Updates from Hillsboro

I like this idea of blogging, thats cool !! Allright ... so there are a lot of things I want to talk about. Let us take it one by one.

The first thing I want to tell all of you about is, filling gas in Oregon. Believe me its not as mundane as it sounds. Ramya! Do you remember when we first filled up the gas in Oregon, I do. We did it at the Newport when we were to take a right turn to OR-20 to come to Portland. I remember an employee type looking guy was staring me, when I was filling the gas myself, as if I was doing something illegal. And as it turns out, I was doing illegal activity for which I could be fined 500$ !! Yes !! So the point is in Oregon you cannot fill your gas yourself, actually you are supposed to sit in your car and wait for the employee to do it for you. Supposedly the gas is a dangerous substance for untrained people (Read you and me ) to handle :D

As I had heard, oregon is green and beautiful. I have joined the oregon hiking club of Intel and we go on hikes on most of the wednesdays and saturdays. I was able to make into 2 of them till now. Larch mountain and Eagle Creek . I really enjoyed these hikes. One interesting point is that somehow there are more people hiking here than in california. One reason can be that its summer time in Oregon and only time in the year for doing outdoor activities.

Other interesting fact I came to know about portland is that it has highest number of gentle mens' clubs per person in United states. I did not get a chance till now but will certainly be paying my visit to some (??) of them ;).

Portland downtown has nice pubs, we went once to irish pub. They had there traditional music live that day and people were doing line dancing, one like in the Titanic movie, we also tried a few steps. One other thing I tried is pedalling a dragon boat with Mayank (my friend from bhu and Talisma) and his team. Its fun but is really tiring. May be will do it again.

I have told the sad story of my vehicle registration problem to most of you. For the sake of completeness will mention it here again. The roads specially the back roads on mountains are very pretty here and are many. I wanted to buy a motorcycle but figured out here that I cannot register that in oregon because I am california resident. There can be ways around still trying to figure that out. I dont want to take any risk with insurance and stuff. Specially the cops here are very strict about traffic rules and are too many. Also here the cops sometimes ride normal looking cars and thats good way of catching violators. Therefor people here are very careful of speed limits and stuff.

That said, my office is a good 3.4 miles from place where I live. So I bought a very normal bike (read cheap) . It takes me 20 minutes to get to office, so I get 40 minutes of exercise for free daily, am saving the environment from being polluted , tress from being cut ......

About Intel .. the work is good. I cannot talk about that here ... There are some 300 interns here in oregon area and as usual people keep organising something or other. But I miss those free lunches and events like yahoo, there are only few intern events. And I also miss the game room of yahoo. playing pool and foosball was so much fun last year.

There are other things .. which i will tell you guys in my next post.