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| Observations from our family trip to Italy over Christmas vacationSeems like all of the big old churches in Italy are museums now (or at least the ones they bring us tourists to).
Every time an Italian would say "Vatican City" it sounded like "Vortigaunt City".
The Sistine Chapel looks just like all the pictures of the Sistine Chapel, except really big and on the ceiling.
Even though it costs money to use the public restrooms in Italy, somehow I still ended up going to the public restroom more often than I do over here.
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| I pwn small fish in the face! (with a hook)My dad and I finally took Will Lin and Richard fishing today, and sadly the only fish we got was the one scup I caught early on in the afternoon. But we did get to walk half an hour through the sand (both ways!), try Will's exotic animal+beef sticks (buffalo, feral swine, and alligator!), catch and release many small scups no bigger than one of our fingers (I almost teared up as I was trying to release the one scup that nearly got hooked right through the eye), and I even got bitten by a seaworm (I hope they're not posionous...).
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| An experiment while visiting Bernie in CT/NYThis past weekend, I had my first prolonged encounter with depth perception. See, ever since I was young, my left eye has been very near-sighted, but my right eye is perfectly fine, so the two images can't really match up well, and I have little or no depth perception, and the same goes for Bernie. He's tried using the single contact lens to address this before, but I never have. But apparently he recently got a pair of glasses for the left-eye near-sightedness, so when my parents and I went to visit him this weekend, I tried them on for an afternoon. The degree of depth range that I could see was mind-blowing, all of a sudden it looked like everything was separated into individual parallax layers, some close and some far. Too bad it didn't actually improve my depth perception (at least not during that afternoon), because it basically just felt like everything was really close (which is more or less what things look like for me normally). As for looks, with glasses on, I basically just look like me + glasses, exactly as you would expect me to look. The most I can say is that there's sort of a "Calvin's dad" effect, but that's kind of stretching it.
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| the rumors are true!In-and-Out does have a secret menu of "animal-style"-iness! Although that neopolitan shake was a bit too much, feeling so fat now... (and we thought walking there and back would take care of it)
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| adventures with Bay Area CBSers begin!The crazy adventures began almost immediately. I drove from San Francisco International Airport to Mountain View, briefly unloaded my stuff at the apartment I'll be staying in these next two weeks. It was only a few streets down from where Dave Lin lives, so I decided to just walk over there, took me about 20 minutes. Then we went out to pick up Wesley and get dinner. We walked down Castro St., which is like a Chinatownish area with many Asian restaurants, still as indecisive as in those 3 years we spent at 305. Eventually we ate at a small but busy Japanese restaurant that Dave knew about. After dinner we went back to Dave's place and two of his church friends came over and we played 5-player Cities & Knightes, which is more fast-paced than regular C&K (because anyone can build anything between peoples' turns), the results of which can be seen in Wesley's Xanga edit.
Then today we went to Dave Lin's church, MVCCC (I'm sure all of you can guess what that stands for). I tried to get over to Dave's apartment (where Wesley was sleeping over) in time to wake Wesley up like old times, but I drove in just too late! After church we went to practice softball with some of the other softball-playing people from Dave's church, which was part 1 of my exercise for today. I found out that, in addition of my lack of depth perception, I also do in fact have the infamous "noodle arm", and hence am a complete defensive liability! But it was still fun learning softball skills (just like those used in Charles Yeh's epic softball games he always tells us about).
After that we went down to Tiffany Yu's birthday party, where there was a large contingent of the Bay Area CBSers. As expected from CBSers, we ended up separating ourselves from all of Tiffany Yu's high school friends and just hanging out by ourselves, only venturing into "their" side of the room to get food. After some people started leaving, we somehow decided to go practice softball again (part 2 of my exercise for today!), using the equipment still in Dave Lin's car. That lasted for a while, and eventually led to us staying until 10 pm, much later than the originally-planned 3:00-5:30. And finally now I am back at the temporary apartment getting ready to rest before my first day at Google orientation!
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