Basketball, Student Party and Deadpool
This weekend me and Vidar decided to go to a basketball game at Maples Pavilion on campus. On Saturday Stanford played against Oregon and the game turned out to be very interesting (beware of spoilers in the link). First of all we found out that it’s free for Stanford students and once we got inside, we quickly noticed that we got really good seats (well, kind of seats) close to the basketball court. I grabbed a free t-shirt, Vidar grabbed lunch and then we watched the game.
Most of the time both teams had similar scores and about a minute from the end both teams were at 72 points. Then at the last minute Stanford scored two points, followed by another two points leading to them winning the game. The whole arena shouted and cheered loudly. It was actually quite powerful and memorable. Oh, and also I tried to take a few photos during the game, but I clearly had problems focusing (pun intended). I guess some of the pictures are ok, mostly because I was so close to the game.
At the evening a couple of us decided to attend a graduate student party at the Stanford campus, meaning free beer, chips, snacks, glow sticks, plastic necklaces and of course some dance music and a DJ. It was all nice and of course exotic for a Swede. I couldn’t handle all of the free stuff, so I ate chips all the time and went back and forth for more glow sticks. I was lots of fun to finally experience an American student party.
Sunday has been pretty calm and nice. I had a few video meetings with my beloved Swedes and edited some pictures. But we had to do something, so Vidar and I decided to go see the Deadpool movie at the cinema in Mountain View.
And while we were at it we stopped by a Vietnamese restaurant serving really good fast food. I think fast food is lots of fun, but it seems like only the crappy food chains make it to Sweden. So basically fast food in Sweden sucks, with the exception of Stockholm’s upcoming and nowadays quite numerous food trucks and burger restaurants. Anyway, I love how places that don’t look like much serve this high quality food from all over the world. The prices are very reasonable since all focus is on the food (we had these fantastic dishes served on paper plates, which I actually think is kind of cool). So what we usually do is to search for food on Google Maps, powered by Yelp to find a nearby restaurant serving some fast food. And the amazing thing with this area is that you’ll always find something great.
After that we were ready for the movie, which turned out to be really funny. If you don’t mind violence and childish and sexist jokes you’ll probably like it. And if you have seen a lot of action movies in general and superhero movies in particular I’d be very surprised if you wouldn’t laugh a lot to this movie, since it makes so many jokes about genre conventions and stereotypes. Not that it particularly often deviates from these conventions; in fact it is almost more generic than most superhero movies, but in some way that just makes it more funny. The movie is so stupid that it somehow feels smart, but most of all it’s just really funny, which I don’t say often at all about movies. So this is a definite recommendation if you’re up for it (not for you mom, obviously).
I also have to say something about the theater. It’s so great that you’d expect to pay twice as much for it (which you’ll definitely do if you buy anything from the snack bar). I mean, just look at these chairs. The screen is huge and everything feels so premium that I just wanna see movies here all of the time. That’s basically it for this weekend, tomorrow we’ll dive right back into the geophysics.
