california trip, part 3

Had breakfast with Puzzlebox, Rand & Adam, and Taunya's kids. Can't remember the restaurant name. Jeff and Andrew came to pick me up at the hotel at noon. They somehow missed seeing me waiting in the lobby and wandered about the second floor a bit, meeting more folks on the way. :-) People directed them back down to the lobby.

Went to a giant Borders store. Wow, great place! Jeff loaded up on tech magazines. Had lunch at an extremely popular (judging from the line which was, fortunately, fast-moving) burger place. Went to Fry's next. Amazingly enough, they didn't have any film for my camera (I need Advantex film) in spite of having pretty much everything else under the sun. Did find a camera shop shortly afterwards, tho.

Drove to Mountainview to visit our friend Bruce, met his girlfriend Christie. We used to hang out with Bruce at the University of Toronto in our undergraduate days. Bruce is now an astronomer currently studying the surface of Titan...we got to see some impressive-looking pics. We also went for a very nice walk with their dog Oozle (sorry, don't know how to spell the name properly, but that's how the name is pronounced). Oozle loves water. We walked through a park near Stanford University where Oozle romped happily through a creek with other dogs, pausing occasionally to run up the hill to shake water on us. Bruce and Christie have a lemon tree in their backyard! I'd never seen a lemon tree before.

Next, we visited our friend William (another friend from U of T days) at Xerox PARC, met his girlfriend Mona. Xerox PARC is very cool. We got to see the famous Bean Bags, and the Coffeepot Webcam setup, among other things.

The seven of us went to Su's Mongolian Barbecue restaurant in Santa Clara. VERY interesting place! Not much in the atmosphere department, but the food experience was great. Basically, you take a big bowl and load it up with whatever raw stuff you want, choice including frozen meat of all kinds (sliced into very thin pieces) and stirfry vegetables. The Californians advised us to pile our bowls as high as possible since the stirfry process created shrinkage. You add whatever sauce mixture you liked, then handed your bowl to one of the cooks. The cook dumped the contents onto a large flat cooking plate, where your supper sizzles and is shoved around for a several minutes until done, at which point it is dumped back into your bowl. There are also a number of yummy side dishes to choose from to complete your meal. Yum. We were allowed seconds as well, but I was full after one bowl.

After dinner, visited with William and Mona a bit in Mountainview. Found out what agapantha looks like (a plant that is taking over their garden; Mona has waged war against it), met their cats. Drove back to Santa Clara, watched X-Files at Andrew's place.

To be continued....