Hieumor

nicholas
Originally uploaded by Tygriss.

Nicholas celebrated his three cubed birthday yesterday! We started off the birthday week with a Dynamo/DC United soccer game complete with team gear. And last night we celebrated with dinner at our favorite restaurant. They treated us with drinks and a deliciously gooey banana rum volcano dessert!

Ahh, another year gone by. Here's to many many more! Cheers!

This month I had two Student Leadership Seminars for my district, one in Dallas and the other in Mexico City, Mexico. While Dallas was pretty much the same as when I saw it last, there wasn't a lot of sight seeing to be done, however I did get to go visit friends that I hadn't seen in a long time. The Dallas trip was Mashimaro's first drive up to the Metroplex. Yaa Maro! And this trip to Mexico was my first time in Business/First Class - talk about sweeet.

Mexico City was a short trip, sadly, but it was a lot of fun. The Mexico City campus of the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey was beautiful and the students were amazing. I was picked up at the airport by a student who drove me to the campus in his red Peugeot 307 CC and got to listen to the latest latin pop music with the top down. The hosting students were very efficient and quite talented. A couple of them performed on stage with their dance troupe for an on-campus engineering festival. The food was generously provided by one of the students' mom. We're talking real, home cooked, delicious mexican food!

There's a huge chess set on campus. The pieces have rollers so they can be moved around. Each of the pieces represent a piece of Mexico's history.

This is the technology building on campus. The inside walls are all glass/plexi-glass. Even the elevator shaft is see-through. It houses just about every engineering and science lab with the latest technology and there's even an RTV and Digital Arts lab!

There's this well on campus that collects rainwater that gets pumped to a treatment center to be reused to water the landscaping.

Labels: photos

I don't usually get window seats because I have a fear of being squashed between a large person and the wall, but sometimes it is worth it when you can see things like:

Labels: photos

Bright Lights
Originally uploaded by Tygriss.

This month's trip took me to Tokyo Japan. Leaving the Tuesday after Hurricane Ike blew through, the airport was full of people relieved to feel air conditioning. It was a relatively uneventful but painful 13 hour flight. I have been convinced that economy seating is high priced torture. There's no being comfortable, even with empty seats next to you.

I spent just seven days in Tokyo in a small hotel near Akihabara Station. I got to visit a few places in between the drizzle and rain and took my first ride on a train! Immensely fun, and scary at the same time. I couldn't read anything, I had to rely on numbers, colors, and diagrams to get around and figure out where I was going. My pictures are posted on flickr, and you can watch the slide show here.

Labels: overseas, photos

We were watching the news coverage of Ike making landfall in Galveston pushing water up and over into the streets. The winds picked up here near downtown, but we didn't get the crazy scary winds until around 2am. Power stayed on throughout the night and all of today, but we lost water pressure. Thankfully, Nicholas froze a bunch of water and loaded us up with the bottled stuff and filled our tub just in case.

Through out the night we could hear the trees slapping up against the building. We could also feel the building sway a little under the pressure of the winds. According to the news, we got anywhere between 80-90 mph winds. Pretty close to the wind storms we had up in Lubbock, but with more water and flying trees. Around 5am, just before we decided to try and get some sleep, the building's fire alarm went off. The city wasn't sending out any emergency vehicles until after the storm passed so we had to try and sleep through the loud and vibrating duck quacking. If there had been a fire, we would've been screwed inside or out.

By 8am, we were down to just bits of rain. The alarm gave up quacking and turned itself off. Nicholas and I checked on the cars and they did well. Drove around our area of town and saw tree branches and lots of leaves all over the road.

Labels: Ike