Phil’s blog

A bit of background: I moved into my new apartment last weekend (with help from my friend Avichal - you rock). It’s in Mountain View near the intersection of 237 and El Camino Real. Pretty nice place: two bedrooms, one bath, decent kitchen, outside laundry room, $1100 covers rent and utils. I’m living alone currently but Avichal may move into the other bedroom in a month or so, so I’ll hold out because I’d rather not live with a random craigslist user.
Anyway, I thought I’d rip off my friend Marcus’ idea and give you a video tour of the apartment. This afternoon I saw a cat outside and decided to give her a tour as well. More background: she was here when I came to check the place out a week or so before moving in, and she really wanted to come inside. So why not let her in and see what she does while doing the video tour? Comedy ensues - skip to 7:20 to see my folly. In case anyone is concerned, I came out fine; just a few thorns in my foot. Enjoy!

Last night I worked out for the first time in almost a month. It was pretty light; a few minutes warming up on an elliptical, followed by a half hour of lifting. I had dinner afterwards, got really tired, and napped for almost an hour! From such a light workout, that’s pretty sad. I haven’t been in such bad shape since.. I can’t even remember! Before starting work I did wushu pretty consistently for 4 years (minus a few months due to injuries). Before that I did tae kwon do with the UVA club and also worked out a couple times a week. Before that I was pretty good about running and lifting during my senior year in highschool. I was pretty lazy my junior year, but I had youth on my side. Before that I had PE class to keep active, and before highschool I took 7 years of tang soo do. So I may well be in the worst shape of my entire life.

I had been planning to take up qigong and yoga, but neither would give me much cardio, which is something I have a hard time motivating myself to do. Wushu gives you cardio, strength (mostly legs), tone, flexibilty, and balance. It’s just really hard on the joints, which is partially why I wasn’t in a hurry to pick it back up. After last night though, I realized how badly I needed it.

So today I went to O-Mei Kung Fu Academy about 15 min away in Milpitas. I paid $15 for a drop-in 1-on-1 lesson. The first instructor, Yan Fei (I think was his name), had trained for 9 years at the Shaolin temple. He took me through stretching and line drills - some familiar and some I had never seen. I was breathing hard the whole time, but he was patient and let me take a couple of breaks. After line drills, Li Xue, a former member of the Tianjing team, took over. He showed me a 5-step basic form, seemed satisfied, and asked me if I knew any weapons. I grabbed my straightsword and he asked me to show him something, so I did part of new compulsory (the only SS form I know). He said it looked pretty good (!), but that I had no detail. For the rest of our session, he took me through the first two sections of the form, a few moves at a time, and giving tons of feedback along the way. By the end he said it looked much better I stayed a bit longer to practice on my own, then talked to Sifu Chen (the main guy) about which classes I should attend. If this works out with my schedule, and if I don’t get too discouraged from being out of shape, this may be my wushu rebirth!

Justine visited for two glorious weeks and we did a bunch of stuff. I was thinking of writing individual entries for various things but I don’t think people would bother looking back a few entries to where I left off (but really I’m just too lazy to write that much). So here it is, condensed to a single post.

Delicious food
We went out to eat almost every day. Here are the restaurants (that I can remember) in no particular order:

• Momoya Sushi (pictured left): As I said in a previous entry, fantastic. Probably the best sushi in Mountain View. Found out they supply the sushi at Cafe Pacifica at the Googleplex.
• Pho Hoa (pictured right): Pronounced fuh huh-ah. I’ve probably eaten there 10+ times since moving out here. Cheap, fast, delicious, close, reasonably healthy - what more could you ask? We actually tried a non-pho entre one night: some kind of grilled chicken plate with a sweet/vinegary sauce - delightful.
• Betelnut: Asian fusion restaurant in SF. We got counter seats and watched the prep cooks work the woks. Had some delicious Korean noodle soup and firecracker chicken.
• Amarin: Thai in downtown MV. Great beef salad, so-so pad thai.
• Maru-ichi: Best Japanese noodles in MV. My favorites: bukkake udon (cold), nabeyaki udon, maruichi ramen w/shoyu broth.
• Pasta Pomodoro: Cheap, passable, chain pasta store. Nothing special.
• Totoro: Good, cheap Korean food in downtown MV.
• Sue’s Indian Cuisine: Pretty good, great portions. Downtown MV.
• Dakao: Pretty good banh mi (Vietnamese baguette sandwiches) in San Jose.
• La Rioja: Latin American/Carribean fusion. They try to pass themselves off as a legit restaurant, but it’s more like a club that happens to serve food. I ordered a rare ribeye and it came back anything but, so I politely sent it back and received a thicker steak that was still cold on the inside. I ate a few bites to be polite, then boxed it.
• Seoul Garden: Great Korean food in SF Japantown, very nice staff too.
• Crepe place on Pier 39: Too much cheese. Will never eat another non-dessert crepe as long as I live.

Japantown Festival
Like Chinatown, but cleaner! Seriously though, Japantown was awesome, and there was some kind of annual festival going on. There was singing, dancing, playing of games, taiko drumming, and a virgorous mochi ritual pictured left. We had a delicious lunch form Seoul Garden, a parfait from a nicely decorated tea house (pictured right), and a sno-cone. It seem food is always a major part of our activities. Anyway, good times were had. More photos here.

Exploratorium
Probably intended for children, but we saw plenty of adults having a good time. It’s basically a bunch of science lessons in the form of (mostly) hands-on exhibits. Memorable ones included:

• a game where you listen to ambient noise and try to determine the location (laundromat, supermarket, etc)
• an aquarium of mutant goldfish
• a giant display showing the transformation of one scene to another, one small piece at a time, and flickering with each change (I almost wrote flickring, haha), showing that it’s hard to perceive changes when your whole field of view is disrupted
• a heat sensitive video camera (output pictured left)

We walked around SF afterwards (right photo) and dined at Betelnut. More photos here.

Alcatraz
We went on Labor Day, huge crowd. The history was interesting but I appreciated the scenery most. It probably didn’t help that my audio guide device was malfunctioning and the line was too long to go back and exchange it, forcing me to have Justine tell me the interesting parts while she listened to the narration, or to put my ear next to hers to try to listen myself. Weather was beautiful as it has been this whole summer. Parking was crazy expensive. More photos here .

Geocaching
Spent an afternoon geocaching in MV. First went after Middlefield Field. The readings on my Magellan eXplorist 200 GPS kept drifting so we had to cover a wide area. I don’t know whether it was due to conditions or lousy hardware. Justine ended up spotting it in a tree as you can see in the photo. Then we went for Stevenson Surprise near an elementary school. We’re pretty sure we were in the right area, but came away empty handed. I suspect it was buried in some bushes, which we weren’t willing to go too far into. Good times though :] More photos here.

Movies

• Ghostbusters: You know these guys. One of my favorite movies as a kid, and still is. Teeny fell asleep though
• Porco Rosso: About a bounty hunter pilot who happens to be a pig (in a normal human world). Charming!
• Zatoichi: About a blind swordsman who takes on Japanese gangs. Hilarious and fierce.

PS: I posted this from writely!