleeping, evaluated me as intoxicated, and kicked me out of the bar. My friends tried to persuade them, but to no avail, so we switched bars. We did that a few times, and in the last one we stayed until closing time. Carlos met a turkish girl, the rest of us danced around for a while, and then we left. By that time Chino had a strong hankering for pizza, and he walked off to the pizza place with Romeo, and didn't wait for the rest of us to catch up.
Once we caught up, they were still waiting in line, and Marcelo was getting pretty angry at them for making us wait so long. About 30 minutes later, Marcelo really wanted to get back to the hotel, so we went outside and hailed a taxi. Most taxis were busy (New Year's Eve), but we found a guy in a car who said ("I can take you for 35"). Marcelo said "make it 20", and he said "deal". Right then Chino and Romeo ran towards us, all 5 of us got in the cab, and I directed the illegal taxi back to the hotel. He was a pretty nice Moroccan guy who was using his GPS to get us there.
The next day, oh man, what happened then. Chino and I got breakfast at the hotel, while everyone else slept in. We decided to go to a Japanese place for lunch, Daikaya, which Marcelo chose. But when he got there, a bit later than us, his eyes were puffy. He was having an allergic reaction! The few pills that he swallowed didn't help, so Carlos and I we took him to the George Washington Hospital on a cab, and he was interned there until about 5pm. Chino and Romeo stayed at the hotel and did a grocery run at Walmart.
Later that night, we met with Carlos' friend Alana at a city plaza, similar to Station Square, just outside of DC (in Virginia), which had a skating rink. We went to a lebanese restaurant there, and began to order and eat.
Just then Marcelo asked me if his eyes were puffier, and indeed, he was puffying up again. So we went to the pharmacy to get some medication, but the ones in the area weren't open. So we hailed a cab to go to a 24h pharmacy in the area, and we went and bought the medication. Luckily, that one was open, and though we ran a pretty substantial taxi bill (about $40-$50 there and back), Marcelo got his medication and became all better.
The next day I left early at 7AM back to Pittsburgh, and I stayed there from Jan 2nd-8th. The first few days I went to Giant Eagle, got myself some food, worked on writing up and compiling my Adobe notebook's memories (the one with 2013 writings), studied up on Google Interview topics, and practiced some problems on the whiteboard that I'd given to Carlos when I left Pittsburgh.
Then on Sunday Jan 5th, I went to a TurnOn event. It was in Penn Ave, so I just walked it. I walked in, and I only saw Stephen and one other guy, and only 3 chairs put out for the participants. I thought "oh man, it's gonna be pretty empty today". As it turns out, we ended up being 8 participants plus Stephen! The details are a bit irrelevant, and private anyways, but I felt we had a genuine and emotional participation that day. The one thing I do remember was that Stephen asked me: "And what have you found about yourself during this time?", and I clearly said: "That... I desire company!"
And then after the class I talked to this girl Amanda of whom I really had wanted to ask: "Do you love Life?". I asked her, she said yes, and we got to talking. The topic of my trip to Singapore on Saturday came up, and she said "that's so cool!". I asked "do you want to come?", and she said "Yes!". So after a lot of details, which included ordering a vegan pizza together, playing and talking out in the cold street with her friend Asia, and some talking to her parents, that's what happened. I got her a ticket that would see her arriving in Singapore one day after I did, and we parted ways!
Then after a couple of days, on Wednesday the 8th, I flew to San Jose for my Google interview. Everything was paid for! Flights, rental car, and hotel! Speaking of rental car, when I took the shuttle to the rental car area, I met this Salvadorean driver, with whom we began talking in Spanish, and just having a good time exchanging quick anecdotes and speaking our native language in the brief 3-5 minutes we had together His name was Juan Antonio, I told him about the state of my life at that point, and then I got out of the bus. I used January the 9th to study, to support the LUX GoLive, and to flesh out some more of the Singapore details.
And then the 10th came, I drove to Google HQ, and I had my interview! I arrived one hour early, and just read the complexity cheat sheet while I was waiting. Then the interviews occurred - 5 of them.
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And then I went back to the hotel, packed, and wondered what I'd do that afternoon. I texted Wen Xin, and she was in the area and available!!! I decided to meet up with her for dinner, so we did! She took Channie too, and we caught on what had happened in our lives since we last (and first!) met each other in the summer of 2012. It was a very entertaining night, filled with stories and laughter. In the end, Wen Xin dropped me off at the hotel, we said goodnight, and I went to sleep.
The next day I ate breakfast, printed out my boarding passes, got my bags, drove to the airport, and dropped off the rental car. And on the way back to the terminal, guess who I would run into again, but Juan Antonio the airport shuttle driver!! He remembered that I was going to Singapore, and he asked me to exchange phone numbers. We did, but I felt it was just so funny that I should meet him again, when I was least expecting it. Unexpected pleasant surprises are awesome.
And then I flew to Singapore! My first leg, SJC-NRT, was awesome. The airplane, a 787-Dreamliner, seemed amazingly spacious. I felt I was walking in actual room corridors rather than in a pressurized tiny metal cabin flying through the air. Everything was clean and colorful, the flight attendants were all japanese, pretty, and so very attentive! The windows of the airplane didn't have shades - they had a button to electrically make them opaque or clear!! And very effectively so! And the bathrooms had the water-gun auto-anus-cleaner that I'd only heard stories in stories about Japan. The airline was ANA (All Nippon Airways) has now earned my highest respect among airlines.
The richer experience I obtained there was talking to a lady flying to Tokyo for business, who was awfully nice, told me how she loved Japan, had been raised in Hong Kong, lived in San Jose, had an 8 year-old daughter, had found having a daughter a very fulfilling experience, how exercise can help you get over jet lag and sustain longer and harder work, especially as you get older. I told her my stories about my 2009 backpacking, she told me her stories about getting lost in Munich, almost taking a train to another city, finding the BEST chinese food in Venice?!?! (and coming from a native chinese, this is amazing, bizarre, and intriguing). And how she had the best pasta she's ever tasted in Rome. Not from a touristy place, but just in a place that had almost no customers at the time.
That flight was 11 hours long, so we didn't talk all the way. I also got to see The Wolverine and Serendipity on the airplane's very complete and free media system offered to every passenger in the airplane. Then we deplaned, we walked together for 2 minutes, and then she went to the arrival line, I went to the connections line, and we said goodbye.
Then I boarded my 7-hour long NRT-SIN flight. I arrived a little after midnight (local time), at which point there was no public transportation from the airport available. So I decided to stick around in the very comfortable airport area, and check it out.
So I walked around and saw the Enchanted Garden. And then the Orchid Garden. And the entertainment zone, that has free PS3 usage, XBox usage with a Kinect in a little dedicated room for that, a movie theater!, a sunflower garden in the terrace!, a Lounge to catch a shower, nap, massage, nail paint, or just unlimited non-alcoholic drinks and finger food. And a Hotel! This airport is so clean and orderly. It's reaaaaaaally nice.
And now it's almost 5AM, I'm still here, and I have yet to pass through immigration. I booked a hostel for tonight (over 12 hours from now), I wrote the rest of this text whose worth I'm wondering about, and I'm looking at the empty immigration line, thinking that I'll be crossing it soon. The buses don't start until 30 minutes from now, though. I think I'll take a look at the Enchanted Garden before I leave.
And Amanda arrives like... 25 hours from now!!!!! Excited!!!!!!!!!!!! :D
I think it's almost time to go check out the "Fine City".
