Saket Vora

Last Friday, Donny bounded off the train in Palo Alto and I finally got to see him after nearly 2 years! I could tell he was excited to be in the Bay Area — one of the first thing he told me was that he was surprised at how big it was. Nearly two hours to go from Berkeley to Palo Alto! Donny had spent the last day and a half in Berkeley visiting the school during its civil engineering department’s open house. Berkeley is one of the schools that accepted Donny for graduate school, along with MIT, Georgia Tech, University of Texas @ Austin, and Purdue. He had visited Georgia Tech and Texas earlier, and Berkeley definitely offered something new.

We had a bit to eat at the Coupa Cafe then headed down to SJC to pick Mike up. Mike was arriving early for the Game Developer’s Conference taking place next week at Moscone West in San Francisco. This would be I think Mike’s 4th GDC. We headed back up 101 towards the Googleplex!  Ben, an ‘02 Park, invited me over and it was an opportune time for Donny to catch up with his old friend Ed from New Jersey, who was at Stanford for his M.S. before joining Google just a week ago. I had visited the Googleplex during the EEP trip in ‘07, but it’s always such a neat place to visit.

After the three of us got back to the Farm, we went out on a walking tour of campus. This gave us plenty of time to talk and catch up , and Amit joined us too.

We did a long circuit through the campus, swinging by the coffee shop at the Clark Center where fellow Park classmate Mary stopped by too.

By this point, it was too late to make a trip up to SF, and our plans to do a sunset Big Dish hike were thwarted by early closing times. So we did the next best thing: head over to the Old Pro for drinks and March Madness college basketball. And what madness it was – two OT games! We hit up an Indian restaurant down the street for a quick but filling meal afterward.

Donny was leaving at 8am from SFO the next day, so we called it an early night. This was a little tough with a raging party going on in the courtyard outside. Mike and I continued to talk until 2:30 or 3. Groggily, we drove up to SFO and bid goodbye. After getting some more shut-eye, we headed to Prolific Oven for a late lunch, coffee, and to get some work done. A return to Old Pro was in order to catch the afternoon basketball game, but alas no upsets.

In the evening we synced up with Amit for a late dinner at Tofu House, a Korean restaurant in Palo Alto. It’s kinda sad, but even though i’ve known Mike since 10th grade of high school, I can’t say I’ve ever had a real Korean meal before. And man I’ve been missing out!