Monthly Archive for September, 2002

i am moved in. class starts tomorrow. and i’m definitely not ready for the hardest quarter of my stanford career.

portugal was really fun.

last wednesday we flew out of orlando at 2pm, to miami and then across the atlantic to madrid, spain, on an iberia flight. the flight was nice because we were surprisingly upgraded from coach to business class–a fantastic difference in service and comfort. going against the spin of the earth, we arrived in madrid thursday morning, only to smoosh ourselves on a crowded 1-hour commuter flight to lisbon.

thursday and friday i spent at our hotel, the carlton palace, which was originally a noble family’s residence and recently renovated as a hotel. it was rated 5-star, but i would certainly class it as better quality and service per dollar than any other 5-star hotel you could find. my hours were divided between reading, sleeping by the pool, working out, and eating. and eat we did…for the portuguese, dinner is an event which requires at least two hours to finish, and one which doesn’t generally start until after 9pm. thus, dinner was, most days, the last thing i did before sleeping. a bit of a change from school culture, where i would generally only go to bed after second dinner.

i won’t bother telling about the restaurants we visited for dinner over the seven days, because they defy description. let it suffice to say that not one was disappointing, and the food and wine at each were so exquisite as to make me smile and sigh happily just at the bare thought of remembrance. one particular meal, fresh-caught stone bass cooked with bananas, has entrenched itself as my favorite gastronomic experience of all time. perhaps not as interesting was the fact that i served as our group’s interpreter at a number of meals, because out of the 30 of us, i was the only one that had learned any portuguese at all prior to the trip. i will say that i fared reasonably well, despite the occasional surprise when the dishes came out.

apart from dinners, i only went into town three times (our hotel was very much on the outskirts, so to get to downtown one had to take a taxi, but they were very cheap): once on a tour bus that took our group on a 4-hour tour of the city and some of the most salient monuments, once to visit a castela do sao jorge (the castle of st. jorge) and the shopping district, and once to a roadside market sort of deal. so, all told, i didn’t get around too much….however, i think i did soak in quite a bit of the city’s atmosphere the times i did go out, and it was nice to just stay at the hotel and relax, like a legitimate vacation.

some other highlights of the trip:

• spending a few hours with my parents learning about port wine and some of its finer points from a vendor in the hotel
• sleeping for 6 hours in the sun by the pool one day
• late night cigars and port with some of the men in the group, discussing non-profit business tactics, banking strategies, philosophy, and ancient greek
• taking a risk at the hotel lounge and ordering an unknown cocktail, and receiving a pepto-bismol-pink beverage with a little umbrella on the top
• dressing up every day
• becoming a minor connoisseur of white wine
• talking with cab drivers in portuguese
• talking with laura, the only other sub-40-yr-old on the trip, who goes to cal poly
• watching terminator 2 in portuguese
• not checking e-mail and not having a phone
• flying home on september 11th, with all the flights less than half full, and reflecting on the meaning of that

hopefully that gives you a bit of an idea of what things were like. on the whole i am very refreshed and relaxed, and looking forward to my last week at home before i go back to stanford!

disc on spin: a rush of blood to the head | coldplay

and now, part 3 of the DiscMagnet™ saga: coordinated assault

i knew that the cunning of the evil monster holding my 3 discs captive was too great to be overcome by myself alone, so on thursday i recruited a team of hardcore disc-rescue veterans to help with the cause. the members of this newly-formed counter-discnapping force were as follows:

team leader: jonathan lipps
callsign: throwmaster flex
skills: insane speed, tactical genius, looking dark and cool in a trench coat
job: strategy, execution coordination, primary munitions expenditure

team member: marie white
callsign: hilariokins
skills: having a car, finding dvd players
job: getaway driver, munitions management, taunting the enemy

team member: james boyd
callsign: boyd, james boyd
skills: knife fighting, the stickshift, commando training
job: secondary munitions expenditure, tactical advising, shooting things

with this intrepid group i was ready. first, hilariokins and i went to safeway munitions factory to gear up, buying 200 ft of intense string (really intense), and 2 lbs of hot tamales. then it was back to the battle field–the engineering quad–after stopping by kingscote to pick up the secondary munitions–a bundle of coat hangers.

boyd, james boyd, arrived not long after we did and surveyed the scene. then, the team arrayed for stealthy combat, we tied one end of the string around a large rock (probably 4-5 lbs). i threw this rock over one side of the beast, and it fell directly through its gaping maw to the ground in the center. carefully i retreived the rock and string, now neatly straddling one of the four edges of the DiscMagnet™, and launched it a second time, over the opposite edge. success again–now the string was thrown completely over the top of the entire gargantuan.

hilariokins and boyd, james boyd attached the secondary munitions to the long end of the primary munitions, and we had our Rescue Sweep Device, or RSD. thus armed with our powerful RSD, we used it to scour the high and invisible surface, causing, i believe, incredible pain to our nemesis in the process. and, lo and behold, the two s.m.u.t. discs were caught in our RSD and flew happily and freely from the top of the monstrosity. victory!!, we cried.

alas, we had awakened the sleeping monster who heard our victory cheer, and it became immediately enraged, thrashing this way and that, until our RSD was mangled and useless. we tried in vain for the next half hour to retrieve the s.w.u.t. frisbee, a beautiful disc that should never have been captured in the first place, but, as i said, it was in vain. we threw away the element of surprise, and the DiscMagnet™ was once again the master of its domain.

still, two out of three is not bad, and we were glad to have saved any discs at all from the hideous thing’s clutches. perhaps when i arrive back at stanford i will go on another reconnaissance mission and see if disc #1 is still alive, or if she has been devoured by the monster.

for now, though, the fight against the Stanford DiscMagnet™ is finished, and i consider myself the victor. we all know, moreover, that the victor is he to whom go the spoils. thus with pride and sincerity i claim the following spoils: world peace, love, free taco bell for eternity, and a girlfriend. now i just need to find who exactly it is who gives out these spoils.