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