It was pretty hot and humid every day I was here so it will be nice to be back in Cali where there is no humidity and nights are cool and refreshing. If you have had the luxury of living or camping in Illinois without AC, you know why night in Cali are awesome.

The play-by-play of the trip is below the fold.

I attended five Olympic events. Basketball, Volleyball, Wrestling, Table Tennis, and Baseball.

We started the trip in Shanghai and planned to spend more time there, but had to get to Beijing to see Yisong’s mom and sister before they flew home. We spent a few days in Beijing and then we flew to Huangshan to do a 3 day trip there hiking the mountains.

After touring Huangshan with Yisong’s cousins we took a night train and another train to their hometown, which is Yisong’s Dad’s hometown. We visited with them and had several good meals and did some shopping and took a night train back to Beijing.

As soon as we got back to Beijing at 8am on the night train, we headed to the Great Wall to do some sightseeing. That night we went to see women’s volleyball and it was an awesome quarter-final match with USA playing Italia.

I woke up the next day early went to the Wrestling venue and tried to see some freestyle wrestling. I figured that I really should watch some wrestling if I came all this way to see the olympics. It turned out that I accidentally went to see the weight classes that I am interested in, 66kg and 74kg (They have a 55kg and a 60kg, which would have also been cool). Even better, it was the 1/8 1/4 and semi-finals. So I basically got to watch the whole bracket for 2 weight classes in 3 hours. Some of these guys wrestled 3 times in under 3 hours, which is pretty tough.

After that success, we went to the 798 art district, which was pretty awesome. If you know me, you know that I’m not that into art, but I could have hung out there all day. There are like 400 galleries with all kinds of crazy art. We then went to see Ari’s friends’ Terra Cotta warrior marionette show, but they changed the times around, so we were late to the last show and they didn’t let us in. We then came back the next day, and it was rained out, so sad times on boats with respect to the show Ari suggested we see.

But all was well because that night we hit up the Peking duck and then did some serious clubbing. Yisong did not join us because he had a talk to give at Microsoft Research Asia in the morning. I however rolled in from partying at like 3:30am and had to wake up at like 7:30 to get ready to go to MSRA. After the talk we went out to a really nice lunch with the Microsoft people and then Yisong had meetings all day. I didn’t want to hang out in his research meetings for the rest of the day, so I met up with Lisa and we tried to go to the Terra Cotta thing (which was rained out), and after that didn’t pan out, we went to the Beijing Zoo and saw some Pandas.

I caught up on sleep that night and we went to see Table Tennis the next afternoon. We decided that partying was in order this Friday night so we started at karaoke and at about 1:30 moved to the clubs. We didn’t get home until like 4:30 and Yisong’s grandparents were just getting up. I thought we were busted for sure because it seemed like they had been waiting for us all night, but they had just gotten up and Yisong smoothed it over like a champ.

We got like 3 hours of sleep and were up for the 10:30am USA bronze metal baseball game. Baseball will not be an Olympic sport next year, so it is pretty awesome that we saw the last USA game of this era. It was a slug-fest with homers and was high scoring and back and forth and was a great game against Japan. We took the bronze and much sun (and beer) was had by all.

That pretty much wraps things up. We walked around the main Olympic area Saturday night; caught up on sleep. Sunday we watched Basketball and the closing ceremony on TV. Monday we went out shopping and hit up the local bars at night. And right now it is Monday night and Yisong and I are working through the last of the 24 pack of beer we bought 2 weeks ago and are being nerds writing our blog posts. yay!

It was a most excellent trip but I miss my life back home and am ready to be back! Now I just have that pesky 16 hours of travel tomorrow.

On Thursday, we woke up and went to the Forbidden city. Check out pictures here. Yisong and I followed that up with some awesome basketball games. I will send those pictures later, because there are over 400 of them to sort through. China won it’s match with Angola, which was fun to watch. The game of Russia against Lithuania was really close the whole way and was very exciting.

I had tried to fight the jet lag, but I was up at 6am the next morning and went around looking for a coffee shop, but nothing was open yet. We took a cab down to the Bund but the river trips didn’t start till 10am. We got some breakfast and hung out in the restaurant for a while because they had air conditioning and it was hot and really humid out. After the boat trip we hung out at the Jade Garden area and bought some souvenirs and a lot of food. We caught the night train to Beijing at 7pm and that was a 12 hour ride that got us into Beijing at 7:15am.

We took the subway then a taxi to Yisong’s grandparents’ house. We had breakfast, showered up and found an open wireless connection. Now we are about to head out and buy more cheap stuff and hang out in Beijing.

Check out the pictures of Shanghai here

Palantir is having another recruiting event, this time in Palo Alto. We will be showing off 1.4 and I think people will really be impressed.

After the 1.4 release, I got out a little to do some hiking with Steve. Here are the pictures when we went to mission peak.

On my left in the parking area bellow the apartment across the hall there was a car on fire. The whole hood was completely engulfed in flames and they were hitting the ceiling of the parking area. At this point I put the cat in the car and then moved the car to another spot (I thought everything was all burning down).

I really really thought about running in and grabbing my camera; it wasn’t really that out of control yet, and it was currently localized to the other apartment. Sadly, i didn’t get my camera and take really awesome pictures. What I do have for you is some crappy camera phone pics that don’t do the whole ordeal justice. It was pretty exciting and the fire looked like it was out, then restarted from what looks like the adjacent apartment by going through the wall.

The best picture is the top one. You can see my kitchen window on the right side of the picture with the lights on and our neighbors’ place with smoke pouring out. Note that this was taken when the fire was pretty much put out already.

First news link I found covering the fire.
Second news link
Third news link
Best news link
Robin’s recount of the incident

They sent me a different Xbox that had red ring of death! This is not cool! I just bought an HD copy of “Knocked Up”, but now I can’t play it in HD, because my Xbox is dead. I just bought Orange Box and Halo3, but I can’t play that either. Also, they sent me a 1-month card for Xbox Live. Great, that is great considering that I had a Live subscription for the 6+ months that my Xbox was out of commission.