NYLF, Monkey sitings at Giza
Today at NVIDIA, fifty high school students took a tour of the campus. It turns out they are in a conference called the National Youth Leadership forum. Their parents paid five grand for them to go to seminars and such for nine days. Part of their tour included a speech from the Co-founder, Chris Malakawsky. It also included me, another intern named Tina, and a newly hired Waterloo grad named Robert, all giving short speeches about ourselves and advice for things they can do while in high school and college to make themselves appear lucrative to potential employers. It was an interesting experience, I don’t know how much help I was, but hey, I got paid for an hour and a half of work, and I got some free food and one-on-one time with the Co-founder (score). Oh, and at the end, got a compliment on my NIN shirt (double score).
Ben and I went to Fry’s to look at cameras, and the results were less than stellar. This means I either need to find a Circuit City in the area, or buy online. After Fry’s, some of us met at my place at 9:45, then we proceeded to San Jose. There is a hookah bar there called Giza (like the pyramid) that we decided to try. Carl had been aching to take us to a hookah bar, so we figured “what the heck?” The place was actually quite nice. We had to wait out in the lobby for about thirty minutes, but it was no big deal, we just talked about concerts and Nine Inch Nails, so it was very tolerable.
Once we got in to the lounge, the nine of us (me, Carl, Karl, Cider-man, Sean, Fred, Chris, Albert, and Lee) were herded into a booth barely big enough for us (at least the seats were comfortable). We were then brought our two hookahs, one with cherry flavored and one with lemon flavored. I’d never smoked from a hookah before, and in fact the last time I smoked, it was a drag from an ultralight, and I got way dizzy. Everyone was passing the pipes around, but for some reason, I just wasn’t able to get the smoke that everyone else was getting, and I wasn’t really feeling anything. After two rounds, we checked my mouthpiece, and it turns out that the stupid piece of plastic had a hole that was about a quarter as large as it should be (I didn’t know better, hookah virgin and all). I ditched the sucker and used a real mouthpiece, and proceeded to get exceptionally dizzy and giddy after my first real hit.
The festivities were continuing, with Cider-man showing us all how it was done. Carl and Lee were keeping up, but Cider-man could suck that smoke in pretty damn good for his size. After being there about thirty minutes, two girls (yes, actual girls! incredible, I know), Liz and Charmaigne, found it odd that nine guys would be at a hookah lounge without any girls. They proceeded to point that out to us, tell us that chick loves confidence, and give us all sorts of wonderful tips. It was okay though, they were attractive, and it was a funny distraction. We snapped a few pictures with them, then one of the boyfriends called them back.
A little while later, out of nowhere, Charmaigne comes back, then asks “Who here think monkey means [edited for content: female body part]?” Yes, yes, you read it correct. She actually said that. We’re not sure if the entire thing was one big joke, or if the girls were just really trashed (or just ditzy), but again, a welcome intermission. We continued passing the hookah pipes around the circle, and people started dropping (I was the first). We finally started making our way out of there around 12:45 AM, after my major buzz finally wore off and I felt I could drive safely.
On the way out, I forced Cider-man to get Liz’s phone number (she had offered it beforehand, don’t know why). He joked around with them for a minute or so, we had some more laughs, got an awkward hug, then took off. All in all a fun and entertaining night/morning.