January 27, 2009

• My Time in California (now with video clip!)

  Happy Chinese New Year everyone!  I’m so glad I decided to take today off from work because I was way too tired from my plane ride back last night.

  If you’ve read my last post or my recent pulses, you probably know that I’ve been in California for the past few days, mainly in San Diego and Los Angeles.  I wish I could have planned to stay longer because there were so much more stuff I didn’t see, but I nonetheless saw and did many things during my time over there. 

  I also got a chance to meet up with Xangans in real life, which is a first for me.  I haven’t met any of them before this, so I was excited.  How did everything go?  Let’s take it day by day, shall we?

  *Note:  This entry will be very long, but hopefully I wrote it in such a way that you can just skim through if you don’t have the time to read everything*

  Thursday:  San Diego (Mount Helix, La Jolla Shores, UCSD)

  Before I even talk about California, I gotta mention the plane rides over there.  On my connecting flight to Chicago, I found out that one of the flight attendants is a member at my tennis & fitness club.  She recognized me and gave me some free cookies, which was very nice of her.  Small world!

  On my flight out of Chicago, I found out that a pilot I know (coincidentally enough is also a member at my club) had emailed the flight crew and told them about me and that they should take extra care of me.  I ended up getting a personal greeting from the whole crew and shook hands with the pilot.  They also treated my friend Kenny, the person sitting next to me (who I didn’t know), and me to free warm nuts and wine!  Hell yeah!

  

  That wine made sleeping a bit easier

  I arrived in San Diego a little after noon, where we were promptly picked up by Hong (aka BomCamChuoi).  She ended up hanging out with us all vacation, housing and driving us all over California.  Thank you so much Hong!

  After a quick stop at In-N-Out, we took our burgers to eat on top of Mount Helix.  What a view of San Diego!

  
  Kenny chomping on an In-N-Out burger in front of a gigantic cross.  Nice.

  Some extra pics (click to enlarge):

  

  Once we left there, we planned to go to UCSD next, but ended up stopping by La Jolla Shore first.  I’m glad we did, because we got to see a beautiful beach filled with seals!

  
  Didn’t slip thank goodness

  More pics (click to enlarge):

  
  

  After that long detour, we finally made it to UCSD where Mai (aka InlUvWiTuRsMiLe) took us on a fun little tour of the campus.  For some reason it reminded me of UMBC, except bigger and better.  They have singing trees!  Perhaps in another life I would have loved to have gone here for school.

  
  Posing along side the singing tree (it’s artificial btw, in case you didn’t know haha)

  Click click boom:

  

  Friday:  San Diego (San Diego Zoo, Coronado Bay, Tet Festival in Balboa Park, Ocean Beach)

  We spent the first part of the day seeing all the animals in the San Diego Zoo (the best zoo I’ve ever been to!).  We saw so many animals and took way too many pictures. 

  

  Haven’t been to good zoo in a while

  A small selection of the 59680321 pics we took:

  
  
  
  

  

  Stopped by briefly over at Coronado Bay, which was somehow even more beautiful than the beach before!  I felt like I was walking on water.

  
  I could just stay here all day

  Playing in the water:

  

  Later that night, we went to a Tet Festival in Balboa Park, ate at Bennigan’s, and viewed Ocean Beach at night.  I ended up not taking too many pictures that night because I was bummed about something.  That’s a story for another time though.  I was able to recover from that the next day after reading aJoLLyDork‘s comment on a pulse telling me that thinking was not allowed on vacation haha.  Good call.

  
  Mai (InlUvWiTuRsMiLe) and I on a ferris wheel (can’t really tell from the pic).  BTW, I know I’m totally cheesing it in this shot.

  Friday:  Los Angeles (Irvine, UCLA, Griffin Observatory)

  Our last full day in California!  We decided to do a day trip in Los Angeles.  We briefly stopped by John’s (aka wutuwaitn4) place in Irvine.  He brought two of his other friends along (which, coincidentally enough, he met through Xanga); Regina (aka blahblahfishy) and Susan (aka bobaShop). 

  We all continued on to UCLA, where we met up with Jennifer (aka jeNNi_RoX).  She proceeded to give us a very good tour of UCLA.  The campus has so much open spaces and was very pretty to see.  I was expecting it to be a lot bigger, but it was still big nonetheless.  Yet another college I would have loved to go to in another life.

  
  Xangans (plus Kenny =P)!  From left to right:  jeNNi_Rox, Kenny, BomCamChuoi, Roadlesstaken (me), wutuwaitn4, blahblahfishy, bobaShop

  More pics from UCLA:

  

  After eating, Jennifer unfortunately had to leave us to go study.  The rest of us drove over to Griffith Observatory, which overlooks Los Angeles.  It was so crowded there!  I think it was because the sun was about to set and a lot of people wanted to view that from way up top.  I know I’ve been using “beautiful” a lot in this post, but seriously the view up there was exactly that.

  
  Don’t worry, there was something below me so I wouldn’t fall off and go SPLAT

  You know the drill!  More pics:

  
  

  
  Saturday:  Departed California back to good old Maryland

  Not too much to say except we woke up at the buttcrack of dawn to catch our flight at 6:17am.  Got just 2 hours of sleep the night before and barely any sleep on the plane ride back.  Lovely.

  That concludes my time over in California.  Can’t wait until I go on my next trip, whenever that may be.  Hmm, where should I visit next?  Canada?  New York?  Florida?  Texas?  We’ll see!

  —-EDIT—-
  Oops, forgot to add the video clips I took on here.  Here’s a YouTube link below of videos taken at the San Diego Zoo and the Griffith Observatory.  Btw, I know I wrote “Griffin” instead of “Griffith” in the video caption.  Whoops!

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