payphone

There are a lot of things I remember about us. Our favorite restaurants, our favorite desserts, our favorite TV shows. But even when I forget those things, I’ll never forget the way that I would look at you and just feel overwhelmed, feel like I had to cry because I know that I’ve never loved somebody so much, and that no one had ever loved me so much. 

I remember the summer we were together, how everyday seemed like we had so much to do, yet looking back, we really had nothing to do except be together. I remember the same five things we cooked for each other, over and over again, and it seemed like the greatest food on Earth each time. I remember the nights we stayed up and talked about everything that was important and not important to us, and I remember the way it felt like all I wanted was for that to be the rest of my life.

I remember the summer we weren’t together, how everyday we would follow each other’s lives like we were right next to each other. I remember how I could call you about the biggest and the littlest of things, and you would understand. I remember the things you would tell me stories about our little Tux, and I would think about him peeking out of your bag as you walked around California. I remember how you always managed to push me to do the things I wanted to do, how you always knew what was best for me before anyone else knew it.

Towards the end, we fought a lot, but for some reason, I don’t remember any of it. I know I was annoyed with every little thing you did, that sometimes, I just couldn’t stand being around you. I know these things, but I don’t remember how they felt.  All I can remember now is how it felt to love each other, in a way that I didn’t think we knew how, but somehow, we were able to. In two years, we grew up together. We learned what it was like to be crazy, in the way you see in movies and hear in love songs, and we learned what it was like to be down-to-earth. Sometimes, we were the only thing that made sense to me, and all the time, that was the only thing I needed.

I remember walking in the large black gates of Princeton with you, pre-frosh weekend. For the longest time, I believed I would be walking out with you too. I guess at one point, we just started to grow in different directions. And I don’t know if this is permanent, or if we’ll ever grow back together again, but I know that these are the things I’ll wonder sometimes, especially on Sunday mornings, especially if the rain is falling. 

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friends with benefits

it’s not about who you want to spend your Friday night with, but who you want to spend all day Saturday with

sunday, july 16th - monday, july 17th

Sunday, July 16^th, 2011

After two very tiring days, Rohan and I decided to just wake up whenever and relax for a day. We woke up at around 10 and watched many episodes of Modern Family. I demolished our leftover Olive Garden and a bag of carrots for lunch. We walked through Stanford – the campus was so pretty. I wish we had taken pictures, but we forgot to. 

We arrived at the downtown area and went to get Gellato. I don’t know why Rohan looks so upset about this, it was very good Gellato.

After getting back to the apartment, we watch X-Men First Class. I can’t believe I waited to long to see it. Great movie, despite the fact that none of the actors we knew were in it. Also, Hugh Jackman had the greatest cameo line ever. If you’ve seen the movie, you know what it is.

Went on reddit for a bit. Late at night, we heated up milk and had chocolate chip cookies, finished off the Thai food, finished off the cheesecake. All in all, a yummy night to a great weekend.

Monday, July 17^th, 2011

We woke up and looked up schedules for me to get to the airport. :( I packed up some Pocky, the leftover Asian snacks, stopped for Subway, as my food for the day. The flight back was uneventful, but since it was an overnight flight, there was a beautiful sunset from the plane. That was about it. Arrived back at Summerfield at 3:00am, and after a shower, it was already 3:30. Work the next day was not fun.

I hope to be back in California soon though. The entire place just has such a sunshine atmosphere to it. The entire time, I was so scared though, to fall in love with the place, because the chances of me actually living there are slim to none. In any case, it was definitely a trip to remember.

saturday, 7/16/11

We woke up this morning, and Rohan made breakfast. The egg flipping skills with his limited tools was quite amazing. It was quite a great meal. We got up a bit later this time, but still early because we had planned a lot to do. We left the penguins studying Orgo, and went to catch the bus.

We had to walk to the train station because Stanford buses didn’t run on weekends. Thus, we missed the train. At the station, we played Cat Physics and I beat all of Rohan’s high scores. Finally, the train arrived. On the train, we tried to plan out the day. We wanted to check out a few comedy clubs, but they were all super expensive, so we quickly scraped that idea. We got off at Caltrain again, and a few bus rides later, we made our way to Golden Gate Park. We decided to quickly walk through the park, just to see what was interesting.  Turn out, not much. We saw what looked like a lion, but it had boobs. Apparently it was a sphinx. There was a really nice jar as well. And a bunch of art exhibits.

We wanted to stop by the Japanese Tea Garden, so we walked through the park. On the way, we stopped by a few sculptures. They were strange. The giant safety pin (that I thought was a paper clip) was my favorite. All these statues looked like they could be moved to Princeton.

The really nice guy at the door told us about the dome, where your voice echos loudly if you talk in the center.We went in and checked it out. It wasn’t that amazing, but if you stand in the middle circle, your voice gets SUPER loud, but only to other people in the circle.

I wanted to start playing the penis game, but right before I got a chance to yell ‘penis’, a guy walked in. I decided to keep quiet. He and a friend sat down and had the following conversation:

Guy 1: Duuuuuuude is that the sky?

Guy 2: Yeah man! That’s totally the sky! Whoaaaaaaaaa

Turns out, I didn’t really need to stop talking because they were really high. We got out of there.

We later found out that the Tea Garden had an admission fee. We decided it wasn’t worth the money, so took a picture by the gate, and moved on.

We found the bus stop and got on a very crowded bus. The Golden Gate Bridge was awesome. The permanent mist that seems to be over San Fransciso really made it look prettier. We did our usual ask-different-people-strategically-located-apart thing and got a few pictures.

We started walking along the bridge, but got attacked by a bunch of bikers. None of them looked like they were having a good time trying to bike across the bridge while trying to avoid knocking over other people and being knocked over by wind. We were happy we decided to not take the lady at the information center’s yesterday’s advice to bike across the bridge. We walked a few feet just for the sake of it, and then headed back. Stopping by the gift store, I bought the cutest ceramic shot glass. I highly doubt I’ll be drinking out of it actually, but it was really cute.

From Golden Gate, we took a bus to Fort Mason. Apparently, it was supposed to be a good, scenic walk. We get there and realize that it’s a historical site, which neither of us was interested in. So we tried to walk through as quickly as possible, cut our losses, and went on the Ghirardelli Square.

We walk into the Ghirardelli store and it just smells like heaven. Warm, chocolate-y, heaven. On the train ride here, we looked through all our brochures for coupons, so we had one for ice cream. We decided to share a sundae, which turned out to be chocolate syrup with ice cream on top. We did the best we could, loved the brownie and ice cream, but couldn’t finish the chocolate.

After heading out of the store, we spent a good half hour as I waited in the bathroom line. The guy’s bathroom had no line.  Why girls take so long in the bathroom, I will never understand. From there, we wanted to get to Fisherman’s Wharf. At the street corner, there was an old musician claiming he could speak every language. He sang a song in Chinese for me (the one about the two little tigers). He was super cheerful in asking for money and made everything rhyme. I asked Rohan for change, which he gave me reluctantly, but the old guy happily told me he loved me in Chinese. At least someone appreciates me.

We decided to walk around the beach for a bit. Rohan claimed that the water in the west coast was warmer than the east coast, so we tested that theory. He was convinced he was right, but I’m not so sure.

From there, we just walked along the road. Since there were a lot of piers in the area, it was pretty busy.

For the first time, I saw spray-painting shows. Apparently, they’re popular things in cities, but I’d never seen one before. The first guy had a Reddit photo on his window, and I was going to tip him a lot, but then he mentioned that someone who tipped him asked him to put it up. I was sad. I didn’t tip him, and I didn’t feel very bad. The paintings looked amazing though.

