Vincent Cheung

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Sunday, November 06, 2005

Careful, you may mistake me for having a life

I picked a great day to go to the Hot Sake dragon boat practice. It was like the coldest day since I've been here (high in the single digits), plus it was raining pretty hard. I don't have any rain or snow/cold weather gear with me here. I scraped together any clothing that was almost suitable for the weather and managed to keep warm. As nothing I have is water proof, what I did was just layer like crazy so that it'd take the rain a while to seep through all the layers :p. T-shirt, long sleeve, sweater, wind jacket, life jacket. Fuzzy pants + track pants. Two pairs of socks + runners. Hat from the company meeting + hood from my jacket. Crappy stretchy wool gloves. Surprisingly, while I could see my breath and anything exposed was completely wet, I was really comfortable. Didn't even notice the rain or cold, but it might have been the pain that drone it out.

I had a good time and the company was really cool. This group of people just doesn't do anything small, which is awesome. 20-something people showed up to paddle in the rain and we took two boats out. It was pretty hard as they were doing like 22 min. of continuous paddling on each side and my muscles don't nearly have enough endurance to do that right now, considering that it was my first time dragon boating. I'm pretty sore today - upper back is pretty bad, my butt has got to be seriously bruised or something, and my side muscles are sore.

They had an end of the year meeting later that day and I crashed the party after the meeting. They had it in one of the peoples' house. I get inside and there's like this massive group of people.... Everytime I see them, it's a big gathering. They have like 40+ people in total, not sure how many were actually there, but quite a bit more than at practice. The group is really cool, it's an interesting mix of people - ranging from around my age to undisclosed ages, good balance of guys and girls, people of all colour, and as typical of my experience here, few Americans :p. A bunch are from Microsoft, but there's also representation from Amazon, Starbucks, and the unemployed. We had good representation of engineering from across Canada too - a girl from computer engineering at UBC, me from comp. eng. U of M, and two girls from systems design engineering Waterloo. Aside from dragon boating, the other common denominator that I see that strings them all together is that they all act as if they're in their 20's :)

Not too late in the evening, we shifted over to another couples' house back in Bellevue. Apparently the convoy of cars is quite typical. We lost some people, but still had something like 20. House party where the people throwing the party actually owns the house, that's new :). There was some indoor volleyball going on :). It was a pretty late party, didn't end until 4 in the morning :p.

The only bad thing is that I only met all these people like a week and a half before I'm leaving. Just as I met some people that are cool to hang out with and fun to socialize with...

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