Peer Trip to Utah (All 7 days)

So this is all gonna be based off of memory

Saturday “Departure to Riverside”

• Left Berk headed for Blackoak House (Steve & Eunice’s) at 10 am with twelve guys + two minivans (filled with 3 jars of kimchi, 7 packs of Evergoods, 3 large boxes of ramen, and a Bongo Drum)
• Don’t remember much about the drive but we got there in 8 hours after dropping off Andrew D and Eric K.
• The moment of “May 21′s Judgment Day starting on 6pm” passed very uneventfully, but we stayed in a parking lot during that time in case of the mass destruction that was promised. The San Leandro guy still holds to the date now saying judgment has begun but it will finish by October sumthing… crazy man
• Steve and Eunice had us over for dinner and cooked us a bunch of meat on the barbecue. Gary failed to push the on button for rice. Later, we saw Gary and Bob’s room which was double the size of our rooms in Dwight!
• Boba Tea Time, so I ordered some royal milk tea thing with pudding but I got this reallllly good slushy thing that was definitely not what I ordered, but I got too scared to ask them what my drink actually was in fear they would take back the drink or think I was super stupid for not knowing what drink I ordered, but I’m kinda sad I didn’t ask
• Saboteur 2 is really fun, slept over @ Hackamore

Sunday “Celebrations”

• DT @ Farmer Boy’s
• Practiced a special song for Service
• So we basically came at the end of the 8th week for Course 101 at Riverside so Steve got us Berkeley ppls to sing Come Home Running, SuperFob gave his testimony, and Steve preached the message of the Three Crosses
• Praise the Lord for 5 salvation/lordship decisions that were made on that day and the day after, we’re pretty fortunate to have been here to just serve in something so small as singing a song, it set a good tone for the rest of the rest trip
• Celebration at Ten Ren for Boba + Shaved Ice
• 1 hr later, drove to Steve Chang’s place in Rowland, dude his place is super sick, we had homemade barbecue and played basketball on his tennis court
• Surprised Gary for his birthday and caked him in the face four times, good brotherly peer love.

Monday “Drive to Brianhead, UT”

• DT and Prayer Walk on UCR’s Campus
• Drove off for Utah, our car had Calvin, Dereck, David, Will and me, the other car had Isaiah, Sam, Jordan, Eric, Aaron, and Jason
• Fastforward to getting there, we thought originally we were gonna live in a cabin-like house that Wenjie’s class got to go to live in, we were surprised to find out that we were living this really nice ski resort with a huge room. The hotel had an Indoor Swimming Pool, Jacuzzi, and Sauna! Nice
• The other car had the kimchi containers which exploded because of the pressure going up and the car smelled like kimchi, sickkkk
• There was still snow all around and during the day it sometimes snowed
• Watched Infernal Affairs 1, the original Cantonese movie that the Departed was based off of. It was incredibly good and we convinced ourselves we had to stay up to watch the second. The second was just as confusing but not as good as the first

Tuesday “Today I Don’t Want to Do Anything” Lazy Song

• Woke up super late and we all didn’t feeling like doing anything, stayed in the resort the whole day just cause we could
• We found out that Eric Kim is the beastliest peer at cooking, yay for living with him at DHouse next year! Over the trip he made some pretty crazy things like Carnitas, Spetzel, and Meatloaf all from scratch
• Read Satan and His Kingdom 1/4 wayish
• Sent ppl off to Super Walmart Run
• Watched Infernal Affairs 3, good lord don’t watch that movie, our advice to you, just stop after the first one. Everyone was going mental in the third movie and every Chinese actress looked exactly the same that we couldn’t differentiate

Wednesday “Bryce Canyon”

• First day of actually doing something outside, lol, we hiked this place called Fairyland, it sounds like all our manly credibility is shot but it was this 9 mile hike in Bryce where we started off really slow cause we took like 10 pictures in the first mile of the hike, then things started all looking the same, we made our hike interesting by cutting through areas of the trail and finding shortcuts. I think 9 miles turned into 8 miles…
• After the hike Isaiah texted the leaders that we had “lost” the Superfob in the canyon, in response Steve responded “Nice” and Kevan responded “It’s okay, we can always get ourselves another communist”, LOL. Superfob is still okay, we’re officially rooming together now in DHouse
• Afterwards, went to Jacuzzi and Sauna, my first time in a Sauna and I gotta tell you, you’ll want to go back everyday afterwards
• Vision casting back in the room for next year

Thursday “Zion Canyon”