We stopped for fries since we were both starving at this point. We arrived at Hyde St. Pier, where there were a lot of old boats. We saw a few more spray-painting shows, and an Asian guy who could draw really well. Teenage boys soliciting money for weed. We stop by a museum for old, vintage video games. The Atari games brought back so many memories. Rohan was disappointed though, when he couldn’t find Pac-Man (only Ms. Pac-Man), and I was disappointed when I couldn’t find Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We watched what a stripper does on her day off, and went back on our way.

We finally arrive at Pier 39. Now, I must make a point that from Fort Mason to Pier 39 was about a 3-hour walk. So at this point, we were super tired. We also were both extremely hungry, but didn’t want to spend a fortune at a crab house. We walked around for a bit, half-heartedly looked for some sea lions, sat down by the ocean for a bit, and went on our way.

We took Lombard Street back to get to Grant, Chinatown’s main street. I really wanted Asian snacks. This was the hilliest street I had ever been on. On our way back, we caught a glimpse of the most famous part of Lombard Street (the “crooked-est” street). It looked exactly like a photo. I wonder what it’s like to live up there, telling people to leave half an hour of time to get up your driveway.

We started to enter the border of Little Italy (the main street is Columbus Street). We started to smell pizza and lots of bread baking. Finally, we got back to Chinatown. We found the bakery we were at the day before, and get lots more food. Lots – egg tarts, sesame balls, melon cake (lao po bing). We also got pork buns. We decided they weren’t as good as the pork buns we got from Hang Ah though, so we went back to the tea place, order some pork buns to go, and left happy.

We walked back to Union Square and went back to Tu Long. We ordered the same noodles as last time. This time though, the cute boy was not working there. Instead, some grumpy old man was. He didn’t package our noodles right (cute boy put the noodles and the soupy part separately, and grumpy old man put them together in a box that wouldn’t even close). We tried to tell him we had to do a lot of traveling to get home, and after about ten minutes of arguing, he gives us a better box. Luckily, we didn’t miss the train because of him, or else I would’ve been very angry.

At the train station, we munched on more Asian snacks as a group of obnoxious, drunk people shouted for about an hour. Drunk people are so annoying when you’re not the one that’s drunk. When we got on the train, I pretty much just fell asleep and died. Getting off the train, there were, of course, no buses on weekends. But being the perfect boyfriend he is, Rohan tracked down a taxi in the middle of the road, we got home without making the 2 mile walk back to the apartment, heated up the food, and had part 2 of our feast. We tried to stay up a bit and Reddit, but quickly fell asleep.

Our incredible walking tour of San Francisco was as follows:

friday, 7/15/11

Woke up early again today (around 6am). After showering, we realized that we really didn’t need to get up so early. We spent the morning looking up where to get dim sum since we were going to Chinatown first. We also watched the second half of the Bachelorette in the background, but there was a whole lot of crying because someone broke up with someone else, and it got boring. We got to the bus stop at around 8:30, got lucky because the train we would’ve missed just happened to be late, and were soon at San Francisco.

It was a lot colder than I expected, which made me sad. We walked quite a bit to Chinatown in this cold. The buildings were so pretty; it made me decide to live in the city when I grow up, if only for a few years.

We soon see Asian architecture in the distance. We walk in, and there are cute monkeys on a bench. Yay, great start to the day.

So before we left, Rohan told me to remember this street the dim sum place Yelp suggested was on. At this point, I remind him that the street was Sacramento, to which he says that it’s definitely not true. Turns out, I was right (!). We walk up this giant hill, past the YMCA (wtf?), and see signs for Hang Ah Tea Room. A lot of signs. I don’t know why one dim sum place needs so many signs pointing to it from every direction. We find the restaurant in a tiny, sketchy looking corner. When we walk it, they had just opened, so we were the only ones there. We order 3 dishes to start off (shrimp dumplings, pork and shrimp shao mai, and guo tie), decided it tasted amazing, and promptly got more food. I hadn’t eaten so much in a really long time.

After stuffing ourselves with Asian food, we head out to find a kite shop and a temple that we had read about. However, we couldn’t find either. Instead, we just found more signs for the dim sum place we were just at. We also found this really nice bakery, where we bought a black bean dessert. Rohan picked up some lychee at a market, which was also amazing. We wanted bubble tea, but were both too full for other things. Finally, we decided to head out of Chinatown and back to Market Street. This would be a good time to mention that San Francisco is the hilly-est place I’ve ever been. All the streets looked like they would be so much fun to just bike down. I also couldn’t help wondering that would happen if some driver didn’t put on his parking brake and his car caused the entire street of cars to roll down a hill. Horrible and unlikely, I know, but it was hard not to worry.

We got to Union Square and there was an art exhibit going on. We took a few pictures, then continued on our way.

There were some awesome stores and I got to try on lots of clothes. Then, I saw it. The largest Forever21 I had ever seen – it was three stories high. Needless to say, I was very happy. Rohan was not.

First though, we went to the information center by the subway station, where we got a ton of maps, brochures, etc. We talked to the nice lady at the counter, who told us about a ton of places we could go. We sat down and decided to head to Twin Peaks since it was so out of the way from everything else we wanted to do. So after visiting the huge Forever21, we got on a metro and went to Twin Peaks.

We got off a bus at the sketchiest stop ever. It was this residential area with cube houses and a lot of hills going upwards.

There was mist everywhere and it was chilly and rainy. The piece of paper we got at the information center said to ‘walk to X road and turn right onto unmarked footpath’. I was scared. We walked to this road and we see a huge metal gate and…well, decide to keep walking.

We finally reach a dead end at this huge house where we were told to not trespass. We backtracked, met a group of people who gave us directions. It turns out we missed the small, “umarked footpath” we were supposed to turn on. We started hiking up the hill. At this point, I was pretty skeptical. 

When we finally got the Twin Peaks, the view was just amazing. We saw so much of San Francisco. The mist made everything so pretty and I just wanted to have a picnic there.

We asked various people to take photos for us, strategically making sure they didn’t see us asking other people so they wouldn’t think we didn’t like the picture they took. The sun came out at some point and the mist cleared, more buildings showed up, and the view got even better.

It took a long time to get bored of the view, but at some point, we did. We were a bit confused as to how to get down. We got off at an unmarked bus stop, and wasn’t sure when it would stop there again. So we decided to walk. It was a really, really long walk, about 40 minutes, down all the hills back to the metro station. We sketchily asked a lot of people and got very vague directions; we were pretty lucky to have not gotten lost.

From the metro station, we headed back to Market Street. After stopping for a quick burger at McDonald’s, we go on a search for a legendary awesome Thai restaurant. After stopping at 2 restaurants that weren’t it, we finally arrive at Tu Lan. There’s a really nice and cute Asian guy taking orders who I quite liked. If he had been our waiter, I would’ve tipped him a lot. Anyway, he suggested a dish for us, we took it home, heated it up, and it was amazing.

On a side note, I got to watch Rohan cook. It was like watching a caveman learning to use tools. A lot of improvisation – plastics forks and knives instead of spatulas, pliers because the pot has no handle, etc. It was super cute. We had DELICIOUS Thai food while watching Modern Family. I had more of the fruit I bought (YUM!), we had leftover cheesecake for dessert; needless to say, it was a feast.

I pretty much fell straight to sleep after that. Rohan stayed up for a bit on the Internet, and then we both went to bed soon.

A tracking of our route today: 

thursday, 7/14/11

Wednesday night, me and Lynn are all packed and ready to go!

Thursday morning, I got up bright and early (5am!), left Summerfield, got to Washington Dulles International Airport. After parking, I walked through the super sketchily long walkway to the main terminal. There was a group of Chinese (probably middle schoolers) kids clearly on a group trip that was checking in, and of course, being Asian and short and all, I was asked whether I was part of that group. Said no, bypassed the huge line they made, and checked myself in. At security, there was a really nice old guy checking IDs. Not really worth mentioning, but nice people make me happy. Things went relatively quickly, I found my gate, and was about 2 hours early for my 8:30am flight.

