San Francisco and its environs

Christmas time!!! What a lovely time to be in the USA. Every home is decorated, colourful lights and some decorations with themes...and if you are lucky, clear skies in the evening making it such a beautiful sight for anyone! And for an Indian software engineer like me, this means the time to relax without fear of delays in projects or having to think of deadlines. This is the true holiday time in the whole year (eventhough you might still be "working").

This Christmas, I used the vacation time to visit relatives on the West Coast/Silicon Valley - San Francisco (and its neighbouring towns of San Jose, Palo Alto, etc.). I would suggest the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" by Martyn Burke. Its a movie based on the book "Fire in the Valley" and is a comedy on the stories of "Apple" and "Microsoft". And thankfully for once in this year, there wasn't much problem with the flights! Even the dreaded red-eye flights weren't so bad. But yeah, the laziness and age in me finally caught up and when I landed back in Kansas, I slept like a baby. I took the newly bought Tamron 75-300mm lens for my Canon 350D on a spin during the trip and boy, my wife (my sponsor for the lens) was impressed with the amazing portraits that have come of her!!!!

The usual spots of Golden Gate, Downtown San Francisco and Stanford University and town were covered in this trip. This trip was mostly about family time and we stayed indoors. We had 2 wonderful family get-togethers at different locations and it felt real good. And personally for me, it was a great change in the environment. Here I'm, seeing loads of Sunshine and greenery around with beautiful autumn colours still present in many areas .....contrast that to the dull,lifeless environment in Kansas with the cold, bare trees and craving to have some sunshine fall on your body to produce Vitamin D!!!!!!!! Fell in love with California. Though everyone was wearing sweaters and jackets, this seemed like summer for me having spent almost 1.5 months in the Kansas winter.

The Stanford University is a private University and was started by Leland Stanford and his wife Jane Stanford. Leland was also the Governor of California during the years 1861-1863. Born and brought up in New York state, he started his career as a lawyer in Wisconsin and moved to California during the "California Gold Rush" and became a very successful business man. He started the Stanford University in memory of his only son who died at a young age of 16 due to typhoid during a trip to Italy. The picture above, is of the Hoover Tower which houses a library collection and is named after the former US president Herbert Hoover. He also happens to be the "first" student of Stanford University. It also has the largest university campus in the world (there are other colleges which own larger campuses, but they are not universities). They even have an old "clock tower" which rings on the hour and the university has a nice display of the mechanical parts making the clock tick.

I personally enjoyed this trip - lot of family time with relatives, nice food and excellent weather (compared to Kansas). And the sponsor of my new lens is a happy person seeing her wonderful portrait pictures it produced ;-)