More Money than Taste, More Taste then Money

My New York neighbour (couple of times removed), Pierre, dropped by last weekend; part of his tour of the US. He's heading back to Paris to start work there.

It was a lot of fun to hang out with Pierre, and it was also reason to carry on my San Francisco tradition of alcoholic weekends by going with him, Stefanie and her friend Colette to the wine region north of San Francisco - the Napa and Sonoma valleys. San Francisco reminds me in many ways of Cape Town, so I went to the wine region expecting Stellenbosch and Paarl - and I got both more and less than I expected. The Napa Valley has a lot of wine, but it has a lot more too: more Harley-Davidsons, more ultra-chic villages, more expensive restaurants. Wow. We ended up in Clos Pegase at the end of the valley. This is a "temple to wine" designed by "renowned Princeton architect Michael Graves"; its got sculptures by Henry Moore and Jean Dubuffet. And man, its ugly. The art is all over the place, some of it is really kitsch, the building is an oversized, hulking edifice which radiates discomfort. But the wine was good.

It was also good in the Sonoma Valley, where they let you buy a bottle of wine and bring your own picnic. Sonoma is a lot more relaxed than Napa, and has a homey feeling about it. We spent more time there, ending up the day in the giant square in Sonoma town, where the short-lived Californian Bear Flag Republic was declared in 1846 when it was wrenched from Mexico's power. On this Sunday afternoon, war and power struggles seemed very distant, and the townspeople were dancing to a bluegrass band with a washboard-strumming singer in the square.

Mission Street Carnival

Its only a sample of two, but my weekends in San Francisco are always colourful. This time around, it was the Mission Street Carnival, a South-American style street parade with lots of feathers and glitter and swinging skirts. It would have been a lot of fun anyway, but it was made into crazy fun because I went with my new room-mate-to-be Stefanie and a bunch of her friends, after kicking the day off with a champagne-and-mojito breakfast. They are 24 hour party people, and really friendly to boot.





















I went out into Mountain View for the first time on Tuesday for an 'offsite' event from Google. Its a bland stretch of suburbia out there - I am very very glad to be in San Francisco!

The Bay to Breakers

What better way to get to know San Francisco than dress up as a shrubbery and run 12km with thousands of other people in fancy dress from the Bay to the Pacific Breakers? That's what I did at 8 o'clock this morning. The race was a lot of fun, some people went over the top in their costumes and some went under the top and didn't wear anything at all. Does that sound sexy? I guess it could be, but imagine running behind jiggling masses of sweaty cellulite ... now try and forget the image! There were also teams of people who had kegs of beer on wheels and were drinking like frat boys while running in public in the early morning (probably double illegal in America)






















Just before the start of the race, the crowd erupted in a spontaneous display of tortilla throwing. I have no idea why this tradition started, but thousands of them were suddenly whirling through the air.

And just after the start, the raucous crowd was greeted by three Christian protesters, having their say about the race. Here is my favourite banner, warning how the race caused judgment:

The Berkeley Time Warp

I'd heard about it before, but was surprised all the same. When you catch the BART subway across the bay to Berkeley, all the 30-somethings white men with matted dreadlocks get out the train at the Berkley stop, and you set your watch back to the 1960's. People really are protesting by living in trees, railing against US politics outside the gate and selling tie-died T-shirts (Made in India) on Telegraph Avenue. Its an anachronism, but its also cool.

I went there to hook up with Sandy, my neighbour in New York, who was at her sister's graduation. We had a cup of coffee at International House Berkeley, which we walked past by accident. IHouse Berkeley is a mixture of Mexican villa on the outside and faux medieval hall on the inside. Not only that, but it also offered my very first view of the Golden Gate bridge. Sandy and I had a good time, walked around the campus, visited the t-rex (California seems to have lots of these) and a conversation which was strangely deeper than anything we've ever had in New York. Maybe things were like that in the 60's too.

A Flat Heirarchy

Today, a mail from Eric Schmidt landed in my mailbox. Later, Google hosted its weekly Thank God its Friday meeting, where most of the company gets together, all the Nooglers have to wear a nerdy cap-with-propeller and either one of Larry Page or Sergey Brin is present. This Friday I was lucky: both were there, and Sergey had just gotten married, so the Nooglers stood up together and pelted him with rice. How often do you get to do that to a multi-billionaire?

This meeting was for me an indication of how special the atmosphere at Google really is: it was totally informal, witty, and there is an open mike so anyone with a question can get up and put it directly to the CEO's. And there were lots of trivial ones, along the lines of 'can we reserve a free bicycle?' and joking ones, like 'are we going to license Linux from Microsoft?

