Two Twenty-Five Oh Seven

Hi Everybody!

My first post of 2007... I'll start off with my customary apologies for not posting sooner :) One of my new year's resolutions is to take my camera around with me more. It's part of my larger resolution to return to being more creative, because lately I feel like I've definitely been neglecting that part of my life. Hopefully, this will also lead to more pictures, which I will post up (I got the idea from my older brother's blog) and hence more updates for the lot of you :)

Let's see, ever since November last...

Friends Viet and Mei Li visited from San Jose. Lots of fun as always. We ate lots of good food and they found this place called The Griddle Cafe up on Sunset which makes some excellent more exotic pancakes (oreo crumb, pumpkin pie, etc.) and cream cheese french toast. The pancakes are huge too! I swear like the size of a small pizza.Greg and Ali visited from New York, and we all ran around town getting korean food and going to the swap meet. Amy also visited from Fremont, CA and we went to the refurbished Griffith Park Observatory. This place has been under reconstruction for 5 years and just recently reopened. The highlights are the planetarium show (voiced by this funny sounding narrator) and the view of the city from the hilltop. It's funny because later we realized that from the roof of our house, we could see the Hollywood sign and the Observatory :)
Christmas was largely spent working but it was worth it because our residency program has this thing called pullback, which is essentially that you work your butt off for one of the holidays (xmas vs. new year's) and then you get several days off for the other holiday. My schedule worked out in such a way that I had almost 10 days off for New Years, which was excellent. I ended up going up to San Francisco to celebrate with old friends. We had to decide between having everyone drive up to the city, finding parking, dealing with driving home intoxicated vs. just getting together at Viet house and having a bunch of people sleep over. As you can see, we chose the latter and it was excellent. Good friends, good times... what else is there?Batman also made an appearance at our house.. One morning, I woke up as usual, got dressed, checked my email, got ready to head out, opened my room door.. and was slightly startled by a diminutive pinata standing right outside my door. Turns out Harsha and Chaitali had driven by a pinata store the previous evening and couldn't resist. But for $12 he has been thoroughly worth the expense in laughs... The Dark Knight has mysteriously appeared (as is his nature) all over the house, including in Jeff's shower, under the covers in bed, hanging upside down in Jeff's room and even on the roof, watching over our neighborhood. That Reddy, what a joker...Then my real vacation. The first of my two week vacations finally came around in the first half of February. Not that I'm really complaining mind you. With our ability to switch shifts with others at will, I feel like I've managed to get several strings of days when I could get away as needed to maintain sanity during residency. But on sort of a whim, I decided to go visit my friend Alice, who had recently moved out to Hawai'i (it's never a bad time to go to Hawai'i, after all.) I stopped in Honolulu for a couple days where I soaked in the general atmosphere of the islands once again - the sweet li hing mui, the pricey supermarket prices, the semi-broken down state of the buildings, the warmth and the often unpredictable rain showers. I then set off for Maui, which I had never been to, to seek some adventure and some contemplation.Maui is probably the second most popular of the Hawai'ian Islands. I landed in Wailuku (middle of the island) and went to rent a car, getting a silver Chevy Monte Carlo - this would be important later considering how much time I ended up spending in the car. I then drove the car south and then west to Lahaina and Kana'apali, the big artsy resorty area on the west side. Lots of art galleries (way expensive) and some nice beaches, but overall I wasn't that impressed with that side of the island - a little too commercial. I did see this cool, slightly eerie, boat that had overturned in the Lahaina harbor...
The second day, I drove north around the west end of the island. That day I saw two spectacular sights. One was the Nakalele Blowhole (someone's going to have to excuse me if I get these hawai'an names wrong :)... after a short hike through what looked like acid etched landscape (I think it was the interaction of limestone and sea water) I found the blowhole, which was essentially a 2-foot hole that had been bored by the action of the surf. Occasionally, quite unexpectedly as well I will add, the pressures would be just right and this plume of water/spray would shoot 30 to 40 feet into the air. It was really neat.The second of the two sights was near the Olivine Pools (that's what they are called in the guidebook..) and quite possibly the most amazing thing I saw/experienced on Maui. The pools are these tide pools in the rocks which are deep enough to sit or swim in. What's really spectacular is that the ocean is right next to you and the waves crashing down. I was going to go down there but if you check back at the beginning of the paragraph, you'll see I said 'near' the Olivine Pools. The path split on the way there and I saw that everyone was going left to get to the pools. So I decided to take the right fork to see where it would lead. I could see why the path was less taken (I actually had to climb down some steep parts of the cliff through some trees to down to the ocean) but when I did I was rewarded with a spectacular pool all my own. Crystal clear water to sit in with waves crashing in against the rocks and cascading around you. Sure, there were a couple times when I feared for my life as the bigger waves came toppling over the rocks but sitting there watching the fury of the ocean made me feel like this was what living life was for.
I also saw whales off the coast during this day, which was pretty sweet.

My third day I drove the famous road to Hana, a small town on the east side of Maui. There are a ridiculous 50 miles and 500 curves or something to the road and it's pretty famous. Essentially there are a bunch of cool waterfalls to stop at as you drive along the road. There hadn't been a lot of rain though so the waterfall were a bit small and there were way too many 'private property' and 'do not enter' signs. Eventually, I just started ignoring them and went on a couple cool hikes. I didn't realize how undeveloped Maui was though so all the way there I didn't have any cell phone signal so when I got to Hana, there was no longer any place to stay. I ended up sleeping in the car that night and, you know, the back seat of the Monte Carlo is actually pretty comfortable. Enough so that I slept in the car a total of three times during the trip. Yes, silly perhaps, but it kind of reminds you what it's like to rough it a bit.

I was hoping to drive around the southern end of the island on my fourth day but it turns out the road was closed because of the recent earthquake on the Big Island. I got up early to watch the sunrise, spent the morning hiking the Pipiwai trail to a 200-foot waterfall - and despite warning markers (some people have been injured/killed in flash floods) went on a path to the top of the waterfall... very carefully, mind you :) There, an infinity pool collects before the water dives down into the canyon and you can see as far as the eye can see. Then I followed to river down to the ocean side and the Seven Sacred Pools of O'heo, a popular place for people to swim and jump from waterfalls into the pools.

On the fifth day, I woke up super early (no joke, it was 3am) and drove up the road to the summit of Haleakala. This is the old volcanic crater on Maui and it stands 10,000 feet above sea level. Its name meaning "House of the Sun", sunrises from Haleakala are spectacular. Standing in the freezing cold and 30mph wind (lucky, I had brought my ski clothes in prep for my trip to Tahoe), you see the dark sky light up in shades of blue and violet and then the sunrise into the clearest sky over a sea of clouds.The rest of the trip in Maui was largely spent relaxing on the beaches and in a couple small cafes (yes, I even studied for my upcoming exam.) Well, not quite true, I did go snorkeling at this awesome place called Fishbowl. It's an inlet formed behind a massive lava flow in southern maui. You actually had to park a half a mile away and walk to the trail (which I did) but the trick was that the trailhead was really hard to find as all of the lava rock looked the same from the road and you couldn't see the trail. Standing at the side of the road after two failed attempts to walk into the lava field and having almost given up, a hawai'ian woman pulled up in a while truck. Surprisingly, I realized it was the same woman I had offered a ride to earlier on the road (she was walking by herself in the hot sun and it was pretty hot). She said "the trailhead is over there. Don't tell anyone else. I'm telling you just because you were so nice and polite earlier." Hmm, karma I guess. After a hot and exhausting 1-mile through the lava, I found Fishbowl and it turned out to be as awesome as suggested with tons of cool fish for the snorkeling.After another brief stop in Honolulu, during which I cooked dinner for Alice and Terry and relayed my adventures, I flew to Sacramento. There a bunch of us from residency last year convened at Mukesh's house for our (now) annual ski trip. The drive to the mountains was filled with rain and for a while we were afraid there wouldn't be any snow. Then we crossed the 7000ft mark and everything turned white.. and then we were afraid, we'd die because we had no chains. There was a scary moment when the car started slipping downhill where Wei had to swerve around Minh's car and two cars which had already crashed into the shoulder. The skiing/snowboarding turned out great though I always forget how tiring it is. Afterwards, we drove to Reno and ate ridiculous amounts of food at the casino buffet. Good stuff.

Also had a chance to go rock climbing with Tim, one of our ER attendings. I can't believe I remember my skills after so long - be proud, Tek!Whew! End of a long blog, hope everyone liked the pictures :) Drop me an email if we haven't talked a while or call :) Take care! -Nik