Today we took a short trip to lewisburg, TN so Kumagai could cash his check. After we got back we went to the Huntsville Depot, an old train depot in downtown. It was fun.
Also, tonight I ordered a pizza online. Which was crazy cool. 🙂
Monthly Archives: June 2006
Chattanooga sans choo choo.
Today we took a trip to Chattanooga. We got to see a lot, and had fun. We started out with lunch at a Wendy’s, and then went to the Ruby Falls(Most of the pictures are of the Ruby Falls cave). After that tour we went and drove around downtown Chattanooga and had planned to go to the aquarium. Once we got downtown there was some kind of event going on, and traffic was horrible, so we decided to come back home.
Just a note, all the pictures of the river are the Tennessee river.
A day in Tennesse
Today Dr. Kumagai and I spend the day driving to the Jack Daniels distillery in Lynchberg Tennessee. The tour was really nice, and free! I bought a bottle of Jack Daniels that is only sold at the distillery, so that was pretty cool.
On the way back I took some pictures of some really pretty houses in Tennessee, and some other notable items. Specifically, a “Piggly Wiggly”, and the Alabam version of Carl’s Jr “Hardee’s”.
Sorry about some of the blurry pictures, some places along the tour required no camera flash.
Day six: the park and UAH
These are pictures from downtown Huntsville, and the University of Alabama, Huntsville. The park was very nice with all the regular park entertainment: ducks, fish(HUGE), and a pond. When I took these pictures it was about 3:30pm on a saturday…seems like a good time to be in downtown Huntsville? Guess not, the whole town was _Dead_. It was like one of those movies where someone wakes up and all the people are gone….just creepy.
After the park, we stopped by UAH and walked around a while. We strolled around the engineering building, which was very nice. The whole campus is very consistant, all the desks are the same, same types of buildings(awesome red brick), and just looked nice. 
Day four and an authentic Alabama dinner
Today was the last day of my first week here. Overall, everything is going great. Besides the heat, which wasn’t too bad this week, I actually like it here.
Of the many differences from California, a few things really stand out to me. First of all, everything here is so clean and green. The roads are clean and smooth. The countryside is green and open…There isn’t even any traffic. “heavy” traffic here is like saturday morning traffic in sacramento.
Another big difference here is the weather. Besides being very humid and hot, a strange thing I’ve noticed here is the complete lack of wind. There is no wind, no breeze, nothing moves the air around here very much. Another thing about the weather here is the constant thunderstorms. Like clockwork everyday the whole week I’ve been here, every day the suns goes away for a half hour or so and it pours down rain. The storm passes and it’s like it never happened………..weird. Because of the high humidity, in the late afternoon there is a “haze.” In California we have fog that reduces visibility on cold days, here they have haze that reduces visibility on hot days.
Today I also had my first authentic Alabama meal. Fried catfish, hushpuppies, and sweet tea. It was all pretty good, and the sweet tea tastes just like the tea my grandma makes.
That’s all for now. Sometime this weekend I’ll post a detailed description of what we are going to be working on…it’s pretty cool.