Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Austin Trip
5/24/05 - Today I flew down to Austin to try to find an apartment. I left my nail clippers at home because I was only taking cary-on luggage, and they say you aren't allowed to take them with you. While I was waiting at the gate to board my plane, I discovered that I have a rather bad hangnail. I was afraid this was going to happen.
This morning my brother asked me if I remembered the tune that is the opening song to the anime series Gunslinger Girl. I said it's called "The Light Before we Land," and managed to remember how some of it went.
On the airplane to Austin I got out my iPod and hit play. I've got it set to play random songs, and out of all 3497 songs that happened to be on it at the time, the first song it randomly decided to play was "The Light Before we Land."
The girl sitting in front of me on the airplane had her laptop with her, and decided to use it to watch the first Lord of the Rings movie. The gap between her seat and the one next to her was fairly wide, so I could see about the center 90% of screen from where I was sitting. About 10 minutes into the movie, she paused it, looked at me, and asked if I could see it OK. I said yes, and she went back to the movie. After about 1.5 hours her batteries ran out, at which point she apologized for not letting me see the ending. Both times she sounded and acted like she was sincerely happy that I was watching it along with her. I was a bit surprised about this, since when she watched it she used her headphones and she didn't turn on the subtitles, with the result that I had to rely on memory (I've seen the movie once) and lip reading (something I'm terrible at) to catch any of the dialog. Anyway, it was fun to watch and I'm glad she wasn't annoyed at me for basically watching it over her shoulder.
Nick came down to Austin to visit me while I was down there, and it was nice to see someone from Tohoku again. We went to a Japanese restaurant that he frequents, which I suppose is appropriate. This place had good food, and had very nice prices; all of the Japanese places in Madison are really expensive. I ended up ordering yaki-soba, just because that's what I lived off of in Japan. The beef they used at this restaurant tasted very good, but was completely different from any that I had in Japan, which was a bit disappointing.
After dinner Nick gave me a brief tour of the UT campus. It seemed to be much bigger than the UW campus, but part of that is probably because they have more buildings and the buildings are fairly close together. The UW campus is also downtown, but is more mixed in with the other buildings downtown, and also has 2 major roads running through it. Every year I find out about more UW buildings that I didn't know existed.
5/25/05
A guy my company hired for me came and picked me up from the hotel and took me to various apartment complexes. We looked at 6 before lunch, and 2 after lunch. After about the third one though, my head was starting to spin. I couldn't remember what questions I'd already asked the places, and what each one had said about things. I spent most of the afternoon trying to narrow down my choices, and eventually chose three to investigate further. Unfortunately, the motel I was staying in didn't have internet access, so I was unable to research these places online. Instead, I used a 2 hour calling card to phone home and had my dad do my research for me. By the time I'd used up all the minutes on the card I'd pretty much decided on the one that was closest to work. It seems like a decent place, isn't too cheap, and is right across the street from work. Depending on how bad the traffic on that street is, I expect the commute to work to be somewhere between 1 and 5 minutes.
This morning my brother asked me if I remembered the tune that is the opening song to the anime series Gunslinger Girl. I said it's called "The Light Before we Land," and managed to remember how some of it went.
On the airplane to Austin I got out my iPod and hit play. I've got it set to play random songs, and out of all 3497 songs that happened to be on it at the time, the first song it randomly decided to play was "The Light Before we Land."
The girl sitting in front of me on the airplane had her laptop with her, and decided to use it to watch the first Lord of the Rings movie. The gap between her seat and the one next to her was fairly wide, so I could see about the center 90% of screen from where I was sitting. About 10 minutes into the movie, she paused it, looked at me, and asked if I could see it OK. I said yes, and she went back to the movie. After about 1.5 hours her batteries ran out, at which point she apologized for not letting me see the ending. Both times she sounded and acted like she was sincerely happy that I was watching it along with her. I was a bit surprised about this, since when she watched it she used her headphones and she didn't turn on the subtitles, with the result that I had to rely on memory (I've seen the movie once) and lip reading (something I'm terrible at) to catch any of the dialog. Anyway, it was fun to watch and I'm glad she wasn't annoyed at me for basically watching it over her shoulder.
Nick came down to Austin to visit me while I was down there, and it was nice to see someone from Tohoku again. We went to a Japanese restaurant that he frequents, which I suppose is appropriate. This place had good food, and had very nice prices; all of the Japanese places in Madison are really expensive. I ended up ordering yaki-soba, just because that's what I lived off of in Japan. The beef they used at this restaurant tasted very good, but was completely different from any that I had in Japan, which was a bit disappointing.
After dinner Nick gave me a brief tour of the UT campus. It seemed to be much bigger than the UW campus, but part of that is probably because they have more buildings and the buildings are fairly close together. The UW campus is also downtown, but is more mixed in with the other buildings downtown, and also has 2 major roads running through it. Every year I find out about more UW buildings that I didn't know existed.
5/25/05
A guy my company hired for me came and picked me up from the hotel and took me to various apartment complexes. We looked at 6 before lunch, and 2 after lunch. After about the third one though, my head was starting to spin. I couldn't remember what questions I'd already asked the places, and what each one had said about things. I spent most of the afternoon trying to narrow down my choices, and eventually chose three to investigate further. Unfortunately, the motel I was staying in didn't have internet access, so I was unable to research these places online. Instead, I used a 2 hour calling card to phone home and had my dad do my research for me. By the time I'd used up all the minutes on the card I'd pretty much decided on the one that was closest to work. It seems like a decent place, isn't too cheap, and is right across the street from work. Depending on how bad the traffic on that street is, I expect the commute to work to be somewhere between 1 and 5 minutes.
Comments:
Post a Comment
