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Mon, 18 Sep 2006
[20:52] Googlified!
Today was my first day at Google. I caught the light rail to Andrews place and scored a ride with him to work. I was there in plenty of time to join the others and spent the rest of the day doing all the normal "joining a company" paperwork plus the Google-specific things.
All in all it's been a pretty normal kind of day, tomorrow I suspect will be a bit more mind-blowing...
[Posted at: 2006-09-18 20:52]
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Sun, 17 Sep 2006
[18:04] House Hunting
We had our rental tour with Jalayne today. A rental tour is when someone who has good local knowledge drives you around to look at rental places that they think will suit your needs. It was a bit disappointing, we looked at a lot of houses and we didn't really see anything great. I think that moving straight into luxury apartments kinda skews your view of what you're looking at. The other problem is that we've gotten used to London suburb placement (and public transport) and told everyone that we'd be happy to look for somewhere to live either in Mountain View itself or perhaps in the surrounding suburbs of San Jose, Sunnyville or Palo Alto. Turns out that's not such a hot idea since everything is (literally) miles away from everything else and this place isn't exactly bike friendly.
The other problem was that this was Jalayne's first rental tour and she was a little disorganised so we ended up flitting from one end of town to the other. On the other hand she had really awesome local knowledge and showed us around a fair bit so we got to see Shoreline Park, Santana Row (the local "strip") and as she's a knitter she also showed Shona a place called Commuknitty. Unfortunately, the hunt's not over...
[Posted at: 2006-09-17 18:04]
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Sat, 16 Sep 2006
[23:13] Walking for fun and fitness (and exhaustion)
We got a few e-mails from the lady who's going to take us on our rental tour tomorrow suggesting a couple of places to look at, in hindsight, she probably thought we had a vehicle of some description. We popped out to check them out and ended up doing a LOT of walking. I'm used to looking at maps in either kilometres or quarter-miles. Those mile-wide squares are quite deceptive!
Apart from the exhaustion, it was actually good to go for a trot through suburbia and see what it's like here. We saw a couple of parties in the park with some pinyatas. In the end, we only managed to check out one of the two places but whilst wandering down El Camino Real we found more Bubble Cups (yay!). We ended up at the mercy of public transport again (trying to catch the hourly Caltrain) on the way home - next thing after we find a house is to find a vehicle (we know where all the car-lots are now).
The Pollocks helped out again by inviting us over to dinner since we've got no food and no local shops to obtain any from (Great Mall only does clothing, machinery and assorted other homewares). They also had a couple of people from work around to help ease me in which was pretty cool.
[Posted at: 2006-09-16 23:13]
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Fri, 15 Sep 2006
[17:46] Meet The Local Mall
We ventured out on our own to visit the Great Mall again. On the way to the VTA Light Rail we ran across a stationary behemoth. Not ALL of the vehicles here are this large but I'd peg it around 30%, check it out:
It's really nice to have a horizon again! We got to look at a lot out of the VTA window on the way, about a 30 minute trip from the Tasman stop to Great Mall.
[Posted at: 2006-09-15 17:46]
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Thu, 14 Sep 2006
[15:47] Welcome To America!
We made it! The advantage of living in Australia is that you get used to REALLY long flights so the 12-hour hop from the UK to the USA was easy!
We black-cabbed it out from Balham to SFO on time at 1300 local time (GMT-7).
Getting out of the airport was amazingly easy. We waltzed through both Immigration and Customs with barely a stop and getting out of San Francisco was just as easy! We caught the BART to Millbrae and then hopped onto the (enourmous) Caltrain to San Jose where we taxi'd the last mile to "home".
The fabulous Andrew and Sarah came over after they finished work and drove us around to the local mall, Great Mall for dinner at Johnny Rockets and then shipped us over to the local supermarket to stock up on grub because there's NOTHING within walking distance!
Initial thoughts on America:
- The US is a LOT like Australia - startlingly so. It could just be because I'm used to the UK now but the physical town structure and the social interactions seem to be a lot like what I remember home being like (obviously my US sample set is pretty small right now though).
- The American stereo-type is definitely not representative of the normal, everyday American. This is a conclusion that I've been coming to over the last few months of dealing with interviewers and post-interview organisers. They all seem to be really friendly and even the checkout chick kinda folks over here are stupendously helpful and friendly compared to their UK counterparts. Last night Andrwe got me signed up for a SafeWays card and the bloke realised that he'd forgotten to key in the details before he started doing the checkout so after he finished he manually re-keyed it all to get me my discount and then gave me a refund, all whilst smiling and apologising!
- It's BIG. Everything is big. The appartment, then bed (you need a ladder to get in), the milk, the paper (actually, the paper sizes are just weird), the towns which are spread out and sprawling around here, the roads - even the small suburban roads look like 4 lane highways, especially after the twisty little UK streets that we've gotten used to.
- Cereal is only cereal if it contains a minimum of 10% sugar - even the museli.
- It really helps to have great friends who can help you out with stuff like SIM cards when you don't have a credit reference. I'm looking forward to going through all of that again!
[Posted at: 14/09/2006 23:47]
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