AlbertLiang.net — Blog

Firstly, what I’m eating as I blog this:

Dinner last night:

Sights from the grocery store (Meijer, pronounced My-er):
(Buy ONE get TWO free! Needless to say… Eric’s apartment has 3 loaves of bread right now.)

(Somehow I don’t think this is a good combination. That’s like putting paper towels next to the drinks aisle.)

Found a new Arizona flavor here, and it’s awesome! (Plus, I just like apple-teas, but not the chemically “green sour apple” stuff… I mean like apple juice + tea)

And last but not least, my 6-way teleconference with Optix Productions board of directors last night =)

Karen came over from Detroit for Labor Day! It’s nice to have such a good friend just 30 mins away. =)

The cat looks surprised it got used as a coaster:

Chinese food!

What do you think? Is it “my” card?

Shaved ice!

We were tired/full/sleepy so we went to Biggby’s [Karen does a gay little hop every time she hears the word Biggby's]. We saw this at the front counter:

Me picking tea leaves (splinters) out of my vanilla red tea latte (good!):

Went perfuming at Sephora… found a REALLY GOOD SMELLING ONE (jasmine). Technically, it’s J’adore L’eau… which is a limited summer edition =(

We watched G.I.Joe and then went to Red Lobster. (I swear, they put the Red Lobster right next to the movie theater on purpose…)

We went yogurt-hunting afterwards. I thought I was crazy… I could swear there were 2 yogurt shops on State St., but we could only find one! (Turns out the other one was the next block over. We walked up and down that the same block like 4 times.) This one wasn’t THAT good… although it had key lime pie as a yogurt flavor!

We walked by this coffee shop that had really cool door handles! (Karen took this pic! Isn’t it good?? And obviously all the pix that I’m in, she took too. =P)

I went to Birch Run outlet malls with the Michigan Taiwanese Student Association yesterday. Well, actually, I went with Eric’s apartment, but they were going because MTSA was organizing a massive trip there. (Like 70 ppl… never had a TAS event that big before…)

Nike outlet mall… epic fail:

Had A&W for the first time (for lunch). Check out the root beer float! Mmm..

After the mall (not much to comment there… I bought stuff, including things I probably didn’t need… go figure) we went a little more north to a town called Frankenmurth. It’s like a little German-esque town with a lot of stores and German foods. Went to the Bavarian Inn:

Got the traditional sausage stuffs… it was OK. Different. The sauerkraut was good:

After dinner, we went wander through the other stores:

Ugly dolls! (Karen would be excited.)

Fudge-in-the-making:

As the sun started to set, we found ourselves here:

New friends =)

Bavarian Inn at night:

This morning, I met up with a semi-acquaintance and had Mediterranean food. I got falafel again!! (Hadn’t had one since NYC summer 2007…) Tak’s car was decorated all over with Totoro dolls. I thought it was really cute:

Life here is good. I’m pretty happy, although I’ll be even happier next weekend when Carol comes to visit and I finally settle into my own place. (So I can stop bumming off Eric’s couch and living out of my suitcase!)

Have you ever wondered why we say “fridge”, but the word “refrigerator” has no D? What happened to the D?

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_is_fridge_an_abbreviation_for_refrigerator

(Thanks Carol)

And now a photo run…

Today was the last day of orientation, and also the most useless. And also the earliest. Funny how all those factors add up together.

The food was certainly a step-up from the usual:

(Cotton candy and popcorn! Not to mention mini quiches, mini muffins, and fresh fruit for breakfast)

(Nature’s Crystal water… it’s really good! It’s like the Poland Spring of Michigan.)

(Another clocktower! This one’s on central next to Rackham [the graduate school])

(If I were these statues, I’d get pretty pissed about being sprayed on all day.)

And lastly… I leave you with this gem:
umich_school_song

Before we get to the main topic… here are some random pix!

Orientation (day 2 of 3) was today. It was the college of engineering orientation:

(Yes, I was totally paying attention… between facebook and taking pictures)

Here’s the engineering-quad clocktower. Even though it’s not nearly as cool (or sound as good) as the Cornell clocktower, I have to give them props for 3 things: it’s more modern (I like modern architecture more than old), it seems to be played in a more “digital”/”mechanical” way so they can hit a lot more notes a lot more quickly (instead of the Cornell method of using 1 poor person using all his feet/hands and running around a giant “organ”), and they have multiple clocktowers! This is just the one on engineering quad:

(It looks a little like… (1) a virus w/ the hexagonal protein casing, (2) one of those sentinel-things from the Matrix (the type that was used to drill down into Zion), and (3) a penis.)

OK, and now onto the main show. So I know I shouldn’t complain about getting free food… I haven’t paid for food for like 4-5 meals in a row now. It started with pre-orientation happy hour at Bar Louie (dinner on Monday night), and then lunch at BME orientation the next day, and then BBQ at BME BBQ that afternoon, followed by boxed sandwiches at lunch today. I just couldn’t take it anymore, because the only food I have at home is sandwiches and fruit punch, too. It was just too much “cold”, “dry”, “temporary” food… I needed something real.

While attempting to eat the boxed sandwich, this one persistent bee wasp (thanks Carol) kept coming back and landing on my turkey sandwich. Seriously, this thing was so persistent I had a “trained bee wasp (thanks Carol)” at my disposal. Wherever I led my sandwich, he would follow, so I could get him to do loop-de-loops and fly in circles around my wrist. Anyway, I finally decided I was tired of him landing on my sandwich (and pollinating it? (thanks Carol)) so I broke off a piece of my turkey sandwich and led him to it using my bigger sandwich. He landed there and didn’t bother me for the rest of lunch:

So today after orientation and talking to my adivsor, Eric and I went downtown to get Chinese food. (Technically, Taiwanese food!) But along the way, one of Eric’s friends called and said that the bubble tea shop (also Taiwanese) was having 50% off entrees today. (You know bubble tea food… fried chicken pieces, fried pork, etc. with rice and some small cold veggie sides.) Well, that was no “niu rou mian” but it was cheap, it was Asian (sorta), and I could get bbt (which I did)!

MmMmMMMmm….. =D It was pretty good, I ate it all, and I bought a second entree to take home for lunch/dinner tomorrow. It was so cheap — only $3.50 for each entree!

Food craving satisfied. A few more days of free food/sandwiches and I’ll need another real-meal fix. I can’t wait until I move into my own place so I can have my own stove/pots/plates and I won’t feel bad about mooching Eric’s roommate’s stuff and I can actually start cooking again. Until then, it’s minimalistic “mafan” stuff and just sandwiches/canned food.

We’ll start with actually chronological things… today was the first day of orientation. As part of the activities, they had us play a team-communications game. The rules of the game are: you have 1 “looker”, you have 1 “runner”, and the rest of the people on the team are “builders”. The “looker” leaves the group and goes to a secret room where s/he observes a particular structure that has already been built. The “looker” cannot leave that room, so it is the job of the “runner” to go to the “looker” and listen to his describe the structure. (The “runner” does not get to see the structure.) The “runner” then take the information over to the “builders” and relays the description from the “looker”. (The “runner” also does not get to touch any of the building pieces.)

The building blocks:

Our structure grows:

(No, our structure looked almost nothing like the original. I think the original was some kind teapot?)

And now for the random things I’ve seen around campus… in no particular order. This is the “decoration” in front of the architecture building (go figure):

Most people who have been on a college campus have seen chalkings all over the place advertising things. And most of us know that stencils and spray-on chalk are like the next big thing. But this is the first time I’ve seen multi-color chalk spray! So cool!

(I almost missed my bus taking this picture.)

Funny sign I saw at the bottom of an apartment complex. I think they were trying to get retail/restaurants to move in downstairs:

(If you can’t read it, it says: “Students above tired of eating cereal. Restaurants wanted!”)

A random cube spinning in central campus. I’m not sure what building it was in front of (although eventually I should find out):

And last but not least, this very sketchy but very well painted/decorated alleyway somewhere in downtown. Like you’re walking down this perfectly modern and clean street, and then blam, this alleyway, and then more clean/modern streets. I even ventured down this alley, but only about 100′. There’s a poem spray-painted to the ceiling of one of the archways. If you wander deeper in, you see people loitering. It’s actually kinda scary. I’m glad I went during the day. (Funny, the grad students I talked to knew about this alleyway, but nobody dared to venture down.)

And finally… I went to the BME picnic for all of us new kiddos, and I got to watch this sunset (yes, it has been photoshop-enhanced for color and contrast):