Good Things Happen in CA

Earlier this month I took a much-needed 10-day timeout from life in Massachusetts and headed back to the homeland. California was great. Despite the fact that the parents left town soon after I got home (I've never been a very good planner...) I got to see lots of other family, including the sis, along with more friends than I'd expected.

In addition to all the people I saw, there were also two big trips while I was at home. First there was Ashley's wedding. It was the first wedding of one of my peers, which made it a little amazing, but it was also at the Ritz in Half Moon Bay, and everything about it was awesome; the ceremony, the party, the food, the people. We even split a room for the night. (We stayed at the freakin' Ritz!) Tons of fun and way too cool to write it all down, so I'll give you this...


The second trip I made while I was out west was an overnight trip up to Jeff's cabin in Tahoe for a triathlon at Donner Lake. I competed as part of a relay, with my friend Jay (above in the pink) leading off for the swim, Jeff taking over for a tough bike ride up a big old hill, and me finishing off with a run around the lake. It was a great time and an awesome team effort from everyone helped our relay beat out about 40 other teams for the win. Also, there are some pics of the race here, but it doesn't really include the whole team...

Anyways, great race, great wedding, great trip.

Party Time

All modesty out the door for a moment. I think my housemates and I threw a pretty good party last weekend. It certainly surpassed our expectations, and the comments we received were all positive. And a note to anyone who attempts to emulate our success: butcher paper on the walls and lots of Sharpies makes for a good time.

Furthermore, the enthusiasm that everyone in the apartment put into the planning -- from the website, to printing up pictures of global warming and nukes, to the trip to Home Depot for "bird flu" masks -- was impressive. It brings to mind a quote from Hannibal Smith of The A Team, who said, "I love it when a plan comes together."

Ecuador III

The final part of our trip was spent in a small mountain town called Vilcabamba. Back in 1973, National Geographic published an article about many locals who lived well past 100. Since then a handful of hippies have set up hotels/hostels/resorts there. We stayed at Madre Tierra Hotel and Spa, and thanks to our connections, we were treated like royalty. Mike Don and Becca worked at the hotel back in February as consultants/travel writers and helped with rewriting menus, brochures, and even a bilingual literary magazine featuring work from local artists. We hiked during the day and were treated to meals that were always top-notch (and accompanied by fresh bread, fresh tea, and fresh hummus... I mentioned the hippies, right?)

Here's the traveling party on one of our last nights at Madre Tierra. Yes, those are flowers in my hair.

Ecuador II

By tourist standards, we didn't see anything amazing in Cuenca. But that's not to say that the city was dull. Cuenca was a very charming city. I truly enjoyed it and really liked the way it felt small but developed and quaint but not too poor all at once. We spent time every day walking around the city, seeing it's many old churches and cathedrals, and sitting in its parks and squares. We saw the soccer stadium with double barbed wire fences to keep the fans separated.

We also took a bus to Cajas National Park. There we hiked through the mountains, went wading in a lake, and bushwhacked our way down mountainsides. And as we did nearly everywhere we went, we saw donkeys. They actually interrupted our picnic lunch. The park was at 13,000 ft (4166m, according to the sign,) so everyone had horrible headaches from the altitude.

On the way home we tried to stop at a little village famous for las truchas (trout) but the restaurants were all closed. So we hitchhiked home in the back of a pickup truck.

Ecuador I

I made it back from Ecuador in one piece. It was an awesome trip. However, my to-do list was only partly successful; I forgot to watch the toilet flush; I did eat cuy; I really didn't speak much Spanish.

But of course this trip had much more to it. We spent the first few days in Cuenca, which is a moderately-sized, middle class city at 8000 feet in southern Ecuador. We had lots of great, cheap food.

This included good bread shops, gelato, seafood, produce, and of course cuy. At the market we bought all sorts of really good produce. We also bought 15 eggs for a dollar and had to find change because the egg man couldn't break a five dollar bill. Ecuador uses the US dollar and all of our coins. I know there were news stories a couple years ago about those Sacajawea gold dollars being a waste. But they're making good use of them in Ecuador.

vaya con dios

Tomorrow I'm off to Ecuador. I don't know exactly what's on the agenda for the trip, but I'm hoping to accomplish the following as soon as I get there:

1) Flush a toilet. Southern hemisphere. Which way's it gonna go??
2) Eat cuy. I hear it's the thing to have if you're going to Cuenca.
3) Learn Spanish. I've always wanted to learn. I'm hoping a week in "Southie" will be enough.

Box of staples

I passed a milestone at work today. I finished a box of staples. I had been waiting for this time to come. And to be honest I never thought it would be possible to go through 5000 staples. (Sophomore year Mike Don took a box of staples from the English department, and I don't think we used more than 30 staples between the two of us. He still had a very full box of staples when we graduated.)

But in the work I do every day at The 'Tas, as it's known in my apartment, I use a lot of staples. Actually I use one staple every time I pay a bill (it's kind of the cherry on top of the sundae...)

Now, I'm not celebrating this event, per se. That would suggest that I use accomplishments such as this in my work to measure my worth as an individual. Or even that I pay attention to such inane facts as how many staples I've used. (Who would do that.) This is somewhere between an achievement and a mile marker on my road to... um... somewhere that I'm going. It is what it is. And it's a lot of bills.

Tufts Alumni 0; Tufts Hillel 1

This week I got mail from Tufts Hillel. I think I'm making too big a deal of it, but the fact that the mail reached me absolutely blows my mind.

