West Express diaries, part 2

Colorado, Or how much mountains are enough montains?:)
I liked this state. It kinda looks like Iran. Mountainous with dry weather.The road from Denver towards west very much resembles the Chaloos road in Iran which passes the Alborz mountains in the North. Only the road was cleaner and safer and there were less shaggy venders cabins alongside the road.


Another interesting thing in Colorado: this is the picture I took from the window of the giftshop in the hotel we stayed at in Denver. what do you think about the line on the t-shirt? Who is fighting the terrorism? Indians? Or are they the ones Coloradoans flighted against? ;)


Loveland, Colorado
How many of you would consider changing your trip route across States to pass by a certain icecream shop?:-) I would in general, though I couldn't do it for practical reasons this time we were badly behind our schedule for the day, and we could have missed our hotel reservation for the night. But anyway, there is a small town in Colorado called Loveland. It surprisingly has a branch of my favorite Italian gelato shop, while some big cities like Chicago for instance don't. Btw, isn't Loveland an interesting name for a town? :) So here's some more about it:

It's a town of 50,000 population, about 30 miles east of the Rocky Montains National Park. Each year hundreds of thousands of Valenites from across the world are sent to Loveland to be remailed in Feb, handstamped by volunteers with the town's postmark and a special poem that changes each year. Aren't you tempted to send a letter to Loveland this year?:-) I am. I might as well ask for a special overnight icecream delivery. In February it might get to Champaign unmelted!

LA and Cold

Sleeping all the way when passing California road One,
Walking with a runny nose in Hollywood boulevard,
Breaking your camera while shooting the Chinese theater,
Wearing a jacket when everybody else is in bikini in Santa Monica beach,

LA was not nice to me!


P.S. I forgot to mention the terrible smell of the Hallywood blvd. Who is the mayer there? He better make some public restrooms there!

West Express diaries, part 1

Okay, here we go, the diaries of my road trip to california. I will write about the things I found interesting along the way. The other thing is I usually like to keep my posts as short as possible in this blog, but I don't think it's gonna happen with these diaries.

We started off on the commencement day in our campus. The streets of our tini-tiny twin cities were irregularly traffic-jammed with an unusual number of cars in campus town. It took us like 20 minutes to get to the interstate, which was kind of funny cause usually it take like 5 minutes to get there. I thought to myself if that was how the trip is supposed to be, we might need an additional week to get to our destination! But luckily the road was smooth enough and we made it to Kansas City for the night stay.

Do you know which state Kansas City is in? .... Wrong answer! It's not Kansas, it's Missouri. The city is close to the border of Kansas though. There was a museum of Oz there. Bewitched by the Wicked show, I like to see it but they close on Mondays, boo! The other significant happening of this day was the hail storm that hit us in the road somewhere in Utah. I was driving with my mom next to me and the sky got cloudy. Pretty dark clouds lower in the sky and the wired thing was that in the horizon there were two dark color (same color as the clouds themselves) vertical columns coming down of the sky to the ground. From distance the view ahead of us look pretty much like a giant pi. And I was driving right into it. Spooky, nah?;)

So as we approached to one of the legs of the giant pi, the rain began. Light in the beginning, but quickly in turned into a shower. A shower so intense that i could see nothing in front of me. And when I say nothing, i mean "nothing". The wipers were on full force and still no visibility. Wooyee, it was a scary 3 minutes. I continued to drive ahead, cause i couldn't distinguish the road shoulder to pull over, and even if i would, no other car could see me stopped there and they could hit us. Now add to this situation a telephone call from a family friend :))) Okay, lets not make it more dramatic. The whole thing was just a couple of minutes and then the shower turned into a hail storm, pretty big size hails, but yet we were happy that we could see in front of us. So did you see the thing? The leg of that weird pi cloud was the hail and rain storm! So I guess somewhere in the right hand side, some other poor drivers in the road were struggling with the other leg of the storm!

I wish I had a picture of the pi storm, but you tell me, could you take time to shoot in the middle of that ciaos?;)

P.S. something else about Utah, in the walmarts there, they have the book of mormons on the racks in the register isle. No wonder, hah? :D

P.S.2 In the ladies room in a gas station in Utah, the tampon despenser, also dispensed condoms! Isn't that strange? What's it with Utah?;-)

I'm back!

Think for a moment and answer this question: Could you let go of your internet connection for a week? If someone asked me this question two weeks ago, I would have answered with a strong No, being aware of my addiction to my 3 email accounts, my two weblogs, and my feed reader. But things went on such that I lost my internet for a whole 9 days, and I'm still breathing!

I recall some years back I heard about a program that had American families live a week of no-TV, helping them find other family activities. My case was kinda differnt cause I was (still am) on a trip and other new things easily fill in your free time automatically. But yet it was an interesting (though irretating in the beginning) experience.

Anyway, I'll start writting about my road trip from Champaign to Santa Clara soon. We passed 6-7 states and visited 4 National parks along the way which were amazing. But for now have this picture of Simpsons family cauch. You have to imagine me sitting right next to Homer. I do have a picture like that, but I'll send it out by individula requests, hahah!

Stay cool whereever you are, cause California's weather is joyfully pleasant these days:)

"Ingredients for life"

This was such a deep post, and i liked it. I have known the guy who wrote it as a not-too-close friend. This gives another dimension to these words, kinda separates them from the usual words of wisdom you could find everywhere; what i often find hard to relate to, beacuse the people who say them seems so inhumanely wise. I thought I'd share it with you here.


P.S. I often find people become conscience and wise when its close to their birthdays! Have you experienced this?

"Kiss me goodbye, I'm defying gravity !

... And no one is gonna ever bring me down! "

Well, from where we were sitting, she literally was flying over our heads :-) Chicago's Elphaba is not Idina Menzel, but Dee Rosciolli. She actually did a very good job. She too could get into the Toni's I say.

Did you know that the actors in a musical wear a very tiny microphone on their foreheads? It's barely visible, but we could see each and every detail of each and everything on the stage, except for the red shoes the wicked witch of the east had on when Dorothy's house hit her!