Back.
The end of the trip was fun, fun, fun! I guess I'll post from where I left off. Forgot to say that on Monday, I bought a Hybrid album, "Additional Remixes and Productions by..." It's a continual mix of some popular electronica songs put together by Hybrid. It's rather freakin' sweet.
Tuesday:
We took a tour of UC Santa Barbara. It's a nice campus. The main mode of transportation is by bicycle. We saw the dorms, cafeterias, DDR MACHINES~! and whatnot. Daimn, was there a lot of DDR on this trip.
And finally, we made it to Los Angeles! The traffic was pretty bad, but we expected it.
We made our way to the Santa Monica Shopping Center and ate at Stage Deli, a New York restaurant. I almost made myself sick by chowing down on their Philly Cheese Steak. I stopped off at a bookstore and got "Steal This Computer Book," a book explaining how to create or invade privacy on the internet. It came with a lot of nifty tools on a CD. I think I'll equip my computer with, oh, ALL of them.
We walked around Santa Monica Pier, where, you guessed it, I played DDR. And this time I passed a 5-footer. But unfortunately, this 12-year old kid jumped on right after me and did Afronova on Maniac almost perfectly. :(
We arrived back at our campsite so late that we were locked out! A "no parking" sign was hung on the closed entrance gate, and the exit gate had those one-way tire-puncturing spikes. Fortunately, this guy appeared out of nowhere, said he was learned in the way of spike-crossing-over, and guided our car over the spikes with the help of some flat tools he had in the back of his car. Isn't that a great coincidence?
Wednesday:
Last day of the trip. We went to UCLA and had a tour. I thought that I'd like it least of the campuses when we started this trip, and then I saw Cal Poly (ugh), and then I actually saw UCLA. Great, great campus! The tour guide emphasized that you won't notice you're in LA. That's a good thing, because despite the DDR machines, I didn't really enjoy walking around LA late at night.
While waiting for the tour to start, I actually saw some classmates from TL! One of them, Jonathan, is in my English and History classes. That was pretty cool, seeing them there.
After the tour, we zoomed over to Genghis Cohen's, a Jewish-Chinese restaurant, for a quick lunch. We stuck with the Chinese stuff and had some great General Beef, shrimp chow mein, and Kung Pow~! Chicken.
We drove over to Burbank, where we waited on line for an hour or two to get into the Tonight Show with Jay Leno! We got pretty good seats, and could see everything that went on. Jay introduced himself before the show to the audience, told a few jokes, took some pictures with fans, and before we knew it, the show started. Even though it's filmed at 4:30 PM and isn't live, it's not cut at any point, so it's just one solid hour. During commercials, Kevin Eubanks's band performs, and Jay gets ready for the next section. That was pretty fun to watch. And we got to see Ashley Judd, Zxccv Vrmrmnr, (or something like that, he's from Wales), and Tweet, my sister's role model.
Our vacation was over, and we wanted to get home, so that's what we did. We left the studio at 6:00 and drove straight home, through the ultimately boring Highway 5, for seven hours straight. (Well, that's not true, we had to stop about 4 times for gas because of the van's crappy mileage.) We arrived home and, without unpacking anything, went straight to bed.
Thursday:
The day was spent unpacking and settling down. It went by pretty fast, since I slept 'till noon. I spent an hour replying to all my email and deleting all of the spam, and had a nice read through my computer book.
Friday:
Why am I still listing the days? It's the end of the vacation! Erhm. Anyway, today, my mom got the dog she's been wanting to get for a while. Yup! She's a half black lab, half collie from Taiwan, named (I did NOT make this name up) Chocobo.
Reminds me of my late fish Magus, who I named after Magus' black magic because he was a black goldfish. Well, Chocobo is black too... but he can't fly. He CAN run really, really fast, though.