The Tufts Alumni Network has been trying to reach me, and while I'm interested in staying in touch with them, I prefer to hear about them through emails rather than mail. And if I do want to hear from them more, I'll let them know.

But the fact that Hillel has found me... I honestly don't know what to say. I can't imagine how they did it. Score one for them.

Day of Glorious Food

Saturday started off like any other Saturday -- getting woken up too early by the busy traffic on Brookline Street. But this Saturday was unique thanks to two very awesome things: breakfast and dinner.

Breakfast came from the authoratitive cookbook "The All New Joy of Cooking." The goal was to cook pancakes, because, as we all know, they are the best food ever. (Not an opinion... verified fact.) Rather than traditional pancakes, we went with "Silver Dollar Hots," which are described simply as "super light and fluffy... delicate treats." Unfortunately, I think we aimed too high. Long story short, something got messed up. But anything can be salvaged with a bit of chocolate. First we added some chocolate chips. That was good, and we decided to up the ante by adding Ghirardelli hot cocoa powder to the batter. This was also good, but we needed more. So we piled a bunch of the Silver Dollar Hots onto a bowl of Ultra Chocolate ice cream by Double Rainbow. It was very good. This reinforces my earlier argument that chocolate fixes anything.

Dinner was the second awesome of the day. Along with four of my housemates, I had my first trip to Mr. and Mrs. Bartley's Burger Cottage. I think Bartley's is Harvard's answer to that one local place that every Ivy League school has that's kind of a tradition and everyone goes there and doesn't mind the wait. This place had awesome burgers, good shakes (excuse me... frappes), and good fries. There was a lot of anticipation when I finally headed into the place for dinner after waiting outside for 20 minutes, and there was definitely the potential for the food to fall short of the expectations, but I was very pleased with the meal.

Awesome.

In praise of the To Do List.

This week marked the end of an era here at 35 Brookline. After a brilliant start and a slow, but discernable decline, the To Do List is no more.

Some background to explain the To Do List:
-Each Monday night, members of the apartment would gather around the white board in the hallway and set out goals for all five members of the house.
-These goals included simple tasks (Brian gets his suit tailored) and more lofty accomplishments (Brian doesn't eat at Anna's Burritoria for an entire week... he didn't make it to Tuesday on that one.)
-At the end of the week, awards are give out for Best Week Ever! and of course Worst Week Ever!

You can check it out here.

It all started off as a revolution for 35 Brookline. But as the weeks passed there was less and less enthusiasm for the whole ordeal. And finally it was put to rest. But I'd just like to say that I thought it was absolutely awesome while it lasted. I feel that unique happenings/traditions such as this one make for a memorable year.

I lie to Canadians

I had the chance to go skiing at Jay Peak this weekend. It was a great trip for a number of reasons. First of all, there was a ton of new snow. Great conditions. Also, this was my first time skiing in the East. I see some solid reasons why it doesn't stack up with skiing in the West, and at least now I can pontificate on the inferiority of the East Coast with some authority. But I'm not here to talk about that.

The final reason I was very satisfied with this trip was because of all the Canadians I met. I won't deny that they were something of a novelty to me. And I don't mean to demean their country at all; I think they're very neat. I just haven't met that many and I was pretty excited that there were so many at the resort (Jay Peak is located in northern Vermont, just a few miles [kilometres, mon ami] from the border.) Seriously though, it was pretty neat to be surrounded by so many French-speaking skiers and snowboarders.

And this leads me to another fun part of the weekend, lying to Canadians. Not just to Canadians, lying to everyone I met. Since there were considerable crowds, my skiing partners (friends from work) all decided to wait in the "singles" lift lines rather than ride up the mountains as groups of three or four. This meant that every time I rode the lift up the mountain I was riding with a group of skiers I'd never met before. And each time our small talk revealed that I was working in finance in Boston. By noon on Saturday I was bored of this lifestyle. So then I became a masters student studying human physiology. Then I became a consultant based out of San Francisco. Then I worked for a pharmaceutical company, then I was working in education, then at a bike shop. I considered "singer/songwriter" but got scared someone might ask me to sing.

Beating Ticketmaster

A columnist on ESPN's Page 2 wisely proclaimed that "rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for Ticketmaster." I don't think that has much to do with the rest of what I've got to say. But as long as we're on the subject, my interpretation of this statement is that both entities suck a lot. I'll concede that both entities are pretty dominant in their fields. But let's leave the Yankees out of this for the moment. It just dumped like eight feet of snow on the Bronx, and no one's thinking about baseball right now.

So while the Sox (and everyone else) think about beating the Yankees, I've been doing my best to beat Ticketmaster. And in the past week I've seen two concerts and managed to avoid paying Ticketmaster any money.

The first concert I saw was a group called Sigur Ros. They're from Iceland and they play music that I honestly don't know how to describe. But I loved the show. It was probably one of the best shows I've ever seen and I got 10th row tickets from someone scalping them for $20 -- half price.

The second show I saw was by a guy named Matisyahu. His music is much easier to describe; it's reggae. He sings about redemption and peace and all that reggae stuff. He's also a Hasidic Jew from New York. He performed with the traditional black brimmed hat and double-breasted suit and fringed shirt. So anyways, Sunday night was his Tu B'Shvat concert. (Tu B'Shvat is the Tree New Year, for all you goyim out there. If you don't know what goyim are, then you probably are one.) It was also pretty awesome. I avoided paying Ticketmaster on this one because the tickets were a birthday gift. Thanks Dan.