The dish and my room

I just payed my room! 1,797 for three months, wait, 2 and a half in fact, since I moved in late. That's still quite ok, I'm living on campus and it could have been worse. It was actually pretty easy to get this room. In fall quarter (September-December) it would have been very difficult. More later!

Here are two more dorms, complete with parking and a palm tree (who finds it?):
The campus is basically surrounded by dorms. Graduates (Master or PhD) and undergrads (Bachelor) are separated; there's fraternity houses (actually here student fraternities are regarded as being"cool"), those Kappa-Sigma-Beta or Omega-Gamma or whatever named things. Add some faculty housing and something like "embassies" for countries or religion-related groups and you got the idea.

Right now I'm training for the half-marathon on Saturday, and I'm doing that in the "dish" area. That's the terrain directly behind campus located in the foothills of Palo Alto. The foothills are the south-western slopes of the valley - beautiful region with villas right next to the San Andreas fault line. You start in suburbia, which covers most of the valley "floor", than some day maybe... or you just run there. Look:



Ok, the last picture is back on campus - you can see the walkway. Those funny squirrels are all over the place! Playing in front of my window, running up the trees next to the students - really nice!
You have kind of a view over the valley from the hills of the dish, check it out:
So as you can see the hightech companies right at the side of the campus. It's pretty full there now, Google for example built on the other side of Palo Alto.

Something I wanted to share. Isn't that a living room?
The kitchen is impressive, too:
(Recently they had a NASA empoyee's party, if you wonder about the green little...)

Oh yeah, they also have those:
(trash bins that open with a proximity sensor - if you move your hand (with trash) close to the lid...)
That's how americans live... well, hopefully one day I won't forget to take pictures of "suburbia"; this is from a friend's space-geek condo in the foothills.
Now I'll go on preparing my seminar on Thursday. This week I'm doing the questions to guide the discussion. A guy doing a "Symbolic something" Bachelor and me. He was at CMU before, says that it's lousy - food, dorms, weather, people. So he changed. Good that I'm here!
See you later!