Ganesh Swami

Not. Dead. Yet.

A couple of months back, I got a chance to go to Stanford for a conference. I took the opportunity to visit a couple of my friends in the area. It was a blast!

Though I doubt if they’ll continue to remain my friends: I put almost 400 miles (ugh…metric units) on his car in two days! Living in Mountain View, we visited San Francisco twice, Berkeley once, Stanford twice (or thrice?) We went around almost all major tech companies in the valley.

I’ve heard about a lot of tech companies being in the same area, but I didn’t expect them to be so densely concentrated. As my friend says, “you can change your job without really changing where you park your car!” So true.

One of the things I really wanted to do is to have authentic Mexican cuisine (none of that Taco Bell crap.) We went to two places: La Fiesta in Mountain View and another one I can’t recall in San Francisco (it’s by the beach.) My friend remarked that he has had better, but I’ll have to start somewhere. I’ll be in San Diego and Austin (i.e., closer to the Mexican border) later this year, and I guess I can re-fulfill that wish again.

One of the things that really irked me was how often people pull out their car. Here in Vancouver, I always walk a couple of blocks to the corner grocery store or for breakfast or anything for that matter. For breakfast, we pulled out the car, drove on the freeway, and landed at House of Pancakes. For lunch, we pulled out the car, drove on the freeway, and landed at a restaurant. For buying a razor at Safeway, we pulled….you get the picture.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 4:33 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.