Such was Aroon's title for the photo album of my trip to visit him in the grand old Silicon Valley, and the name just kind of stuck. This weekend I struck another of my lifelong to-dos from my list: see California. In my desire to see as many of my close friends as possible before Japan, I was off to the Bay Area for the weekend to visit Aroon in his new digs at loopt. I was excited to find out what my Californian friends were on about, since they all insisted that it's a completely unique place. Truth be told, it is. It wasn't all palm trees and suntans though, since I was in northern Cali, or more specifically, Silicon Valley. Aroon works and resides in Mountain View, CA, home to (among many others) Google. There's plenty about California I could write about - the organic farmers' markets almost every day, the grocery stores that sell more organic than not, Aroon's organic car - OK, not the last one. He drives an RSX-S and it's just what you'd expect - a freshened up Integra that goes decently fast. But I digress. What really interests me is the Silicon Valley culture in which Aroon has completely immersed himself. I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions in this town, but the little taste of life I got here includes virtually everyone being tech-fluent, all the kids going to top universities (MIT and Ivies are the most common by far), the cars are all nice, money is plentiful and worries are few. (And yet, unlike Texas, the fat cats here all vote blue.) And there's one thing pervading and perpetuating this living American Dream: the start-up. Silly me, the cautious one who believed the hype that the dot-com boom was done for. This place begs to differ. It's alive and kicking as if it became a permanent fixture in local culture instead of the volatile economic rollercoaster that Newsweek or Time makes it out to be. Enough of the scenery, on to the action. For Aroon and I, it was a whirlwind 4 days that involved a ton of places that were new to both of us. A night of barhopping ended in crashing at Aroon's coworker's place in the middle of San Francisco, but not until after I gained the unofficial title of Loopt Office Linebacker after a female Looptie play-fought with me and I tackled her, providing a source of comedy and shit-talk for the next 24 hours. The next day was Tourist Day in SF, when Aroon and I decided to do things like drive the Golden Gate Bridge and see Pier 39. It kind of sucked, but the weak moments were broken up by our party piece, the loopt office iPhone which was on loan to Aroon for the weekend. It turned ordinary moments into more-playful-than-usual cameraphone moments, and it even turned a snooty waitress into a sweetheart. The rest of our time was spent back in Palo Alto hanging with many of Aroon's friends in the area, which is basically the network attached to the cousins he lives with. A movie at an actual drive-in was a first for me, and a day spent at the farmers' market turned into cooking lunch which then turned into a gigantic dinner party for people of all ages. Also, Bay Area sushi isn't as good as I had hoped. :( Oh well, I'm going to the home of sushi in very short order. The work-safe-only iPhone-camera pictures can be found here:
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| Blake Does The Valley |
