First real post since arriving in California. A combination of being busy, tired, homeless and screenless resulted in me not having the time or motivation to post till now, no good excuse.

By the way, this post is brought to you from Southwest Airlines flight 2478 to San Diego... blabla busy bla on a flight bla insert self-touching.

So, I'm sitting next to this girl who brought a CPK Pizza with her on the plane, and a row away from a vertically challenged gentleman (un nain quoi) who boarded the plane carrying a desktop computer on his shoulder. Yep, I'm in the US. For those that aren't up to date on my geographical position, after coming back from Singapore in late December, I started a 6 month internship at a green-loving semiconductor company in Santa Clara, in the heart of the Silicon Valley. I live in PDR Palo Alto, (not very far from Stanford, Kyoto do you hear me?) about the only town in the Bay Area with a pedestrian downtown area. That's not entirely accurate, but it sure seems like the Valley is a big maze of cross streets on El Camino Real (which, incidently, goes all the way to Mexico), which is quite distressing for an arrogant and pretentious French fundamental bastard like myself. Like, whatever.

Here's my street:

my car (yeah yeah, the typical Indo-Pak Honda Accord, STFU already)

and a cute little house on my street, with those huge trees bending the pavement, complete with the vintage car.

For the geographically challenged, this is California. I'm half an hour away from San Francisco, which has found its way near the top of my all time favorite cities. Here's the mandatory glam shot of me and some bridge.

I landed in sunny (or rather rainy, since it rained for what seemed like two straight months when I got here) Cali on March 13th, stayed at my man Seashell's for a couple of weeks, found an apartment, went all Ikea-boy for a few days, bought a 1990 Honda Accord with a shoddy 281000kms on the odometer (no, I'm not going to convert that into miles, buy yourself a metric system).

CPK Girl seems to have decided to land her head on my shoulder. I'm not gonna wake her up or anything, but, like, getchaself togetha lady.

My high-tech Businessweek 50 work environment experience has so far been pretty sweet, I usually get to work around 10 in the morning, those who know me well will agree that this is probably the closest I'm ever gonna get to bio-cycle-synchronized job hours.

Collegues are cool, yet mostly a older than me. I'm just finishing school, most of them are starting their families, quite a gap, but still nice to talk about their kids' mischievous adventures at lunch time, I somehow feel closer to to that. I've had my own cube so far, but IT brought my future cube-mate's stuff in today, so I'll soon be sharing my space with Parvindar Agrawal, or something.

Which brings me to a totally unrelated point. Yesterday, at the mall, I'm checking out some clothes and this gay guy comes up to me, chit chats and offers me a business deal of some sort. OK. Then I get out of the store, his business card in hand, and this chick grabs my hand and starts manicuring it. Like, do I look that gay? Seriously, tell me.

My life here is quite different from the different lives I've lead in the past. No social context in which to meet people within the same age/interest group, but I'm working on that. So far it seems to me like people here stop having friends once they graduate from College (they seem to suddenly stop a lot of things after College), and after that it''s all about work, your significant other and work. And you meet people by having hobbies. It's not always easy adapting to this, but I'm getting there, even though I'm pretty sure I'm not made for this kind of social context. In the land of the Hummer, everything is about productivity, speed, size. You work hard, you play hard, you have a big ass flat screen TV with hundreds of cable channels to maximize your vegging productivity, you're too busy to keep in touch with your real friends so you fit in make believe ones in your schedule by taking a membership to the local gym or whatever hobby center. I might sound bitter, but this is the new world, and this is how they got where they're at.

Other than this, I've been leading the all American life, went to a Padres' game in San Diego, which was an amazing experience

This picture probably doesn't convey how close we were to the field, like maybe five rows up, between first and second base... *Close*. The atmosphere is hard to describe, it's a pity team sports are generally disdained in France.

Did Lombard street a number of times, had sourdough bread clam chowder in the Marina district, have had *humongous* (I can not stress this enough) burgers at various diner's (nothing like Mc Donald's, we only get the worst in France), go to Sports Bars to watch NBA games with a sizeable portion of garlic fries, have a Tuesday evening tradition with Shelly (Sushi & House/The Unit/NCIS). On Sundays I'll usually go to explore the region, the coast is crazy beautiful around here, and quite savage too (Of course I know that's not the right word).

It's also interesting to observe the wealth of diversity and opportunity that this great country is built upon, and to contrast it to the relative conservatism of France and Europe in general. There truly is a place for everyone and everything here, even though it's often on the street with a caddy full of random stuff.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are making our final approach to San Diego, so it's time for me to turn off all electrical equipment. See ya suckers.

This post has been brought to you by a Starbucks Coffee and Hard-fi.