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woke up this morning and biked to a nearby park with my roommate julia. she brought a sketchbook and colored pencils and we sat in the park and sketched!

i love riding around in my new lime green bike and matching helmet! it also matches all the nature and evergreen trees in seattle!

after lunch, i needed to do some grocery shopping and wanted to explore seattle a bit, so my friend eric and i went to seattle chinatown. we got bubble tea, bought groceries, and even got haircuts!! we found this really great place that had really cheap haircuts. eric wanted to get his hair cut, so i decided to get one too!

before we left, we ate at this vietnamese restaurant. i’d never tried vietnamese hot pot before, so we decided to try it. it didn’t turn out to be what i expected – it was a lot sweeter and not spicy and savory like the hot pot i’m used to. 

it was raining this morning when we woke up so we didn’t really want to go outside. julia and i were itching to move around a bit, so we decided to do ballet!!

julia’s been doing ballet for a long time and even took a gap year before college to dance ballet professionally. we found a playlist on spotify, turned our kitchen bar into a barre (haha) and ended up doing a whole barre routine for an hour! it was fun to kind of get back into ballet! we decided we’re going to dance more often.

eric came by after lunch because he had a car to take us to the pro sports club, this really nice gym that we get a free membership to through microsoft. we didn’t really want to work out so we just signed up for our membership and then took eric’s car to buy julia’s bike while eric and bo, another friend from harvard who’s working at microsoft, played basketball.

for dinner, we went to a restaurant in downtown bellevue called the danube that has italian-german food. it was really great! julia’s friend phil from harvard glee club and lives in the seattle area came as well as another intern on her team and some of his friends. 

from left: kofi, julia, me, eric, bo, and phil

me and my roommate julia!!

my goulash – it’s like a hungarian beef stew – soo good!

the view from eric’s apartment

the windows 8 preview was released to the public today!! there’s some pretty exciting new stuff! the people app that i’m working on this summer will be fully rolled out in the official windows 8 release later this year, but in the meantime, here’s more information and another video about the preview as well as the download link: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/release-preview

for dinner, i made broccoli and pepper stir fry!

met the team and set up my office today!! i’ll be working in building 88 (my lucky number!!) with everyone in the windows & windows live division. 

we got there and were shown our offices! i’m sharing an office with grace gee, another intern from harvard. there’s a third explorer intern next door and two regular test interns across the hall. 

room 2653:

task 1 of the day: setting up my pc. i’ve never really set up an entire workstation and everything from scratch before, so it was pretty interesting.

all set up!!

my team is working on the super cool people app for the new windows 8 operating system  (here’s a video about windows 8 and the people app:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDYQmQ-phX8)!

our specific project that we’ll be working on the next three months is to integrate sina weibo (china’s “twitter” and biggest social networking site) into the people app that currently only supports facebook and twitter. 

excited to actually start working on it!

first official day! we had new employee orientation! it wasn’t too exciting – we just did a bunch of paperwork and listened to a ton of presentations and important people speak. all interns from our wave who have the same start date gathered in one of the huge conference rooms, split into different tables by division. there must’ve been hundreds of us! i asked the HR head how many interns there were total this summer and he said 1450!

it wasn’t a particularly exciting day, but we got tons of cool microsoft swag like mugs, cups, and a cool bag. but most importantly, i got my badge!!

officially a microsoft employee now 🙂

afterwards, i went to sears and bought a bike! after quite a bit of debating and choosing, i finally settled on a lime green 26” hybrid one!! it’s really cute and i got a matching lime green helmet and a basket!! it also happened to match the shirt i was wearing. 

the guy at the store was really nice and helped me install the basket and even took a picture for me! and then i rode the bike home!

then for dinner, we had our two friends/neighbors who are also explorer interns over for dinner. i cooked everyone my signature pepper and chicken stir fry and they really liked it!!

they really weren’t lying when they said it rains a lot in seattle – when i woke up this morning, sure enough, it was raining. julia and i decided to go do some shopping so we walked about a mile to a nearby shopping center and went to fred meyer (the local one-stop shop). 

there’s something very refreshing about the air right after it rains and our walk was actually very nice! there’s lots of trees and everything around us just seemed so refreshing! the weather is definitely much cooler than georgia (we wore jeans and hoodies) but this is the most comfortable temperature in my opinion.

we found out that another intern had a car, so him and his roommate ended up driving us around and we went to a target and a few other stores to buy groceries and shop for bikes. i think i’m an expert on all the different types of bikes now because i’ve probably looked at over 50 different bikes today. we will probably come back and get one in the next day or two.

we were really tired after we came back so made a really simple dinner – mac and cheese and chicken noodle soup.

i also realized that my roommate and i had tons in common! we both do ballet (though she dance profesionally during her gap year so she’s actually really good) and we both like to draw/paint! i’m hoping to get some paints or something and maybe we can paint in our spare time this summer!

got to seattle this evening and am getting settled into the apartment! julia got here yesterday and showed me around a bit – it’s so nice! everything’s furnished – down to pots, spoons, linens, and towels! this definitely made my life much easier than if we had to find our own apartment!

here are some panoramic photos taken with photosynth, this microsoft app for iphone:

our living room

my bedroom

the interactive panoramic photos are online here: http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=95f5d0c2-9920-4d5d-afca-5d9a3ce078e4

very excited to get started with the internship and for my summer in seattle!!!