akrish

I wanted to write about israel about once a week, but this past weekend was really busy (read on for why) so I didn’t get around to it. Plus my weeks have been pretty uneventful (until now…) so there wasn’t much to write about.

So last week (week 2 of work) was, as mentioned, pretty uneventful. I’ve gotten used to going to work in the morning, spending most of my day there, coming home and working, watching tv, or otherwise passing time at night. In my previous post, I commented that the dormitory isn’t a very social place and that definitely still holds. In fact, now that I’ve stopped trying to be social, it’s become even more so. Thus, I typically come home, make some dinner, and head to the lounge where I do work, watch tv (online), or otherwise waste time on my computer. So usually life is just that.

Last Tuesday, I went to play ultimate with the Holy Landers, one of the few teams in Israel. We “practiced” in a town called Rishon, a bit South of Tel Aviv, so I got a ride from one of the players. Practice was really fun, it was good to get back into playing again. I also met a bunch of people from the states, who have been playing ultimate for years and are quite good.

I’ll get back to what I did on Friday, but on Saturday I participated in a Hat Tournament at the nearby Hayarkon Park. The tournament was very different from the tournaments I’d been to, in that teams were created on the spot (I guess that’s how hat tournaments work) and the games were very relaxed. There were two “divisions,” a youth division and an everyone else division. I was amazed that the youth division had like 25 people and the adult division had around 50. People came from all over Israel, but I definitely did not expect to see such a good turnout. There were 5 teams in my division and consequently I got to play 4 games.

Apart from the ultimate, which was pretty awesome, the tournament was a great chance for me to meet a lot of different people here. I met some of the kids, some other natives, and a lot of people who are originally from the states or other english speaking places like Canada and New Zealand. Since the tournament, I’ve been hanging out with many of these people, and I think they will be my core group of friends during my stay.

Even at school, ultimate was my way to meet people and branch out from my existing group and I felt that this year was a lot more interesting because of ultimate. Now in Israel, ultimate is again a really great social tool. Since I’m not really in a happening place, and since my living environment isn’t that social, I’m relying on ultimate to kick-start my social life and so far it’s working. How ironic is it that I just met someone from the states in my dorm, and he seems pretty cool.

So this week, I was supposed to play ultimate yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and practices got cancelled so I went to throw with a couple of the people that live “close” to me. And it’s definitely good to get out of the dorm and to go around town and stuff. Tomorrow, hopefully I’m going to go into Tel Aviv to hang out with someone else from ultimate. So life is good this week. I’m actually pretty busy and unable to deal with the minor crisis of choosing what I want to study in grad school.

In other news, on Friday I went to Haifa to see the Baha’i Garden. The gardens were amazing and Haifa seems like a really cool town. I only wish I could have spent more time there, but it was Friday, and everything stops/closes early to prepare for Shabbat, including the trains. I took a bunch of pictures but I don’t have any more space in my Flickr account until August. As soon as I get space, I’ll upload them.

Work is also going pretty well. I’m still working on the same project, but basically we are happy with how fast things are running and are now looking at improving “correctness” of the results. By correctness I really mean, massaging our algorithms to spit out solutions that are biologically significant. We are also trying to make the algorithms find similar quality solutions. So this week I’m mostly generating a bunch of statistics and analyzing them so we can figure out how to move forward.

I mentioned this mid-life crisis I’m having and it’s pretty serious. I plan to apply for graduate schools in the fall, but I don’t really know what area I want to focus in. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and researching about it and I think it merits its own post (I’ve noticed myself saying this a lot recently…).

Finally, some food related things: croissants here are really good, I’ve been eating a lot of them. I also went to a really good hummus place with some ultimate players after the hat tournament. It was a small place, near the harbor, and unfortunately I don’t remember the name, but their hummus was excellent. In haifa, I ate at a really good cafe near the entrance to the Baha’i Garden, where I got a mozzarella, pesto sandwich and a salad. The sandwich was one of the better ones of that kind that I’ve had.

In summary, things have really picked up here. I’m really glad that I play ultimate, and that it’s a pretty big thing here too.