• Paintballing near Zion. 5 vs 6 on a freakin huge map, 1 and a half hours was only 20 bucks including gear, paint, and guns, Played Team vs Team for two rounds, then a round of D-day (4 vs 7) where 4 ppl sat in this two story fort and 7 of us stormed the fort, another round of team vs team which ended up having a showdown between Taiwan and China cause Will Shen and Superfob were one on one in the end and Taiwan took it, and lastly a final round of FFA where everyone only had around 10 shots, the winner was Dereck after he stayed put for the entire round and waited for everyone else to exhaust their
• Hiked this trail called Emerald Pool, took the bus around the heart of Zion Canyon, we were originally gonna go on this trail called Angel’s Landing but we were told not to cause 2 ppl die on it annually and our leaders would kill us if we did since they fall off this area where the trail is 6 ft wide and either side you’ll fall a thousand foot drop.
• Watched How to Train a Dragon, Jason Lu does a good dragon call, his new name is now JasonFury

Friday “Exploring like no other”

• Planned to got to a lake which started off on the wrong foot where we took the wrong turn from the very beginning, went to two roads that were blocked off, but eventually found this dirt road where we went off-roading in our Mini-vans, drove across a stream which is on video, went another 4 miles in and were eventually stopped by this really big dip in the road that would utterly have destroyed the cars.
• Stopped there and started our hike to a mysterious lake as we went upstream. I planned to chill at the lake reading in my sandals but I ended up hiking with the grandpa socks and slippers combo. We were literally trailblazing a good 2 miles in before we hit an insurmountable mountain. We just added to our collection of stupid but fond memories.
• Last day at the lodge, had to hit up the Jacuzzi and Sauna again.
• Watched Star Wars Episode IV and V. Yoda is freakin on crack in those movies and the graphics of the 70′s are quite… lame.

Saturday “The 16hr death ride home”

• Okay so this was the most exciting day of the trip
• Left the resort at 9 am to eat at IHOP, the steak was incredible, everything tasted more legit than the IHOP’s in Cali
• The trip was expected to be 11 hours which we thought was gonna be super boring cause it was through central Nevada which sounds incredibly boring but we saw some pretty cool things.
• We saw Nevada cows, a cow that walked across the road and made us stop as we honked at it, and a dead cow on the side of the road that had been burned, my theory is that it must had been a California cow that did its prodigal son deal and journeyed to Nevada to find itself and ended up dead. That’s not how the real parable goes but you get the picture.
• Saw this motel that was named “SHADY MOTEL”, we stopped and got a picture on David’s phone.
• Drove all the way to the Sierra Nevada’s where we found out it was snowing and roads had been closed so we kept on finding alternate routes and trying to get over before the sun went down. However we got to this really snowy part of the highway where the road was super slippery. The snow was crazyyyy. Basically, a gas station guy said he hadn’t seen snow on Memorial day for like 12 year, so we came at the strangest of times.
• We thought we didn’t have snow tires at first so for a portion of the trip we drove closely behind this big truck that was paving the road for us. We basically were following it for our dear life and we made it into South Lake Tahoe,  but before that we had a minor accident which involved me not braking in time and our van colliding with the other van. Nothing more than a few minor chips in the paint cause our license plate and had been covered in snow and the other bumper was more solid cause of the colder temperature. Still pretty crazy.
• We got stranded in Lake Tahoe for another two hours where the weather reports told us we needed snow chains so we spent an hour hold putting them on. When we went back on the road, snow plowers had plowed all the roads and the road no longer required chains… GG
• Over the course of this 16 hour trip home, we were supposed to alternate drivers but I took over a lot of the driving responsibility on the mountain cause I was one of the more experienced drivers and this part of the trip took soooo long, so I ended up driving over a 10 hour period.
• Got to Dana House at 3 am and slept at Dwight. We live to tell the tale of how we almost died in the Sierra Nevada’s.

Awesome Peer Trip, we have a bunch of photos and video but dunno if that’ll ever go public. Pictures probably, video veryyy unlikely, haha.

Update: Pictures up at David’s Flickr

Riverside, Bryce & Zion Canyon

In Utah right now, and it’s snowing. I’ll update the blog after the peer trip.

D-house Room 9

• Wednesday started out with a clueless not to be named roommate playing guitar at 9 am, at least it’s better then the other day at 8 am where I had to call him to tell him to stop. Apparently that time, he thought we had all moved out when there was still a full apartment -_-
• Drove to Staples to fax a few things I shoulda done a month ago for EY internship
• Lunch at Crepevine on College, explaining how Gracepoint is like sometimes blows ppls mind cause it’s freakishly complicated and growing like crazy
• Econ Grad, missed the name calling by just a minute =/
• Took DJPan to the very empty Oakland Airport, very pensive drive home
• Basically went over to Dana House and took it over for dinner while the old Seniors were gone. Jason made Kimchi Jigee and we ate all of Isaiah’s food that his mom made for him cause he went back to Alameders. Our dessert ended up being a pork roast that finished cooking the moment we got became full off the first part of the meal.
• Checked my future room with the Superfob, we got one of the smallestttt rooms through a randomized selection process, but we have the most clothes and books. Eh, it’s not like I’ll study in there anyways. Jake (Summer’s bro) is our next door neighbor and the designated Dana House servant cause he’s the youngest.
• Packing and moving got boring really quick. I gave it up for Baskyball @ the RSF till 1am with peers and new Juniors.

Always a reason to be happy

• Contrary to what you may think, I’m more of an optimist these days than a pessimistio dude. I’m just appreciating a lot more stuff and it’s just becoming more clear each day how grateful I should be.
• Haas Graduation for the dear Haas ppl that helped me with my application essay a year back, I loved the high quality ceremony pamphlet they gave cause it feel like it actually cost money to print, unlike…
• Helped Fei and Connie move into the Apt HQ for the soon to be seniors sisters’ apartments on Channing/Ellsworth. Futon of death needed to be disassembled because it couldn’t go through the narrow corridors of death that Isaiah wouldn’t even fit through, jk. But those hallways were no good for moving things through.
• Justin + Annie Kim’s Sociology grads in the rain, but our picture formations could not be stopped by rain, lol. One of the leaders felt like he had known Justin’s parents from some where a long time ago, a deep sense of familiarity… but it turns out they just check Justin’s flickr account a lot, hahahahahaha.
• Drove to Walnut Creek for dinner at Kinder’s, Sweet Potato Fries + Ball Tip Sandwich = KO
• Drove directly to Greek Theatre for Kelly (aka GFG for Gluten-Free-Giraffe), Jessie (whose brother I randomly know from Taekwondo), Grace (whose Masters in City and Regional Planning makes her an expert in the dynamics of playing Settlers of Catan), and other ppl’s graduations.
• My first night time graduation and it was blistering cold, but I gotta admit, the crowd had more heart in cheering for the graduates then any other graduation I’ve ever been to. Props to them.
• Senior (pretty much gone) guys took pretty gross pictures, actually it was just Nick.

3 and Done

• So this past week of finals testing was pretty brutal, I just had three on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, but I couldn’t help but overstudy for the first one cuz it’s the first one. Then I pulled all-nighters for the Thursday and Friday ones -_-
• SuperFob beasted 6 finals left and right like usual.
• Studying at Crossroads every night was really funnn. So much stuff happened you just had to be there.
• Graduations now, dude, I’m so happy for the class of 2011 and how a bunch of them are staying on!! I’m feeling pretty scared that in one year, I’ll be donez with college. Ppl are telling our class already how crazy it is that we’re seniors, and it still doesn’t feel real.

Was it really a secret?

Today was pretty up and down

• There wasn’t anything revealed that was too shocking in my last class, but it was inspirational and heartfelt in a sense that Professor Reich chose to teach at Berkeley because he believes in Berkeley kids.
• We also gave out hugs to the people next to us because we had this I-clicker question where people were asked what their main driving force was, and the answer most selected was  ”To be Loved”.
• Lunch w/ Ryan, that guy’s got like 160 points left, force him to spend now.
• The tables outside of GBC are extremely good at reflecting sunlight into your face. I think I got darker just sitting there 30 minutes.
• Laundry + Safeway run and Frappucino 50% off. Saw some kairos girls who waited like 40 minutes and a few Koin girls chilling and studying in Starbucks.
• I pulled an idjiot move, I got a parking ticket by parking in the yellow which is only loading zone, but to my defense, I asked the Starbucks ppl and they told me whatevs as long as I paid the meter. I was right there when the parking lady handed it out to me, quite shocked in utter disbelief.
• I’ve already written a 1-2 page long note prepared to counter this atrocious parking citation
• Baked some Banana Bread for the freshmen kiddos who suckered me into making it for them with profuse compliments and pleases. But dude, they honestly need it the most.
• Dana House Dinner + Bible Study that was super cramped but reminiscent of the text that helped me to make my salvation decision
• Hung out with Tessa, Gigi, Stan, Jess, and Miao in northside. Things sometimes just don’t change
• Short detour to Crossroads and then to BT to just chillll. Successfully got a bunch of people to just take a break and talk. I should be studying but honestly, I’m just not in the studying mindset yet, it’ll kick in soon. Man, I just wanna take it easy and chill with good friends, Isn’t that the secret to college?