on the crazy train to coachella and back!

Fan, Nam, Bethany and I hit the road to southern california on friday just before traffic time, and didn't stop until we landed in Santa Barbara. We visited Nam's cousing Fong, and played beer pong and flip cup into the later hours of the night with a gang of kids from UC Santa Barbara. A couple years have passed since I've seen my nemesis, UCSB, the one school that rejected me for grad school. This time, however, any hard feelings were drowned in good times... we ended up at an international student party, and had a really great time. Saturday involved getting up and hitting the beach to see how the beached college kids live. Lucky for us, this was the weekend for sorority beach volleyball, featuring some sorority house teams from UCLA (go bruins!) and some other schools. It was a lot of fun, and left me wondering if these kids would actually ever get sick of going to the beach every day. hmmm... yeah....

After this, we moved on to LA and hung out with Mike and Jessica... We decided to hit up little ethiopia for some ethiopian cuisine, and dined into the night... Luckily, Andrew and Angela were able to stop by, and we had a few laughs before parting ways again... I must have been tired, because at some point I claimed to "never eat out", even as we were at an ethiopian restaurant...

Sunday morning, we woke up and pushed off for Coachella... our soundtrack included Chris Isaak's smash hit "wicked game", which bestowed upon us our new war cry, (nihahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!) .... and some similarly sounding classic krooning by enrique...
We finished it off with some "elbows up - side to side" and marveled at how we stumbled on so much material in just one weekend.

When we finally made it to Indio, things were pretty insane... Fan sold off our last ticket, and kept his pride too. We were holding our breath for Rage Against the Machine, but there was plenty of time... we caught the action on a bunch of stages, including seeing the Roots, Willie Nelson (brief), Air, Lily Allen (I skipped), Air, Placebo (who rocked), Damien Rice, and some others along the way. The place was also filled with a bunch of art structures, including some functional ones that spat fire or lit up ping pong balls held by strings. It was a pretty insane display of large scale functional art. Here's the fire spitter: