East Coast Trip

The East Coast trip (Boston - NY - Princeton - WashDC)

(I didn't realize that I had this as a draft and never published it!)

While taking many pictures and solitary walks, I was able to see through to my tastes and motivations. It was a good trip.

For the first 4 days, Phil and I only got 10 hours of sleep (and most were accidental), but we decided to slow down since we were getting sick.

Boston (Day 0-2)

Boston has its charm, but I don't think it's enough to entice me. (Although it's been my thawing longing to move to the East Coast for graduate school because of the different weather, scenery and convenient access to most places without using a car.) You can't get that in California!

When we arrived, I tagged Phil along to fulfill an appointment with a prof at harvard who did research on self-assembling electronics. It turns out to be different from what I want to do. So after that, we went walking around Harvard... and it wasn’t a very beautiful campus. Too dirty for me.

Phil and I visited two friends from ucla who are now at mit doing their phd. Mit is too intense for me. Can you believe that it takes 8-9 yrs on average to get your PhD (starting with MS)! That scared me.

Then Phil, I, Kevin and Hsu just walked around Boston, Cambridge and drove to Lexington and to Thoreau’s Lake, where Thoreau was inspired to write many a-word, a-noun, a-predicate, etc.
Before leaving for NY, we took a Duck tour that took us around Boston… I took some interesting pictures along the way. Then at 10:30pm, we boarded a bus towards Chinatown, NY. The plan was to sleep. Define “plan” for us please.

New York (Day 3-5)

On the way to NY from Boston, I definitely had a stimulating conversation with Phil about our futures. We were both in the same boat (or bus), thinking about quitting our jobs to go back to school. But we had one difference though - I still liked my job.

Anyway, by the time we got to NY, it was 4am and I didn't sleep. We were butt-ugly-tired. The past 72+ hours, we’ve been awake for 62+ hours and most of those hours were energy consuming.

We went to Chinatown, had chow mein at 4am, then walked up 20+blocks to get to our hotel (which was beside the Empire State Building btw, for dirt cheap $80/night! – through hotels.com) then we’re told that our room doesn’t open until 3pm. So… we sat down at the lobby, then next thing I knew someone was waking me up “You can’t sleep here”… Sigh … we kept walking around NY, us two smelly un-showered backpacking asian ucla alumni. We visited Madison Square Garden, walked up to Times Square, MTV, Radio City, NBC studios, ESPN etc etc. We finally decided to walk back toward our hotel around noon. Phil and I saw this park and Phil just dozed off for an hour, while I read my novel and took pictures of people!

We slept for 3 hours in the hotel. Then off for dinner and the empire state building! We also walked around Times Square to take night pictures… and have my caricature taken!

Got back at midnight and slept for 8 hours. I just remembered I haven’t slept that well since I left work 3 or 4 days ago. Then I started feeling sick. Uh-oh.

We had breakfast at this Korean mini-grocery in front of our hotel (we were in K-town btw). Man, they served great breakfast there. Then off we went to see the statue of liberty, and we managed to take good pictures. One of which, started a crazy trend among everyone… Everyone wanted her to stand on their hand as well.

We walked along Wall St towards Ground Zero.

Then that night we crashed at Phil’s friend’s place in New Jersey. Then the following day, Phil and I went to Central Park, I dropped off my stuff at my hotel and parted ways . He was flying back to LA while I was getting on with the rest of my trip.

I woke up like a prisoner at 4am. I promptly checked out for my train ride to Princeton.

Princeton, NJ (day 6-7)

Yes, my trip to the East Coast was filled with visiting different schools. I really had to see the school first before applying because if I end up going all the way to PhD, I might as well like living there!

I liked Princeton and it seems like a good choice for graduate school. They have one professor who's the leader in his field, Organic Electronics. I got a tour of their labs and man... they're well equipped! I also chatted with a prof doing Molecular Bio electronics. Interesting, but not so much for me.

Princeton’s campus didn’t strike me as beautiful until I saw it as a whole. I walked around and took snippets of Gothic Architecture.

I liked the small-town feel of Princeton, with long-standing coffee shops lining the streets and all. The people were kind too, and the cute 23-yo Japanese waitress at the sushi restaurant took a liking to me. Wow, everything was going well for me at Princeton. Even my hotel was top notch!

Washington, DC (day 8-10)

I left Princeton happy. I boarded the Amtrak towards Washington DC to meet up with Patrick, a buddy from Santa Rosa. I stayed at his apartment, thank God, and while he was at work, I walked up and down the Mall and got a picture of the White House. It was cloudy so my pictures were so-so.

That night, I took Patrick bar-hopping. His area is so young, I’m jealous!

The next day, we went to Georgetown, walked across the Potomac River and just chatted and caught up. That night I took the bus to Dulles International airport since no buses go there at 5am. My flight back to Oakland was at 6. I never stayed overnight in an airport. It was really cold. Nonetheless, I finished two novels while waiting.

Once I boarded the plane, I closed my eyes and the next thing I saw was Oakland. I was very hungry.