A couple weekends, a wedding, a race and Hamburg

A (not so) quick update on the past two weeks:

A couple weekends ago was uneventful except for the fact that a few recent HBS graduates, including EWren, were passing through Amsterdam and we met up for dinner and drinks. After dinner we went to the Holland Casino, which was actually my first time there, and then proceeded to drink more than I have in a while. If this is any indication of what HBS will be like I'll need to start training…

Then it was another workweek in Hamburg before my whirlwind trip to the US. On Friday, I flew from Amsterdam to LA for Evan's wedding weekend, getting in at around 7pm (4am Amsterdam time) after about 14 hours of travelling. I was obviously pretty dead, and not too many people were in town yet, so I just crashed when I got in. I usually don't get too jetlagged since I'm used to travelling, but the 9 hour difference did me in pretty good, so I was wide awake at 4:30am the next morning. It was great weather out though, so I decided to run over to the Rose Bowl as I was staying in Pasadena. When I got over there I took a look at it from the outside, and eventually found a way to sneak inside the gate and climb up a scaffolding to get a view of the field from the top of the stadium. The sun was just rising and no one was around because it was like 6am, which made for a pretty cool view.

After that I chilled around Pasadena for a bit, checked out the Caltech campus, then picked up CWong from the airport. We headed to Evan's pre-wedding dinner party at his parents place where I got to see a lot of PKTs and other MIT friends I hadn't seen in a while, which is always fun. That night and the next day more friends continued to get into town, which made for some fun shenanigans, including partying in a San Gabriel hotel room and getting some bubble tea and dim sum. On Sunday night was the wedding reception which I sadly only got to see a part of because I had to leave for the airport. However, what I did get to be there for was pretty awesome, especially the androgenous emcee who only spoke broken English, sang in addition to his emcee duties and was very obnoxious about the games going on during the reception… It was my first Chinese wedding, so that was an experience as well. We did the traditional bouquet and garter tosses (though for some reason when Evan was "finding" the garter the emcee had Spencer and then Jeff hold the blindfold onto Evan's head…) and then when I was leaving they were doing a game where Evan and King basically get as much money as they can from their friends and make necklaces/sashes out of it. From the sound of it there were more ridiculous games and karaoke after I left too, good times.

we gather around to watch the hilarity

The reason I had to leave was because I was getting on a redeye flight back to Atlanta to run the Peachtree Road Race in the morning. Oddly enough JonJon and his girlfriend (wait… fiancé) Tiff were also doing the same thing and we were on the same flight. I landed at about 6:40am, got picked up by my parents, and was running by 7:40. Because of my recent injury troubles I wasn't even expecting to be able to run the whole thing (I had run maybe twice in the previous two months), but my calves ended up doing ok and I was able to finish in a time somewhere under 50 minutes. Then after a good southern brunch and some time with the family during the day it was back on another redeye to Amsterdam and then another flight to Hamburg for work. The back-to-back redeyes were brutal – I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, and plan to try my hardest never to do it again.

In Hamburg my case is winding down, so I finally had a little time to walk around the city and see some of the sights. It's a really nice city with lots of old buildings, nice shopping areas and some historical landmarks too. One of them is the warehouse district, which is basically dozens of identical brick warehouses lining the canals and waterways of the river and the harbor. The harbor obviously isn't used in the same way it was in the 16th century, but many of the buildings are still occupied by shipping companies and manufacturers, which is pretty neat. The other distinctive thing about Hamburg is the churches – pretty much every European city has big churches, but the interesting thing about Hamburg is there were a ton of them and they were all very unique. The skyline is dotted with literally dozens of steeples, but they don't seem to follow a consistent architecture like you see in a lot of cities. I also stopped by the St. Pauli neighborhood, but sadly I can't say that I saw the St. Pauli Girl (I didn't even see the beer anywhere either now that I think about it).

The Inner Alster lake and fountain

Warehouse district

Justin wasn't around unfortunately

So on Thursday I said goodbye to Hamburg for the last time, and now I'm in Amsterdam doing a little work and looking forward to the upcoming weekend in Venice!