Phil’s blog

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About a month ago I went back to VA to visit for two awesome weeks. During my stay I went out to eat at least 17 times, seriously, which inspired me to start reviewing restaurants on Yelp. Here’s my Yelp profile which includes all my reviews. The highlight of the trip was renting a cottage with Justine outside of Charlottesville for a few days. We went back to some of our favorite places including The Korean House, Tea Bazaar, Splendora, the Creperie, Cafe Europa, and various stores on the downtown mall. A few of our friends are still in school (mostly in the wushu and lion dance clubs), so we got to hang out with them and join them for a wushu team practice, which brought back all kinds of great memories. The weather was perfect so we also took a hike on part of the AT and watched the sun set from one of the overlooks. Other highlights of the trip included hanging out with the family; preparing a feast of pumpkin bisque, steak salad, and Thai curry; watching Transformers (finally!); baking some incredible chocolate chip cookies; celebrating Syl’s 22nd birthday; and watching the season premiere of The Office. Two weeks felt way too short, but in another two months I’ll be home again for Christmas

Almost forgot to mention that on the flight back to Beijing, the video screen in my section didn’t work so I got 50k frequent flyer miles! United rocks.

Yikes. It has been almost a month since I posted, so to the three of you reading this I apologize. Quick status update: I’m happy, I’m healthy, I’m working a lot, work is going well, we eat out a lot but it’s cheap and usually good, I cook about twice a week, I go to the gym about twice a week, I spend most of my free time on Skype chatting with Justine (having a laptop with built-in camera rocks), and I haven’t been practicing wushu or Mandarin but want to start soon.

Despite not knowing the language I never feel alone because I have some great friends and coworkers. I’m sharing an apartment with my friend and cofounder Keen, who I’ve known since undergrad at UVA. Like me, he left his job at a large tech company to join our friend Clement on this startup. Also like me, he has an angry girlfriend in the states whom he chats with through Skype every day. And both her parents and Justine’s parents are from Hong Kong - we’re like the same person. Back at UVA we had an awesome time working on a project for our CS 340 class in which we wrote software to control a trashcan-like robot. Here’s an old photo of our team (guess who has bleached hair).

Clement and I were in the same class at UVA. He was always coming up with these business ideas and I had fun working with him on a couple of them. He’s one of the most determined and hard working people I know, and I have no doubt that he’ll succeed eventually at everything he does. That’s him on the right next to Keen in a taxi, doing some kind of gangster salute.

XinXin is Clement’s girlfriend. She’s really nice and is always driving us around and arranging nice dinners and shows for us. She’s also tall - almost as tall as Clement - and always wears heels so she’s even taller. She works and Microsoft and is doing a dual MBA program (yes that means two MBA’s) on the side, so she’s always carrying textbooks around to study whenever she gets a chance.

Wei, our art director, comes to work with us every weekday (he’s in the center). When we first met him he spoke barely any English but he studies on his own and has been improving quickly. He’s a really fun, happy guy and his work is fantastic. Prash works part time for us from Shanghai and visits Beijing for a weekend every month (he’s on the right). He’s super laid back and casual. Before we went to an investor meeting he asked Clement if he should wear his nice shirt. Clement asked if he had a collared shirt and he was like no, but he has a nice t-shirt that doesn’t have naked women or skulls on it. Johnson also works part time and comes in every Saturday, but I don’t have a picture of him yet. He’s really into his work, which is 3D engines.

Update - Justine after reading this: “‘angry probably doesn’t even begin to cut it”