Grace Lu

July 17, 2016

Sorry for the late post! This weekend has been pretty busy; I actually got to spend some time in St. Louis and see some friends! Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to go visit STS though.
I want to talk today about my experience at Palo Alto and Stanford! I went with my roommate after work; we took the Caltrain from 4th Street to the Palo Alto station, which was probably only about a 45-minute ride in total. Although it isn’t too far from the city, Palo Alto is significantly warmer than San Francisco. Advice that I have for you all though if you decide to take the Caltrain: make sure that you tap your clipper card once you get off at the station or else it will charge you for the whole fare (from San Francisco to San Jose). It’s quite expensive if you don’t remember to tap off.

Once we got off at the Palo Alto station, it was another half hour walk to get to the Stanford campus. The campus was quite luxurious: there were fountains everywhere, gorgeous tan buildings with red roofs, and land that seemed to stretch on for miles. I tried getting some nice pictures, but to be honest I am not the greatest photographer so all my pictures of the campus are quite amateur. There were lots of pre-college high-school students on that day, as summer programs are quite prevalent at most colleges. I think it would’ve been nice to have explored an empty Stanford campus, but I didn’t mind seeing all the students as it reminds me of my time at Brown University during my post-sophomore summer.

After walking around the campus, my friends and I walked back towards the Palo Alto downtown. I was quite exhausted from all of the walking: I can only assume that all of the students at Stanford are really healthy from studying there. We ended up at a restaurant known as Rangoon Ruby Burmese Cuisine, where I ordered their famous tea leaf salad: I usually tend away from salads but decided to give it a try as I have not had such a meal before. The first half of the salad was absolutely delicious, but towards the end I felt like it was a bit too strong for me. Nonetheless, I encourage everyone to try it because it really was a delicious dish.

I’m happy that I got to get out of San Francisco and explore the surrounding areas! It is much warmer in Palo Alto as it isn’t surrounded by the ocean, which was a nice change from the chilly San Francisco weather. I’m hoping at some point to visit Mountain View next. I’m still unsure about my plans for the weekend, but I’ll be updating more frequently this week to make up for the short hiatus I had!