After finally boarding, I realized that the entire Asian tour group got pretty screwed over, and ended up with pretty much every middle seat on the plane. A little boy sat between me (window seat) and this other lady who had the aisle seat. Because white people are somehow all fascinated by the cute little way little Asian kids speak English, she tried to talk to him. He clearly wasn’t interested, and after awhile, she gave up. I took a nap and when I woke up, the lady told me that the boy found an aisle seat further back in the plane. Yay, more room for us. When the flight attendants came by with the beverages cart, they accidentally ran into the foot of the lady who decided it would be a good idea to stick her foot out into the aisle. She screamed pretty loudly, I felt pretty bad. That somehow started a conversation between us – she told me she was from LA, was in the hotel management business, had a factory in China in a town that sounded like a porn star’s name (I have no idea what city she was trying to tell me about), had two sons that worked with her, thought Zuckerberg was a piece of shit (which made me liked her a lot more), etc. We talked for a bit before both deciding that we had run out o f things to talk about and would both try to sleep some more.

I looked out the window as we were landing in LA, and it was just. Amazing. Such a big city, but with so many hills. After arriving in LA, we had to land at a terminal off of the main one, and took a shuttle to the main terminal. At the main terminal, some Indian lady informed me that the gate for my flight to San Jose was actually back where I came from. So I took the next shuttle back there, waited for about 2 hours, called Rohan and we complained to each other for a bit, got on the extremely tiny American Eagle plane (about 14 rows), went to sleep, woke up, and was in California!

Rohan and Aaron met me at the airport, which was nice not having to wait for public transportation. I found out that Aaron likes to take extremely wide turns and has a GPS whose directions are announced by a woman who tries so hard to not have an accent that she has a hilarious accent. I mention that I wanted to watch the Bachelorette, and Aaron described the show as about “a girl who’s always crying about something”. That’s about right. 

We finally arrive at Rohan’s apartment. I thought it was a pretty nice place to stay. The penguins had fun being back together again!

We decided to go to a downtown area of Stanford.

Turns out this street has everything you could possibly need.We found an egg made of what looks like circuit boards.

Also, there was an Apple store (!!). There was also a really nice olden day style theatre that was playing Casablanca. We talked about going back to catch a movie, but never really got the chance. All the restaurants were closed for some reason, so I got no food. We decided to pick up cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory (peanut butter!) for dessert and get dinner elsewhere. 

We walked back to the apartment and then left again to go to the Olive Garden. We find out that in reality, not all Olive Gardens have the same pricings, and for some reason, every dish at this one was about $3 more expensive than every other Olive Garden we’ve been to. We found a nice summer special though, with shrimp and ravioli that was amazing. Our waiter was super nice, and because he was so nice, I made Rohan tip him an extra dollar (which being an Indian guy, he did reluctantly). On the way back, we picked up from fruit from a grocery store whose ceiling liked to fall on people (apparently, a piece of the wooden ceiling had fallen on some guy a few days earlier). The fruit was so much cheaper than what I get back in Maryland though, which made me sad. We got lots of peaches, strawberries, and carrots, and I was happy. We walked back through a neighborhood where streets were named after colleges.

Back at the apartment, we broke out the cheesecake. I had to watch the new episode of the Bachelorette because the 10 minutes I saw the night before was driving me in crazy suspense. After watching an hour of the episode (aka half), Rohan decided he couldn’t take the stupidity anymore, and we switched to White Collar. I think Matt Bomer was shirtless twice in the episode, which made me happy. As usual, Neal got one step closer to being caught, and it drove me crazy. I also washed some strawberries to eat with the whipped cream that came with the cheesecake, and life was pretty great.