Hi,

Second resurrection of this blog. I'm sure this one will stick, right?

Just got back from a whirlwind six-day holiday in Auckland. Congratulations to Mikael and Ada! It was a lovely wedding, you guys are great together. And happy birthday to my Mum; 60 years young!

I'm not feeling particularly prose-y, so I'll just list a few highlights in bullet point form.

• Stag party. Unexpected photos on my camera the next day. Karaoke stars were forged.
• Fish and chips.
• 3rd at pub quiz!
• Rain! I didn't realise that I miss the rain!
• Pie.
• Beach.

I'm back in ridiculously sunny California now, excited about getting back into work.

Will try to do something exciting in the next couple of weeks so I've got something to write about. Also will try to take photos - I was pretty bad over the last week.

Adam

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope your 2015 is great.

Here are 3 photos from the last week.

New Year's fireworks above the San Francisco ferry building. 

View from the Golden Gate Bridge.

I go past this place on the train from Palo Alto to San Francisco. I don't know what it is.

Christmas etc

Hi,

Merry Christmas everyone! Was just going through my photos from the last few weeks and was inspired to update this blog thing.

So, I've been here for 6 weeks, and everything is good. Well not everything is good (like I've got a hole in the sole of one of my shoes and my left sock gets wet when it rains), but on average, everything is fine.

In my last post, I was just moving into my new flat. It's good - it reminds of Dunedin, which is why it's cheap and in an excellent location. It's closer to the lab than some people who live on campus (Stanford is a big campus). And it's very close to downtown Palo Alto. When I say it's cheap, it's cheap by Palo Alto standards - which is officially the most expensive city in this country! It's Google and Facebook's fault. I'm paying about 10 times what I was paying in Potsdam, but here it is on a beautiful "winter's" day:

And here's a photo of the second most expensive city in the US to rent in. It was from the top of a hill in Berkeley which me and my flatmate decided, for some reason to bike up. It nearly killed us but we got hazy views of San Francisco.

San Francisco (contrast etc cranked all the way up so you can see it through the haze)

We also went on a bike ride up a hill closer to Palo Alto which looked more like this:

And one last photo, the obligatory Christmas dinner photo which was with my neighbours from Auckland. We had a worst present competition (which resulted in lots of hats) and a cook off in pairs. Here we are eating the main which was meant to be turkey burgers, but the entree team decided to make turkey sliders (with tomato soup) so we had to think on our feet - it turned into a salad with sliced turkey breast and turkey meatballs. Dessert was triple chocolate brownie (with sour cream...) which we all agreed was probably enough chocolate for the brownie.

It was great Skyping with some of you on Christmas day, sorry the connection was so dodgy. We should try again some day!

Adam

USA! USA! USA!

Hi all,

I'm going to resurrect this blog to, as the title says, try to keep in touch with you. This is a two-way street, though, so please comment, or send me an email or telegram if you feel like it. Or send me a link to your blog.

I set off from Auckland on Wednesday evening, and arrived on Wednesday morning after a surprisingly restful flight, as I'd lucked two spare seats beside me, and I could fold all 3 seats out into a skycouch. It was pretty handy as a freebie, but I'm not sure if I'll cough up the extra $1800 you need to book one.

From the airport in San Francisco to Palo Alto, I'd decided to catch a shuttle because it was only $50 and promised door to door service in about an hour. Unfortunately, for me and my shuttle-mates, it was our driver's first day on the job, and did have the hang of the GPS yet. The waypoint optimisation was very clearly not working, and it also seemed to be set on "avoid highways unless they're taking you in the wrong direction". And our driver followed all its instructions (poorly) for the 2.5 h it took to drop me off (last).

Anyway, Wylie and Janet had left a key out for me and I followed their treasure hunt-like clues to the Garage Mahal. Wylie and Janet have been very welcoming, and have been great at giving me the lay of the land and loaning me bikes etc. I could happily stay here for longer, but I don't want to overstay my welcome.

Luckily, I've already found a flat and I'm moving in tomorrow. It's real close to uni, the train station and downtown Palo Alto, and the house is not so flash, so it's pretty affordable by Palo Alto standards. It's inhabited by 4 other guys, doing tech and medicine kind of stuff.

I'm moving in tomorrow, so need to pack my bags tonight so Janet can give me a lift with all my crud tomorrow morning.

Thanks for reading!

Adam

Hello

I should have known not to mention how warm the weather was in my last update... Minutes after my last post, two white kittens arrived in our flat, Friedrich and Wilhelm, and with them came the winter. For the last 3 weeks or so we haven't got above 0C. The temperature's been consistently below -10C, even below -20C. It hasn't snowed much, but when it did, it was really cold, so the snowflakes were like real snowflakes from a cartoon. Here's one I tried to take a photo of on my sleeve.

That day the kittens were allowed outside for the first time. Wilhelm (probably, we still can't really tell them apart) got stuck up a tree. I climbed halfway up the tree, Wilhelm climbed onto my head, then I climbed down to terra firma. I hope he appreciated it, and that he's not the one that's peeing on my bed when I leave my door open.

Anyway, last week the largest annual public film festival in the world started in Berlin. I'm trying to see as many films as practical. So far I've seen two amazing films. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is an American film about 9.11 and a boy trying to handle the death of his father. Film critics seem to think it's a cheap ploy to get awards, but I found it a really absorbing, honest, and uplifting film. I also managed to get tickets to one of the funniest movies I've ever watched - it was called Iron Sky and it's about nazis living on the moon. It was really clever, and despite the subject matter, there was not a single awkward moment for the audience. In Q&As afterwards, the producer mentioned that he did find it hard to get funding from Germany!

Instead of taking the train back to Potsdam on Sunday, we walked back over the frozen river. It was very cool, a real experience. It was not so cool that I didn't zip up my pocket and lost the tickets I had to 2 more movies this week. Doh!

My tickets are out there somewhere...

Anyway, hope you're all doing well. I love to hear what you're up to!

Adam