Archive for November, 2008

On our first day at Haas, we were assigned to our study groups. Each study group has 5 students, pre-assigned by the school, which try to achieve a mix of locations, backgrounds and interests within each group. I am (of course) part of the best group ever together with Gary, Bill, Jenny and Kazu.

Dinner
Last week, Kazu got summer internship offers from big investment banks and he and his wife, Mayu, invited our group along with other friends who helped him with his applications (Fiona, Anaal, Jesse and Anup) to a Japanese dinner at their house in the UC Village.

The food was awesome! It felt like an exclusive Japanese restaurant with top-quality ingredients, lovely looking dishes and high quality Sake which was bought on a tour to the local Saki factory that very same day. The table was full of goodies and people were not sure where to start although it didn’t take long for everyone to develop a silly smile of happiness. It was that good.

Entertainment
After dinner, Kazu and Mayu played on the Accordion (Kazu) and the Piano (Both). It was the first time I actually attended a party where there was formal musical entertainment, and it was such a great idea. Specially since both Kazu and Mayu are really top-class (and I mean, really…they can play!).

Naturally, all of us had to try the accordion too, which turned out to be
1. heavy and 2. pretty easy to learn.

There’s no better sign that things start getting crazy than the fact I’m writing today about an event that happened two weeks ago (instead of writing about the amazing >play conference that just ended, but a dedicated post will arrive soon and that’s a promise!). Anyhow, I proudly present our first Halloween report!

Preparations

As I may have stated in some of my previous posts, people here do things seriously, and this definitely applies also to holidays. For weeks before the actual date our street started to be painted with orange, black and white - orange for the pumpkins, black for the witches and white for the ghosts, skeletons and fake spider webs (as if the area is missing real monster spiders!).

We also wanted to prepare, so we bought tiny light bulbs for our windows (which the cats enjoy very much!) and tons of candy for the “trick or treat” parade. We were strictly following the rule which states that only store-wrapped candies are allowed as there are lots of horror stories about poisoned candies. We couldn’t really tell what’s true and what are urban legends, however, parents here take this really seriously.

Trick or Treat!

As it got darker, some of the decorated houses turned out to be multimedia enables, with sound, lights and smoke effects. Around 7pm (you don’t write 19:00 in America - just one more of those things) the kids started to come. It was really fun except for the fact that Noozie didn’t appreciate their costumes as much as we did and decided to happily bark on each and every visitor. Being the big dog she is, we had to split roles with one of us serving the candies and the other holding Noozie while desparately trying to take pictures.

As you should expect by now (if you’ve read this blog in the past), Haas students have organized a huge costumes party in San Francisco to celebrate Halloween. Unfortunately, we couldn’t attend it this year, but we did manage to conclude an exciting evening watching a movie with our amazing friends from the village.