Google uses all its own products (GMail, Google Applications) internally. The logo: a dog bowl with all the logos inside.

My 3rd Day as a Noogler

I am going to find it difficult to go back into a normal job (or into a normal life) again. I am getting so used to just picking up anything I want (smoothie, juice, coffee, french toast, delicious gourmet food made from organic ingredients, whatever) and walking away with it, that I'm going to get into shop-lifting trouble later.

At Google it feels like the Internet bubble never burst.

People ride around on the kind of bikes that would make a 12-year old girl's heart beat faster or electric yellow scooters (they are all free too).

At Google, they use the space above the urinals to remind you about good code testing practices. They call the project TOTT 'Test on The Toilet'.

Today Nandini (my co-new-noogler) and I helped carry wastepaper buckets full of sand downstairs, clearing the beach out and giving us space for desks. Pity - I kind of liked the beach.

First Day at Google

How could today have been anything but interesting? Google, whose mission it is to store the worlds information and make it accessible, had given me the wrong departure point for the shuttle to get to their office so I missed the one I needed, but ended up hooking up with David (also from Columbia, we'd met already in New York), having a coffee at the new stop (the Muddy Cafe: I'm going to be there a lot) and then catching the next shuttle. Which turned out to be a cross between a bus and a limo, black inside and out with leather seats and filled with people tapping at laptops.

The Google 'campus' was a little less amazing than I'd imagined in some ways, and a lot cooler in others. Its a collection of buildings, many of them rented out from SGI who occupied them before. The dull necessary bureaucracy (photos, passwords, proof of alien employability etc.) took hours, was the main stuff of the day. The most interesting experience was, (fess up), the food. In abundance, everywhere, all free. I had Indian dal for lunch and chinese stir-fried tofu for dinner. Dinner at work? Makes sense at Google. One cafe there specialized in food which is only grown within 150km of Google.

Its not only the food which is international. I am working with people from Zambia, India, Pakistan, America and Argentina. The last organized event of the day was a great speech, 'Life of an Engineer' by Googler John Cox who combines tech savvy with wit and eloquence (its a rare rare mix).

Lots of Google is eccentric. A giant t-rex skeleton in the courtyard feasts off flamingos dressed up in sombreros. In the lobby a replica of Spaceship One hangs from the roof. People put weirdly cool stuff in their cubicles. My team just one second prize in an office decoration contest (theme: Japan) and I fell victim to the winning team, who had converted the space where I was supposed to be working into ... a beach. Its true: a pile of sand and sea shells and and old sofa where my desk will someday be. This is going to be a lot of fun.

In-Flight Entertainment

I am in San Francisco. After a hectic day's packing and three hour's sleep last night none of this seems real. But my first impressions of the city are: its beautiful, nothing like New York, cold, something like Cape Town. I'll try and qualify this another time. I am staying in the Mission District, which is the latino quarter (I've eaten tacos for lunch and a burrito for dinner) in a shared house with two other guys. The house is full of kitch art and lights because Rob, one of the two, is an artist.

Tomorrow is my first day at Google.



The flight over here was a beautiful, shifting kaleidescope of landscapes from the air: desert with green crop circles in Utah, farmlands in California's Central Valley, the snowy Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada. The five hour flight was a reminder how vast this country is.

Torture by Washing Machine

This weekend all those winter evenings practicing in a kayak in a pool paid off ... after a fashion. I went with the Columbia kayak group to the Deerfield River in western Massachusetts for weekend of white water kayaking. There were three other students (two beginners like me, and one intermediate), and four instructors: Andy, Jane, Adelaine and Luke, the 'kayaking kiwi'. Although New York is in full blossom, upstate its cool and wintry still, with the odd patch of ice, and the water wasn't too warm. It took me about 5 minutes to discover this: my very first attempt to 'eddy in' (move from the main current to the side of the river) had me flipped and flailing, as the reality of the difference between a swimming pool and an engorged, fast-flowing river hit me like a very large amount of very cold water in the face. Repeatedly.

The first day we practiced the basics: eddying in, peeling out (leaving the sides of the river for the central part) and ferrying (crossing perpendicular to the current). We got out the river at around 5pm - it never felt so good to be dry. The night was spent in an old wooden hotel in the small village of Claremont. Almost all of the buildings you see in the countryside here are in fact made of wood, and it gives it an odd feeling of impermanent settlements. I really enjoyed the company of the group: mixed ages, mostly American but all of them very interesting people.



