Funny Turnaround

Well, as luck and cooncidence would have it, I was not met by C in the airport when I arrived in Germany three days go. Due to family matters, she couldn't be in Mainz that day and instead, I was met by a dear friend and had a lovely brunch with her that both nourished my stomach after airport food and also kept me engaged as I battled the inevitable jetlag sleep all that first day. 

But C wasn't there, and it was odd to be in that apartment- except it still feels a lot like home, too. The complication really came with the trip to Scotland that we had planned. I'm not sure if I've told everyone about this, but C and I planned a trip to Scotland almost immediately (approx. 27 hours) after I arrived in Germany as my dearest friend Erin has been living in Edinburgh for the last year and will be returning to the States tomorrow. Rather than be on opposite continents again, we decided to use the opportunity. And after she departs, C and I will embark on the West Highland Way - a long distance walking path into the Highlands.

But the point is, C couldn't be with me to travel to Scotland. But she did manage to find a flight from her current location and now, flipping the planned circumstances, I am on my way to meet her in the Edinburgh airport as she arrives from Germany. :)

Also, the following photo is from my road trip with my mom up the coast of California. I hadn't had the chance to post it yet, but I wanted to. 

Southern California Mini Adventure

So, there is no more work. It's all done. This is a bit weird to me- especially today, as it's Monday and I'm hanging out at my aunt's house and my uncle is about to come home after a day of work and normally if I were to be here on a work day, I would be riding home with him right now. Odd.

But, like any normal person, to respond to the end of an internship at a satellite company, I went snorkeling to see sharks this weekend.

Let me give a bit of backstory. Just a few miles South of here is a town called La Jolla (pronounced 'la ho-ha' -- and coincidentally was one of the areas that I was researching as a high housing appreciation area for Primarq last summer) that has some lovely shoreline that is home to many sea lions (or seals? Haven't found out which yet), snorkelers, and sunburned tourists. I went with a few other interns (I always seem to be going on these weekend trips with only boys - one of the occupational hazards of doing a tech internship, I suppose. I hope this changes soon.) ((Not that boys aren't nice. Just a 1:1 ratio would be groovy.)) and we went to a beach that is also known for hosting many, many leopard sharks.

Now, these sharks are bottom feeders (I realized the necessity to use this term after I told my girlfriend "It's fine, they only eat little things near the bottom" to which she responded "but what if you're kinda little and near the bottom?!") - shrimp, fish eggs, clams, etc. So, here's what happens. You squeeze your face into the borrowed snorkeling equipment (the water where the sharks are is fairly shallow, so none of us used fins) which is mostly just a face mask over your eyes and nose as well as the snorkel and then you star tot march down the beach, feeling silly until you get into the water. But, you are also informed that this area is known for it's plethora of sting rays (wikipedia says "the injury is very painful, but seldom life threatening..." -usually stings occur from when unsuspecting beachgoers step right on top of these critters that are chilling in the sand). So, the experts say, you just have to "shuffle" as you walk into the water to scare them away. This means scrunching and shuffling your feet on the sandy floor so that you make a ruckus down there - I did a combination stomp-shuffle to ensure that no sting rays hung out by my feet - and always keep at least part of your feet on the ground as you move forward, never just pick up a foot and plop it down on the sand.

So, even though I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing, I was convinced that every tiny bit of seaweed that brushed my toes was going to send me to the hospital and was very shaky as I went into the water.  I took my feet of the floor and began to swim in earnest as soon as that was possible - so, in about 2.5 feet of water. Imagine how silly this looks.

Anyways, then we were in the water and it looks as it normally does in the Pacific Ocean. No clear blue water, no clear blue skies, even - it was an overcast day. The water is dark, the waves are big but we are out past where the waves break so you just gently float over them as they come. And as everyone swam way in their different directions, you feel very alone - until you put your face under the water and realize that a school of fish is around you!