My first week here in Israel was tons of fun, I got to travel a lot, eat good food, go to the beach, and pretty much enjoy the country. Last Sunday, I moved into a dormitory in Ramat Aviv and since then life has been quite a bit different. Several things contributed to this change, but the net result is that I’ve been spending a lot of time working and I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s going to happen after I graduate. First, why are things different…

I started working on Monday (which interestingly is the second day in the work week; the work week is Sunday-Thursday, Friday and Saturday are the weekend.) and so I’ve been pretty busy with work and I haven’t had the opportunity to travel like I did in week one. My work is really cool. I’m working on finding pathways in gene networks that seem to be linked to a specific disease (Here’s the paper I’m building on top if you’re interested). It’s interesting because the problem we’re working on reduces to Connected Set Cover and I just learned about the Set Cover problem in my algorithms class a couple of weeks ago (see this article for why I think this is cool). I’m working on optimizing our algorithm so we can run it on larger data sets efficiently and so that other researchers will be willing have the patience to use it. I’ve already made some progress in my first week (this is good because my time here is pretty short!). I think I’ll write more about my project (and Bioinformatics in general) as I learn more and spend more time working here.

Another key change is that I’m not with my family anymore. Last week I had people (my family) to travel with, and this week, although I’ve been meeting tons of people, I haven’t made many solid friends to do things with. It’s totally not what I expected but the dormitory isn’t really a social place at all. Although the building is 8 floors with many rooms per floor and they say that it’s full, I’ve only ever seen a handful of different people in the building. My lab-mates and other students say that no one wants to live in the dorms because they’re boring and old (the old part is definitely true). Many students prefer to live at home or in Tel Aviv, and then commute to school. Most of the people that I have met here are international students, but I’ve yet to meet a student from the US, although I do hear some American English every once in awhile as I walk around on campus.

One interesting thing is that in Israel everyone goes to serve in the army for 2 (girls) or 3 (guys) years. Then they all usually take a year off and travel before coming to college, so by the time they start their undergrad, they are 21 or 22. They become a lot more focused on their studies and it makes sense that they as “adults” they are just at a different place in life than college students in the US. Most of the people I’ve been meeting are older than me, and that grad students I work with are much, much older than me (many of them have kids!).

Still, I’ve met some really friendly people and I think this “lack of people to do stuff with” condition will quickly disappear. But since I don’t have much to do, I have been getting tons of work done.

I guess another key change is that I moved to Ramat Aviv, which although pretty close to the heart of Tel Aviv (where we stayed in week one), is completely different from Tel Aviv. Ramat Aviv is a much more residential area and as such, you can’t just walk around and find things to do. There aren’t many restaurants around, so I bought a cooking pot and have been making pasta (yup just like at Berkeley) for dinners. Most of the people I’ve talked to also do the same thing. Yesterday, I took the bus to Tel Aviv and enjoyed walking around there; I visited a couple of open air markets, hung out in a guitar store, and wandered around this huge mall. Despite going by myself, it was really fun to explore the city and people watch. Ramat Aviv is not like Tel Aviv at all in that sense. Although there is a pretty big mall (which supposedly is very trendy), there isn’t much else to do. Maybe that explains why students prefer not to stay in the dorms.

Also, I don’t have a roommate. It’s made me realize how cool it is to live with people, be it roommates, family, whatever. I think I’d prefer to have a roommate I didn’t particularly like than to live by myself. So this especially has got me thinking about what life will be like after I graduate. Hopefully, I’ll go to grad school and have a roommate there, but what if I don’t? I really don’t think I’d enjoy it, but maybe it’ll be different if you have a lot of people around, in your building and such. Here it feels like there aren’t that many people around at all.

I’ve been thinking a lot more about graduating and stuff but I think it may warrant it’s own post. Between writing the beginning of this post and now, I went to play ultimate with a team here and it was awesome. They really made me feel welcome even though I’m not on the team, and I don’t speak their language. I plan to keep playing with them and hopefully make some good friends there. A lot of the players on the team have spent a couple of years in the states so they speak english well. And a lot of the players are pretty good so I should get some decent ultimate in over the sumer. Unfortunately, I am really out of shape, and it’s quite hot/humid here so, we’ll see if I can hold my own on the field.