Sunday was also spent on the river, culminating on the Zoar rapids which is a class III (read: huge roaring walls of water smashing against lots of jet black rocks). The rapid was kind to me and I made it through still facing forward and the right way up ...

Toyi-Toying in New York

Friday I helped a group of other South Africans organize the South African Cultural Hour at IHouse. Thee have been a number of these (French, America, Greek-Iranian) and ours was the last. And the most chaotic. The group broke into infighting at the least slight. Responsibilities shifted, food didn't come, music was there and then wasn't. And despite everything, it was a big success. There were lots of South Africans in the audience and at some stage they were all singing Shosholoza on the stage, and then later fiercely toyi-toying.

Severe Weather Alert

Today was monsoon day in New York. I've never lived in a place where it rains as hard as it does here - even in the tropics it's not like this. Today a 10 minute walk to campus under an umbrella had me stomping through streams of water and soaked on arrival. Makes you sorry for the rats...

Queens-Brooklyn Graffiti Biketour

I set out on a bike tour today with a group of friends from IHouse on a long-discussed and much-procrastinated bike tour to go to Flushing, way out beyond La Guardia airport in Queens, and home to a sprawling pan-asian town (lots of Chinese and Korean shops, and a couple of Japanese ones too). The route is supposed to be really interesting because it goes through all kinds of ethnic neighborhoods.

But it didn't turn out as planned. Abel, Alissa, James, Linde and I cycled across Harlem and Randalls Island in the East River which is made up of only sports fields and bridges. On the lies Astoria, a greek-mediteranean neighbourhood where we stopped for a welcome cup of espresso (it was a bitterly cold day) in an italian cafe with old men hanging around and a huge Forzza Azzurri banner on the wall. And it was after that our trip got derailed because we decided to do a short detour through Long Island City, and it was then that the Flushing Tour became the Graffiti Tour.

Long Island City is part of Queens just across the river from Manhattan. The number 7 train there goes under the East River emerges into an area full of graffiti with some amazing views of the Queensborough Bridge and Manhattan skyline beyond. I'd seen this from the train, and I'd always wanted to go there ... so we tried to find it by following the spray paint. The signatures and the colour and the overhead metro line got us to 5 Pointz, a building covered with graffiti on all sides.

By that stage it was too late to go to Flushing ... and we wanted to see more. So instead we headed south into Brooklyn, through the polish neighbourhood of Greenpoint (which I wrote about in another blog) and on into Williamsburg. Most of the waterfront there is fenced off, but Abel, who had been there before, knew of a place where the chain links were hanging loose, so we got in to one of the grandest views of Manhattan I know.



Like Queens to the north, Williamsburg it also covered in Graffiti ... we kept on seeing more and more. This is one of my favourite pictures from the trip:





Cycling back over the Williamsburg Bridge was an experience in itself: leaving Brooklyn, Oi Vey (and that's official). Back on Manhattan Island we cycled back up the east side which was all clean of graffiti ... and from there Brooklyn and Queens looked a lot less attractive!

Wanaque Reservoir

New Jersey, said the girl from New Jersey at a dinner party, is the armpit of America. There is nothing there but suburbs and roads for people to get through it or out of it.

I've crossed through New Jersey a couple of times now, and its almost true. Its an armpit. But she forgot some things: suburbs, road and strip malls. Gigantic ones that go on forever. Ikea follows Starbucks follows Macey's follows Mr Sleepy follows Micky D's follows Comfort Inn follows Starbacks follows Barnes and Noble and on and on and on, each with acres of parking.

But today Jersey revealed that every lymph gland has a pretty side ... or that before it became the Garden State they use to blurb up their number plates it must have been really lovely. I went hiking in the Wanaque Reservoir, in northern Jersey, with the hiking club at Columbia. 5 hours spent hiking around the reservoir, brief visit to a cave full of tiny, sleeping bats, past a waterfall and up through the 'valley of rocks' full of moraine from the ice age where bears scratch the bark of trees (though we only saw the bark, not the bears).




Its good that you can get out of New York relatively quickly - although even from that distance, you can still see the silhouette of Manhattan skyscrapers on the horizon.

Spring Break in Chicago

After UIUC I spent the weekend in Chicago with Pierre and his wife Nicki. Nicki lives in Chicago's Near North in the 9th floor of a 30-something floor building. These appartment blocks are shooting up all over this part of Chicago as people rediscover the joy of living downtown.