I had fun with the schools of fish. I paddled gently around with my face in the water and they swam with me, most of them about the size of my hand, and then all of a sudden I would see a dark shadow ripple along the floor underneath me -- and I realized it was one of these sharks! The ones I saw (about five in total) were between four and five feet in length and they move just like you'd think they would after watching so many nature documentaries. They glide. They swoop their tail across the xy plane (as I see it - if you consider their fins to be on the z axis) and are incredibly serene. The fish flit in comparison. Though I did, at one point, also see a sting ray and let me tell you, I was distinctly un-calm for the five minutes that followed.

All in all, a fun experience - and all you need is the mask and people to convince you to jump in.

There went twelve weeks.

I'm sitting in the very comfortable armchair in my room at my host family's house, the house I'll only be staying in for two more nights. Yesterday I said all my goodbyes to friends, coworkers, and bosses at ViaSat. I had high hopes for that internship - that it would be fun, that I might learn a thing or two. It exceeded all of my expectations. I learned "material" things if you will (new programming languages -- though I'm not great at them, I had to write at least a little bit of code in 4 different languages by the end of my project, also new software in general) but also intangible things lil learning to interact in a more corporate environment, finding out what work I like and what work I don't, etc.

Even when I worked at Primarq last summer, it wasn't this kind of work experience - though I remember thinking then what I thought this week. Namely, that work is apparently 8 hours a day, but it's really more than that. You don't actually have 8 hours for you, 8 hours for sleep, 8 hours for you each day. No, because you take lunch at work and that isn't really your time, plus the time it takes you to get to and from work - just like even if you lie down at 10 to sleep and technically have until 6, it doesn't mean you are immediately asleep at 10. These things are tricky.

And now, again, it's time to pack up and leave. I mean, I don't leave for a few days, but coming and going seems to be one of my main activities these last few years. When I say this, I don't mean to sound ungrateful for the opportunities I've had to live in all of these amazing places -- San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Budapest, Santa Cruz, Carlsbad -- but all of those have been in the last year. I'm very familiar with my big red suitcase. And in a few weeks, that suitcase will be pushed into the belly of a plane and come with me to Frankfurt, where it will get dragged onto a train in the airport, then down an escalator a few stops later and pulled down the street in Mainz, and finally hauled up six flights (12 half-flights) of stairs on Pankratiusstr. And when it gets there, I really hope it stays there, unused and empty, for a long time. Say, longer than six months. At least.

I don't know when I started to love my hometown.

But I really do now.

On this trip, I was there for about three days in between flights, and this time everything - the tiny roads with fields on the sides, running into ten people you know while out to breakfast, the Saturday morning market, the animals from my old home, the tornado siren and thunder lulling me to sleep. And I got to see my grandmother, my mother, and my dear, dear sister.

What a fantastic trip.

One more.

More classic Calvinball, for good measure. Here.

All of a sudden, 23.

It was a very mellow day in lots of ways. I slept in (for me, so, 7:30 or so) and had a swim in the morning, talked to my host family and my skyped with lots of my actual family. I had a few presents to unwrap in the morning and then my aunt picked me up for lunch with her and the boys, Calder and Powell. We went and had Pho (and the squiggle over the o is one of the marks I don't know how to make on a keyboard - I know ö and ø and ó but not that one...) and it was delicious, and then (silly as it might sound) I went back to their place and had a positively blissful nap.

I think I was and still am quite tired - this week not only did I work on Saturday to compensate for my absence this coming Friday, but also from Thursday to Friday this week was the intern Hackathon, a hacking competition - except 'hack' in the sense of something you throw together, not breaking into someone's computer. So, this 24 hour ridiculous competition where we stayed at work (I came home for about five hours of sleep, I'm a wimp) and got to know each other as you only can at 1:30 in the morning when you've given up on your idea, right before you get your second wind.  So, I was wiped out from that.

And so the nap was blissful. If my affection for sleep continues as it has so far, then by the time I hit forty-five or so, all I will want to do is sleep!


