Hi every one, read the Texas A&M entry first. It is below this one.
Houston here we come. We dropped Nik and Amy off at Jeremy. He is Nik's friend from Harvard and a bunch of people are coming to celebrate new year at his place. Jeremy had a brain tumor removed and it is difficult to see a guy with promising future having such a hard time. Hopefully he'll get better as time passes. Me, Michelle and Nok got a room at the Hilton downtown. It was pretty good, the pool on the rooftop was really cool. The bed was not good through, it was saggy, I'm very disappointed in the Hilton.
Natural Science Museum. The Lucy exhibit is here from Ethiopia. This is a 3.2 million years old fossil of human ancestor. It was discovered in 1973 and was the oldest fossil known at the time. They won't let us take pictures though.
Here a Dino pic.
NASA space center
The next day we went to NASA space center. It's a big campus that house all NASA mission control. There are a bunch of stuff for kids to do, all kind of activities, you could spend the whole day there.
This is the training facility. They have life size copy of the international space station and the space shuttle. The astronauts train here to see how the various modules works. The ground crew also uses this in case they need to do some kind of rescue mission like in the movie Apollo 13.
space shuttle
The control arm can move large satellite when it is in space, but can't lift anything on the ground due to gravity.
The Saturn V rocket that took Neil Armstrong to the moon. Actually, this must be a different one since that one burned up in the atmosphere. :)
After the NASA fun we went to Kemah boardwalk. There are shops and rides and games, but we just walked around.
That night we picked Nik and Amy up to go out to celebrate my birthday. I made a reservation at Yatra, an Indian restaurant. When we showed up they showed us a New Year's Eve menu. $65 per person, are you nuts. We said forget it and went to Azuma, a new age Japanese restaurant. It was pretty good and much cheaper than $65 a person and we got free Champaign. Happy New Year!!!!!
Nok got conch curry of some sort.
Nik got the Hot Rock Beef. yummm..... Cook on the hot rock at your table. You gotta be quick though, rock cools down pretty quick. Amy go Udon. Michelle got tempura. I got Udonyaki. And we got a large Robata skewers to share. next to Nik's plate.
After that we went back to Jeremy's place to hang out a bit.
The Ginyu force!!!!!
Once more with feeling!!!!! hah hahhhahha. That was great!!!
Next day we all went back home. :(
crop circles from the airplane, looks all dried out.
The rockies.
That's all for 2007. Hope everyone have a great 2008!!!!!!!!!!!!
SEE YOU NEXT YEAR!
Nok took us to a Wolf Pen Creek. There is an amphitheater there for free concert, playground and trails.
The Ultraman Pose!!! thank you for your coorporation, heh heh!!!
Then we went to a BBQ place for lunch. pretty cheap for 5 people, we got ribs, brisket, cole slaw, potato salad and green beans, yum. Then we went to Texas A&M to see Nok's office and walked around campus. It's a huge campus, much bigger than UCSB and PSU.
Vasuvian man