It happened to be St Patrick's that weekend, which is celebrated in a big way in many parts of the US. We didn't see the parade, but thousand of people in cheap green beads were milling everywhere. The long-suffering Chicago river, previously used to get rid of masses of offal and sewerage and later having its course reversed (so the offal and sewerage would go elsewhere) gets spiffed up by having huge amounts of green dye dumped into it for the occasion. Its all about green awareness.





Chicago has some awesome architecture, both from the last century (lots of very fine art deco) and this new one - the pavillion of the Millenium Park by Frank Gehry is stunning. I have more photos of Chicago up on Flickr.









On Saturday evening we met up with Mark McNally (also a friend from Wits and now living in Chicago) and went for an excellent meal at a restaurant called the Green Zebra before diving back into some of the St Patrick's late-late revelries.

Campus Envy

Universities in the US are very competitive. The university equivalent of the Fortune 500 is the US News list of America's Best Colleges which ranks universities here by faculty. Rankings have all kinds of affect on research funding and getting the best faculty and students. Last time I looked Columbia - which is more famous for Law, Business or Journalism - had some kind of middling to average rank for computer science. But the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne (try saying that after a night of solid malt whiskey drinking) is way up there among the top 3 computer science campuses in the country. As well as having stellar faculty and doing really important research, its also famous for being the home of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the birthplace of the supercomputer HAL in the film 2001, the one that went crazy and tried to kill everyone.

I went there to pay a long-overdue visit to my friend Pierre who is completing a PhD in computer architecture. We were undergraduates together at Wits in Johannesburg. The computer science department at UIUC is vast and exudes well-fundedness and the campus is beautiful. The last time I saw a gym like the student one was a luxury spa in Hamburg. I spent a really good time with Pierre and some of his research group ... we went out on the town (at UIUC you get a pick of two towns to go out on - we were in Champaign) and took advantage of bars offering a huge choice of beer, talking until way into the night about pretty much everything but computers. Cheers to studentville!

My First Eskimo Roll

Better than an eskimo nose kiss (and with a lot more chlorine) - tonight I managed my first eskimo roll in a white water kayak in the pool at Columbia. It wasn't pretty but I got from hanging disorientated underwater to right-side-up!

Things I'm Getting Used To (but maybe shouldn't)

I have been in the US for 6 months already, and some of the initial culture shock that I had is beginning to wear off. Its a good thing, but I also feel how things which used to seem so extraordinary are becoming everyday. So I thought I'd list some of them here, as a reminder to myself as much as to anyone reading this. Here are some of them - there are a lot more.

• pharmacy chains, lots of them, open 24 hours
• disposable cups, plates and trays - use once and throw away, even in expensive cafes
• coffee to go - everyone walks around slurping from these paper mugs before tossing them
  
• or water to go - those that aren't drinking coffee are sipping water from bottles
• ... and/or chewing gum (cliche but true)
• ... and/or talking on a cell phone
  
• chain me up: there is a Starbucks on every second block in Manhattan (see above)
  
• baggy clothes and jeans worn half way down your hips
• armed policemen (also in baggy clothes, but less stylish)
  
• prudishness
  
• being id'd at every bar I go into
• ... to drink bad beer at high prices
• media advertising (i.e. adverts for tv and film - everywhere - including ...)
  
• yellow taxi cabs (media advertising on the roof)
• craziest mix of people in your average subway car (including me)
• the US flag everywhere: the average subway car, churches and gyms are just the start
• spanish as a second language, by the banks, by the metro, even by the army to recruit (yo soy el army!)
• bagels, especially as sold from little silver caravans on the side of the road for a dollar with some cream cheese
  

I'm becoming Americanized, I think, or at the very least gradually New Yorkified ... but there's a way to go yet.

Google!

Today I was phoned by Google and told I had an internship there over summer. I will be working as a test engineer at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.




Wuhu!

I'm unabashedly happy... I went out with as many people as I could find to celebrate.

Snowboarding!

Last week Wednesday outside the library, horizontal bullets of ice whipped passed the window. This weather makes you studious, and also very happy if you happen to be going snowboarding, which is what I did with a group of other international students on Friday at Hunter Mountain in the Catskills. The conditions were fabulous and it was great to be back on a board again.

The Superbowl Experience

Sunday was the the Superbowl here. Its the day on which Americans eat (and presumably watch more television) than on any other day apart from Thanksgiving.

Like Christmas or an election, the build-up to it is unavoidable.

Today there was an article in the New York Times analyzing the half-time adverts. Apparently there were subliminal references to violence and Iraq. I know nothing about American football, but I suspect the game might contain subliminal references to violence anyway.

So how was the Superbowl itself? I have absolutely no idea, and man, its bliss!