California Dreaming - Silicon Valley and San Jose

We planned on a sky diving trip in Santa Cruz but that wasn't until Thursday. So we had 2 days to kill, no real plans and no place to stay. Luckily the BFF kindly offered us his place for the night, so the hubs got us a rented car for the rest of the vacation and off we went to Silicon Valley. It turned out to be a very geeky trip as we couldn't resist paying homage to the tech giants!

We first visited the BFF to get his keys. Check out his fancy building. 

Then off to Google, Facebook and Apple. Apple was the most visitor friendly, as they have an Apple store that sells merchandises on top of their usual iGadgets.

Google looked like a REALLY great place to work for. All the great things you read about being a Google employee is true. They have a cafe that serves free food, a volleyball court (maybe more), and even free tampons in the toilet.. it's amazing! You can see employees hanging out, really enjoying themselves in the park. Heck, the place reminds me of a campus. Doesn't look like a work place at all. They even have free colorful Google bikes for you to cycle from building to building. Yes, because they are that big. We managed to sneak into the Google store and bought some merchandise stuff. In hindsight I don't know why we went through all that trouble just to pay for some YouTube, Gmail tshirts/keychains... what suckers.

Jelly Bean? Who uses Android :p

Facebook was the most boring visit. The building looks plain and we didn't see Zucky. Although I did see an employee being driven to work in a limo. I wonder if he's anyone famous.



Dinner was at Nola's down at Palo Alto but BFF failed to make an appearance due to work commitment. But what a great find. Loved the chicken + waffles combo. 

Post dinner, we caught a movie in San Jose. And we did it the drive-in movie theater style at West Wind Drive In! I thought that was really cool in a 70's or 80's way. It's a pity we don't have the space for a drive-in here in Singapore. 

And so we drove all the way to San Jose just to see how it's like. And man, it was worth the one hour drive! We arrived at 10pm, and the show was scheduled to start at 10:30pm. It was a weekday so it was really quiet. There was no queue, so we just drove up to the booth to get our tickets and then we were free to roam around to find a spot that we liked. The sound system is your car stereo. They give you the radio frequency to tune into; I thought that was pretty cool cuz I was expecting some crappy sound system from the house. The whole experience was a joy to say the least, even though the movie (Oblivion) was really bad. I would definitely do this again given a chance.





And that pretty much wrapped up the day. It was a long and tiring day, but totally worth it! We slept really soundly at the BFF's fancy place :)