On Friday afternoon Chanda came up to visit from Santa Cruz. It was a beautiful day and after hanging out at the Free Speech Cafe, we drove up to the UC Botanical Garden in the last hour before it closed. It was free that day, which was nice because we only had time to see the "dry house" and admire the view of the sun setting beyond the Golden Gate. They have some really awesome plants there, like these cacti from Baja California that grow horizontally along the ground, and tons of cactus-like Euphorbia from South Africa. There were some other even weirder things whose names I can't remember. We then had a lively dinner at Tandor Kitchen with Zack, Craig, and Jennifer.

On Saturday morning my I went with my mom to the open house for San Francisco Japanese Language Class, a Saturday school for children of Japanese living in the Bay Area. My mom was invited because the same organization had selected her to go on a teachers' exchange program to Japan last year, and she gave a brief slideshow about her trip. I visited a class where kids were learning kanji (Chinese characters), which was interesting because I had learned kanji when I was in college and I was curious how they were taught to elementary school students. During lunch I talked to a number of the people involved with the school; two turned out to be Japanese professors in physics at Berkeley, and a third was at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. The school receives some money and a few administrators from the Japanese Ministry of Education, and I talked to the principal, who was from Kyushu and had only arrived in April. To get this job, you have to be recommended, and pass a test, and then you have no say over where in the world you are assigned; he felt very lucky to have ended up in San Francisco and not, say, Africa. It was fun to get a chance to speak Japanese again, although many of the people on the board spoke English so well that there was no point in trying to impress them by speaking Japanese.

I went directly from San Francisco to to a Fungus Fair being held at the Oakland Museum. There were all kinds of displays set up in the halls at the museum, and people selling cultivated mushrooms outside. The most impressive bit were these expansive displays of all kinds of weird and wonderful native fungi that had been collected by hordes of enthusiasts from all over the Bay Area in the days leading up to the fair. I had no idea there were so many kinds of mushrooms around here.

Today I took a trip down to the South Bay with Craig and Jennifer. We had dim sum in Palo Alto with friends of theirs, and I was able to overcome some of my fears about not being able to find enough Chinese food that lacks eggs. Since fortune cookies contain eggs, I gave mine to Craig; it turned out to contain the message "You deserve and will receive the respect of others", a statement that I suppose will not apply to me now. After lunch Craig and I drove to Los Altos to see Ken Ferry. We walked around downtown Los Altos (looks like downtown Los Gatos) and Ken took us to Apple headquarters, where he works. I thought back to when I was a kid in Silicon Valley, and how all us nerds used to get into heated, angry arguments about Macs versus PCs, in the same way that Harvard students used to argue about politics and hate each other afterwards. If I thought too hard while I was at Apple, I remembered how using PCs was such a part of my identity, and how I felt personally attacked when Mac users made fun of Windows 95 to my face. And I wasn't even that into computers to begin with. I guess I've moved on to bigger and better causes, like the Democratic Party and evolutionary biology.

Saturday night, Nayra, a visiting student in our lab, held a party. Some of you might be wondering what the other people in my new lab are like. Here's a picture of most of us, taken by Margarita Hadjistylli: