Surfin’ USA

Thanksgiving, or the art of gaining and losing weight

As I mentioned, I was invited to an American family for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday. We were 15 people, everything from an 15-months old girl to an impressive 101-years old great-grandma. I certainly enjoyed the family atmosphere with all its “noise and commotion”, as one of my hosts put it, and the Thanksgiving food was just great! There was turkey, several vegetables and different kinds of potatoes and everyone ate tons. Later we had pumpkin pie, which is also very delicious. As you might expect, I was so full afterwards, that I didn’t eat anything until Friday afternoon!
To work off some of the pounds I had put on over Thanksgiving, I accompanied Teiko, a postdoc here at UCI that I met last week at the bonfire, on a hike today. She has this great little booklet that lists various hike trails in Orange County and so we drove to Laguna Beach and hiked there for about 2.5 hours. We then proceeded a little further south to Dana Point, where we relaxed by the harbour and had some great bagels. This afternoon I also joined some other friends for Basketball, so hopefully most of my Thanksgiving pounds have been taken care of.
All in all it has been a great weekend so far, but unfortunately I haven’t gotten too much of my work for school done, so with project deadlines coming up next week, that is my rather boring agenda for Sunday…

Progress

This week brought along progress in multiple ways: First of all I got done with the final exam for my AI course, after a weekend of intense studying day and (partly) night. It went quite ok I think, although some of the questions were a little weird in the sense that you didn’t really know what was expected of you. Well, I’ll just have to wait and see, I guess?
Secondly I passed my behind-the-wheel driving test for my California driver’s license this morning, yeah! I had taken the written test some time ago, but then I had to wait for a free appointment for the practical exam. Moreover I had to borrow a car, since my new one is not yet registered (until today, that is) and insured. Luckily my neighbour was so generous as to allow me to use his car — many thanks for that! The test itself wasn’t that tough, since I’ve had several years of driving experience in Europe, which the examiner also acknowledged with just some minor points of criticism.

Coming up tomorrow is Thanksgiving, where I’m invited to the same family that I’ve went hiking with some days ago. Other members of the family will be there and we will have the traditional turkey — I’m quite excited about this truly American experience.

My new ride

It’s done, I’ve eventually bought a car! I ended up with a 1998 Suzuki Esteem (Balemo in Europe) with a 1.6l engine and about 100 horsepowers. Nothing really fancy and powerful, but it should totally suffice for my needs. It has some small dents and scratches and I’ll have to have at least one of the tires replaced, but that is to be expected for a car that is eight years old.
I guess for local things like everyday grocery shopping I will still use my bike, but especially in California a lot of other things are just out of bike-range, so one really has to have a car around here. Anyway, before I can really start using it, I will need to register it properly with the department of motor vehicles and get an insurance certificate. The latter will require a lot of phone calls to different companies and agents in order to get a low yearly insurance fee, so I’ve put that off until after my exam next week.

Busy times

Just a brief update with some pics, as I’m pretty busy studying for the AI exam next week. The first pic was taken last weekend when I went on a hike in Crystal Cove State Park, which is just a couple of minutes from here. I joined the father and grandfather of a family that I have been associated with as part of a program for international students (the family is very nice and has also helped me a lot since I got here). The other pics were taken yesterday night at the beach, where we went for a bonfire. We cooked salmon and had other snacks, among them fire-roasted marshmellows with crackers (which is kind of traditional over here).
On another note I had my first midterm (a pre-exam) last week and it went quite well. There’s still room for improvement in the future, though, but given my time constraints in studying for the exam I can’t complain.

Elections, finally

As some of might be aware, tomorrow is election day over here in the US. Apart from the nation-wide voting on new senators and representatives for the US Senate and congress, respectively, California is somewhat special in that people get to vote on a quite long list of propositions, concerning various things — all the way from taxes on cigarettes to funding for alternative energies. While I think that this is a good thing in principle, I am slightly annoyed by all the banners you see on the streets and the innumerable spots by all sorts of organiziations on TV — and I hardly watch TV. Fortunately, however, tomorrow evening this spook should be over.

Weekend pics (a.k.a. finally went to the beach)

Before I head off to bed (somehow earlier, got lots of work tomorrow) let me just post some pics from the weekend.

On Friday I went with some friends of mine (Kenny from Indiana, Kristina from Sweden, Ramzi and his brother Mazen from Lebanon) to a local bar, the “Newport Beach Brewing Company”, where we had a fun time. We got home quite late, so I slept most of Saturday. I then played Basketball in the afternoon and did some programming in the evening. Today, after cleaning the house, I joined Kenny for a trip to the beach and a nearby sports bar to watch a football game (Kenny’s team won, so he was quite excited). The beach itself was just awesome — warm and sunny in November — and, given that it’s just a bike ride away, I’ll hopefully find time soon to go there again for more then a short walk…

Oh, I recently got myself a bike, so I’ll start of with a picture of that.

Oktoberfest

Last weekend two other Germans and I made a trip tp Huntington Beach to visit the “German Village” where, so we had heard” they were holding an event based on the German “Oktoberfest”. When we arrived we were surprised to find a German shop as well — which was of course already selling christmas candy.
The Oktoberfest itself was nice, they even had German beer! A band was playing (mostly not singing in German, though) and people were dancing the Chicken Dance frequently (known as “Ententanz” in Germany), which is apparently famous around here. All the waitresses were dressed in shorter versions of the German “Dirndl” skirt and quite some guys in “Lederhosen” were present — almost everyone seemed to be American, though. Anyway, we had a couple of great German beers and a good time in general.