So to summarize this week, it’s been really different from the last week. It’s been interesting meeting people from places like South America, Romania, and of course Israel. Work has been really captivating, which is really good because I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time. I’m making progress on a couple of other projects I’m working on. As I said, it’s been different, but it’s still been pretty good.

I’ve been in Israel for a week now and I plan to stay here for 2 more months until the end of July. I just started my work doing bioinformatics research at Tel Aviv University, but since work only started today I had the opportunity to explore the country for a week. Overall, the country is amazing. Geographically it is very diverse, with deserts in the south, beaches all along the west and mountains and plains in the north. And of course there is so much history, from biblical times, to the war for independence just 60 years ago. Almost everywhere you go you will find ancient ruins, religious points of interest and other monuments.

I think it’d be pretty hard to see everything Israel has to offer in a week, because I feel like we (My parents and I) were quite busy, but I still haven’t been to Eilat, Haifa, Nazareth and Be’er Sheva. We did end up going to Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, and Golan heights, with a drive through Galilee. Also, since I stayed in Tel Aviv, I spent quite a bit of time in Tel Aviv and have become pretty familiar with the city. Fortunately, since I’m here for two more months, I’ll get an opportunity to see all the things that I haven’t seen yet. Like this weekend I want to go to Haifa and hang out there, just to see what it’s like.

So here’s the synopsis of my travels thus far. It’s broken down by region.

Tel Aviv
I’ve spent 3 full days in Tel Aviv, two of them mostly taking care of errands and logistics for my stay at the university. The third day (actually the first chronologically), we went to many of the Tel Aviv hot spots, and the old port of Jaffa.

For a one-sentence history of Tel Aviv, Jaffa is an ancient port that became too crowded about 100 years ago (actually exactly 100 years ago) so some families moved a couple of kilometers north and founded the city of Tel Aviv. Now the port of Jaffa isn’t operational, but there are some ancient ruins around there that we visited. It wasn’t super interesting but still worth a visit as it wasn’t very far from where we were staying in old-town Tel Aviv.

Tel Aviv is the cultural center of Tel Aviv, while Jerusalem is the religious center. As such, the main streets are lined with cafe’s and small boutique shops. There are also several open-air markets scattered throughout the city where you can get produce, clothes, household supplies, and anything else you could want. There are several malls scattered throughout the city and they are very similar to our malls. You can always find a great place to eat and the food is amazing. I’ll write about food some other time.

Tel Aviv is also famous for it’s beaches. On Friday, which happened to be a holiday, we headed for the beach to find the beach packed with tourists and locals (I think mostly locals). People were lounging, tanning, swimming in the water, playing volleyball and generally having a good time. It’s not something I’ve seen much recently in the states and it lead me to some thoughts about Israeli lifestyle versus our lifestyle. As I spend more time here, I’ll have enough material to write about lifestyle in a separate post.

Jerusalem
On Tuesday, my parents and I went to Jerusalem with a tour group. We visited the Mount of Olives, the old city, and the Holocaust Museum. I definitely want to go back as there is still a lot more of the city that we didn’t get to see, but our visit was pretty cool.

The Mount of Olives is where Jesus ascended to heaven and it’s where the Messiah will come to resurrect everyone, so it’s quite a holy place. From the summit, you get an amazing view of old town Jerusalem. The old town is again a very holy place. It was founded by King Solomon years before Christ. Inside the old city, we visited the Western Wall, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (where Christ was crucified). We didn’t get to visit the Mosque on the Dome of the Rock (and I’m not sure if I’m even allowed to) but it’s another site that I’d like to visit.

The old city is incredibly busy and active. I think part of it is all of the tourists and worshippers who come there every day but on top of that the streets are lined with stalls and shops selling all sorts of things. A lot of the shops appeared to be targetting tourists, but I did see produce stands and other non-touristy shops. The whole visit to the old city was an awe-inspiring experience; seeing the religious sites and all of the worshippers was simply amazing.