But then I woke up and had a lovely afternoon with my aunt, drinking tea, looking at pictures, watching a movie. And then we had an incredible dinner - grilled Maui onions and eggplant(who knows if they're really from Maui, but damn, are they delicious), grilled steak, roasted cauliflower and corn on the cob. Of course, courtesy of my uncle Sam, we also had a lovely bottle of wine. He opened it and told me it was from 2007 and that I should think back to 2007, who I was then, what I had done since then, how different I am now. He said that was one of his favorite things about wine - that you can think of when it was made and how long it aged, and every time you sip or inhale it's aroma, you can think back to that time. It really made drinking that glass of wine a particularly lovely experience.

Of course, there was also cake. :)

And then, after cake and laughter and smiles, I came back to my host family.  We hung out in the kitchen and talked about our days and then my two youngest host sisters and I engaged in what I can only call some form of Calvinball -- for those of you who have never heard of Calvinball, I've attached a comic for your edification. Basically, we each guard one of the doorways in the entry hall - there's one to the music room, one to the dining room, and one to my bedroom - the first two are at least eight feet across, whereas mine is a normal door size. So, getting the inflatable ball through another doorway is one point each for the first two goals, two points if it goes in mine. But then again, I'm at least twice as big as these two girls, so things were slightly skewed in my favor. Still, I lost. Also, you can use hands or feet. And sometimes pick up the ball and walk directly up to the goalie past whom you are trying to shoot the ball. Everything is fare game. Hence, Calvinball.

And now, I'm going to go to bed. Only three weeks left of this internship-- crazy. And a very lovely Birthday.

A Southern California Day

So, I woke up this morning at around 7:30 -- the latest I've slept in a while. I'm one of those folks who keeps waking up at 6 out of habit even on the weekends. But I got to sleep in and I went out into the kitchen to make my coffee and toast and joke with my two host sisters - as some of my Facebook friends know, we had a fun night of face painting the other night which ended with me somehow getting a really bushy painted mustache -- pitch black, obviously, as befits my complexion.

After breakfast, I changed into more suitable clothes and was picked up by a fellow intern to go and play soccer at a local park. Now, even the "just for fun" teams around here are incredibly serious about soccer - everyone has cleats, they even have proper referees running around, as well as matching jerseys. This bunch of misfits that I was with is nothing like that. Our skill levels range from the two people who play actively while they are at college to the rest of us, who "played in middle school" - which basically means we know which end of the field to aim at.

Also, these non-professional serious teams always take up the soccer fields, so we play in a baseball outfield with goals that are made of two water bottles precariously balanced on the grass -- today at least both goals were the same size, but I don't think they were really totally aligned on the different sides of the field. We didn't care.  We were 12 people today, six on six, and the teams were quite well matched. As a result, of course, in spite of the generous amount of sunscreen I put on my nearly translucent skin, I still managed to end up rather pink in the face but I think I can just blame it on the sweat that made the sun screen run away. Still, we had a blast and though I have yet to score a goal in one of these games (I've been on the winning team all the times we've played ((twice)) and have played on basically the same team) today I had a few good moments of defense (where I play by default, though I enjoy forward as well) and one assist.  Who knows if any of us will care about soccer in three months - or even on Monday when the World Cup is over- but it doesn't matter! It's a great way to spend a Saturday morning.

After that, we headed to another intern's house to barbecue and watch the professionals in the Brazil-Netherlands game. This house was classic California - a ping pong table on the open porch, beautiful open design, and a plum, a peach, a nectarine, and a lemon tree. Plus cherry tomatoes in the garden. I don't know how these people ever go to work in the morning. Especially because this little one is wandering around.

Her name is Ivy.

Alright. Now I have a bit of work to do - I was asked to join another project this week which is exciting, but first, as a good friend of mine says, I need to "put an upper bound on my ignorance". This project/problem involves so many things I've never worked with before that I really have quite a lot of catching up to do. Still, I like learning. Here I come, Information Theory, Data Compression, and C++!