March 5-7, 2010
After two years in the bay area, the stars aligned and I finally got a chance to go to Tahoe! I got a special invitation to hang out with the Fluffies at their annual Tahoe trip- this year to Sierra. It’s been at least 5 years since the last time I went skiing, and I’ve gone at most 2 or 3 times in the past 10 years after going almost 60-90 times a year during junior and senior year of high school. When I got invited to the trip I instantly went on a mad search for all my gear… only to come up empty. I thought of it as a good excuse to buy new stuff but it was also very expensive. My rational is that I’ll just use the crap out of it.
Jane picked me & Will up from my house, and after picking up some more friends we headed over to Cathy’s in Emeryville for a quick reorg of the caravan. We then stopped by Sonic for a quick bite, and although I wasn’t hungry from eating 인절미 and spam musubi, I couldn’t pass up on Sonic.
Arlan’s spam musubi! I was excepting to eat one piece, but I got the entire roll! Delicious!
The dice game on the first night! Now I know what they were playing on Pirates of the Caribbean!
Do NOT sit next to Jason L. in this game. He will knock you out, make you buy in with shots, only to knock you out again…
Andrew woke us up EARLY Saturday morning to hit the slopes. Jane cooked up some delicious breakfast sandwiches and we were on our way. The problem with skiing for the first time in a long time… or more accurately, the problem with exercising for the first time in a long time is that everything hurts about 10 seconds into it. I got tired putting on my boots (no, seriously), and was exhausted by the time we got to the bottom of the hill from the car.
After the first run I quickly realized these are not the little bunny hills we have in Michigan, but full blow mountains! I’m sure my body was saying STOP after the first run, but I had to pull every muscle in my legs to go on at least 3 or 4 more runs before lunch break.
The group packing up!
Ahnah demonstrating what we’re about to do~
From car to hill… SO FAR!
Ninja vanis~~~h and Ahnah. I was pretty much dead by this point (bottom of the hill)
Everybody in good order: first run of the day
I slapped Ahnah’s butt with my ski pole, and it bent it… her butt is made of steeeeeel!
Play the videos together, its kind of funny, heh.
Ahnah fell asleep while waiting for food. A Chinese lady walks over, looks at Ahnah, hesitates to take one of our chair, looks at Ahnah again (notices she’s knocked out), takes our chair. I saw it ALL! DDAK gul lyut suh!
Mmm~ delicious lunch! Sang and I noticed their “prime rib burger” used the same meat at their regular burger… we got the prime rib burger.
After lunch is where things got interesting, hazy, unclear (depending on the person). Apparently a few people were allocated with a larger amount of the special juice we prepared the night before, and now that I think about it, decided it would be a great idea to drink it all. While they were drinking away, I made a promise to Will that we would go on 3 more rides with one hour of skiing to go. Bad idea. Why? Because on run 1/3 I could barely carve because my thighs and calves were dead. But promise is a promise and I went on all three runs, PLUS a bunny slope run so more like 3.5 runs.
Just an example of the ridiculous state of these kids.
It was dinner time back in the cabin for most of us… nap time for some others. Big thumbs up to our cooks of the night!! From there we eventually moved onto some ridiculous round of games. There were quite a few moments where I thought I was going to die laughing. I was also challenged to a push up contest somewhere during the night by JANE (yes a girl, thanks Ahnah for reminding me…) and lost. Not only were my legs sore the next day, my upper body was sore too, my entire body was mad at me. After a quick stop for Pho at a random town near Sacramento (random as in, these people had cows and donkeys roaming around in their back yard), we called it a weekend and headed our separate ways. Good job guys, and thanks for inviting me to an awesome trip!
2010 Fluffies Ski Trip!
It all started with a short email from Aaron in December saying he wanted to set up a reunion in LA. That reunion has come and gone. Since alcohol killed most or our brain cells this weekend (the little we had left… and I’m sure it killed a lot more than just our brain cells), the blog will need to be pieced together by pictures.
Will and I drove down to LA on Wednesday night after work through the Pacheco Pass. I usually prefer the Bay Bridge way because I don’t want to deal with going through the local streets at Gilroy, but it wasn’t as bad as I remembered. The ride was 100x better when not done solo. We got in close to midnight on Wednesday so we kept it fairly chill and stayed in. (Picture: Aaron decided to jump in the shower just about the time we would arrive… so I cleaned my car while we waited)
I went home on Thursday for a quick lunch with the parents + aunt, and then they ditched me so I went back up to Aaron’s for dinner. On my way I picked up PB from the airport who got in earlier to avoid the massive snow storm in the east coast. We were supposed to eat dinner together, but freaking Aaron and Will were full from a power shake (or whatever it’s called) a couple hours earlier; at least now we know it works. We tried a few places, but it was relatively late and everything was closed, so headed to 
Soon Isaac called from LAX and Aaron left to pick him up after dropping us off at 
The great thing about LA, which is the biggest reason I moved to the west coast as opposed to NY, is all the open grass and the abundant choice of sports! We woke up and first headed out to 
We were a bit afraid that golf would be rained out, but it turned out to be a great day with the exception of about 5 minutes of rain. This is usually a very crowded and time consuming course, but the rain kept most people away and we were able to get through almost all 18 holes. We even got a good look at a perfect rainbow (TWO actually, one on top of another). All my practice lately after work really paid off because I played the best 15 holes of my life. Team Aaron + ME beat team Chris + PB, so they bought us dinner at the Korean/Chinese restaurant 
After dinner, we spent the last night at 
My 이모’s family moved to Orlando from Korea a few months ago so our family took a trip down there to visit their new home. My nephews are the same age as when my sister and I first moved to the US, so I was interested to see how they were adjusting to the new environment. I’m glad to say that I breathed a sigh of relief to see they were getting adjusted well to their new school. They actually came back from school on Friday with a shoebox full of valentines day cards and candies they exchanged with their classmates. It’ll be a tougher adjustment when they go back to Korea in a few years, but no need to worry about that now. I was a little sad that my uncle couldn’t get located to a city closer to LA/SF, because Orlando is, well… really far. But at the same time at least it wasn’t to some remote city in Idaho (nothing against Idaho in particular). Besides, it’s the “Happiest place on Earth!”
The next day we headed out to Daytona Beach for some fun in the sun… except there was no sun. There was however, the Daytona 500 race which did not add any value to our trip, only traffic. It was cool to drive by the speedway though, the loud engines of the cars going by… I’ll likely never get this close to another NASCAR race in my life. After running around the beach with the kids we spent the night at Universal Studio’s Citywalk.