Dead Sea
On Thursday, we took a different tour bus to the dead sea and the ruins of Masada. It was a bit of a drive but well worth it. Masada was a palace built by King Herod (back in the day) that was abandonded and then repopulated by the Zealots (a group of ultra-orthodox Jews). The Zealots were the seiged by the Romans and the Romans eventually took control of Masada after the Zealots honorably killed themselves rather than fight. The whole story of the place is fascinating and the ruins although partially reconstructed, were fun to explore. Masada is located up on a small plateau with an amazing view of the dead sea. We took a cable car up to the top of the plateau, but there is a hike up that seems like it’d be pretty fun to do if it isn’t too hot. Unforunately, we’re talking about the Judean Desert here, so it usually pretty hot.

After visiting Masada, we went to Ein Gedi Spa on the Dead Sea shores. At the spa there’s this place where you put this special mud all over yourself so I did that. Supposedly the mud is supposed to have like regenerative and healing properties, so a lot of elderly people come here for treatments. I thought it was pretty gross. Anyway, I got to float in the sea and that was amazing. The area we were in was really shallow but it’s not like that matters much. I found the whole thing really strange, but also really cool. Of course it all makes sense chemically, but even though I knew what to expect, I was still kind of shocked when I couldn’t sink. Anyway, the water was also really goopy and slippery and if you do go there, do not get it in your eyes; it stings like crazy.

Galilee and Golan
The Sea of Galilee is in the north-east of Israel and Golan Heights are to the East and North of Galilee. My mom knows someone living near Tel Aviv so he offered to show us around the area. Again we ended up doing a lot of driving, but we saw some interesting historic sights and had some amazing views.

We drove over the Israel Valley, which is an agricultural center and then onwards to the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus supposedly walked on water. We didn’t stop near the sea, but naturally it’s a very holy place for Christians. We essentially drove all around it, and had many amazing views of the sea and Tiberias, a coastal town.

Then we drove up to Golan Heights. This area is a huge plateau a couple-hundreds of meters above sea level, but it’s so big that after driving for awhile, you forget that you’re so high up. The area is filled with more recent history as the Golan was recently annexed by Israel from Syria in the war of 1967. There are tons of military relics such a bunkers, tanks, and outposts all over the area. Scarily, there are also several areas marked with “danger land mines” signs.

On our way back, we drove through Galilee, which is to the west of the Sea of Galilee. The area consists of these lines of mountains with valleys in between each range. It’s a very picturesque area but we didn’t stop here so I don’t have much else to say.

So that’s a brief summary of my travels so far. Of course there is tons more to say about my trip and I hope to talk about more soon. I took pictures of everywhere I went and I put some of them up on Flickr. Unfortunately, I ran out of space, but I’m seriously considering buying unlimited space in which case all of my pictures will be up soon. You can see pictures by clicking on “photos” on the right.

This post is probably long overdue. Events took place in early June 2008…

After finishing my finals, I moved out of my house (someone is subletting my room) and pretty much immediately started working. In like my second week, I took Thursday and Friday off (no PTO) and my family and I headed out to Boston for my brother’s graduation (yes from college. I can barely believe it). The flight there was absolutely horrible… first of all we had a layover and that completely sucks and secondly our second flight got delayed because there was some storm somewhere I forget the details now. What’s even worse I don’t really like to be in really cramped spaces for long times. Not that I’m claustrophobic, I’m just really fidgety and move around a lot.

Anyway we landed at like midnight in Boston and only checked into our hotel/went to bed by like 2 and we were supposed to get to the graduation the next day at 7. So my dad says we’re all waking up at 6 and yada yada yada I was really tired the next day (except not like in Seinfeld). So the next day was Friday, and it looked pretty cloudy and we were kinda worried because the graduation was outdoors. We ended up getting there at like 8 and then my dad tells me that graduation doesn’t start until 10 and I was kinda pissed because I didn’t want to be sitting there for two hours. And then the rain started… And it poured for a good 30 minutes or so. Fortunately MIT was prepared and they provided ponchos for everyone so no one got wet, but it was amazing. I haven’t seen that much rain in a really long time (El nino, 4th grade to be precise) and I realized that living anywhere else is incredibly different from California.

So the graduation came and went, it was really nice to see my brother graduate and all that and I met some of the guys I interned with last summer and some other people I knew from MIT which was good. My dad took some pictures maybe I’ll put them up here sometime. We ended up hanging out as a family for the afternoon (brother included) and got food walked around the Prudential Center (it was still looking kinda crappy outside) and then my brother and his friends had organized a dinner with all the families so we went to that. The dinner was actually really fun, I met a couple of my brothers friends and got to talk to a lot of people from completely different backgrounds and experiences than mine or my families. Plus we had a lot of really good food (Maggiano’s family style… awesome).

The next day we didn’t really have anything planned so we just wandered around Boston/Cambridge and I got to see a lot of places I’d never seen before (this was my third trip to Boston but the other two I didn’t see that much). We wandered around Newberry Street (which I thought was really amazing, kind of like a downtown Palo Alto but like better in so many ways). We looked at an apartment my brother was trying to live in next year, walked through campus so I could see all the cs buildings (I thought they have a way bigger cs building than we do, but now that I think of it Soda is a lot bigger than it looks. At any rate the building is really nice with a gym and a cafeteria). Went into some of the other buildings and for the most part I really liked what I saw. We ate dinner at some pizza place on Newberry street that made a pretty good slice and that pretty much made my day.

My parents and I left pretty early the next morning and were back in time for an eventful Sunday (I don’t remember what events but just that it was eventful) and that was that. But for some reason I had a really good time on this trip. Maybe it was that I was completely carefree and didn’t worry about anything work related. But something made me really like Boston and the trip made me want to live on the East Coast even more than I already wanted to before. Granted California is awesome and I love it, but I think I need to get out of here for a little while and go somewhere else and recently that somewhere else has become Boston. So now I just have to get into grad school there… unfortunately that’s pretty tough.

Going to new york at the end of my internship and I’m pretty excited for that trip too. I recently realized that I really like travelling!

Last Wednesday, my dad approached me with an interesting proposition: he thought that we should take advantage of the weekend to hit the ski slopes. I had nothing better to do and I love skiing so I agreed with him and just like that, we went to the ski rental shop, got our blades and embarked on our long drive. The three of us (my friend Vivek came along too) left on Friday and headed to Sacramento where we stayed at our family friends house.

Saturday morning, we all woke up at 6am (earlier than I’ve woken up in a long time) and headed up to the mountains. As Vivek slept in the back of the car, my dad and I were eager to get to Northstar (our intended destination), but ran into a serious snow storm before the Donnor Pass. The weather worsened as we made our way up the mountain and we didn’t have snow chains, so we decided to stop at Boreal. We spent the day there, skiing and enjoying the seriously bi-polar weather (snowy and cold one minuted, and then bright and sunny the next), but the resort was pretty small and we ended up hitting almost all the runs that were our level.

Sunday, the weather was much better so we drove the extra couple of miles to Northstar and skied there for the day. It was a beautiful day, and so Northstar was ridiculously crowded, but we found one lift that oddly stayed empty throughout the day. We got some nice runs in and around 2:30 we shed our ski clothes and made the 4 hour journey back to the Bay.

I haven’t been skiing in a really long time (the lift ticket on my ski pants told me that the last time was February 12, 2006) and I’d forgotten how fun it was. Actually, I’ve started ski-blading (really short ski’s but I still consider it skiing) and I’m really excited to head back which is why I named this article “Tahoe Trip #1″; I hope there will be another one soon. Anyway, I wanted to put up some pictures from the trip, most were taken by my dad but he did a pretty good job.

chairlifts in the snow at Boreal (Day 1)

the sun and the terrain park at Boreal

beautiful weather at northstar looking at East Ridge Run