COSMOS Day 7 - Northern Cal

I'm basically cheating on my counting of my days in COSMOS. I wasn't even with anyone today, since I had to go back to the Bay Area to make my "performance" of Florence at the MTAC convention in Santa Clara. In the meantime, my fellow cosmonauts are on a little field trip to Blomers. I forgot where, since I didn't pay attention to the first field trip when I was looking through the stuff in my binder. After the convention, I went home to Hercules.

That was the paraphrased version of my day.  The more complicated one is as follows:

When I checked out Friday (COSMOS Day 6), I went back to my dad's friend's house in Arcadia.  Prior to that, I went to Hollywood, because it was on the way back to Arcadia, which is why there is one random post about Hollywood before this one.

The next day (COSMOS Day 7), my family departed from Arcadia and started heading up to Santa Clara.  We stopped at a Denny's diner for brunch.  The food I ate there seemed to not be any different than the food I normally eat at Pippins.

Traveling for another two or so hours, we finally reached Silicon Valley.  Big company names, such as Intel, Nortel Neworks, AMD, IBM and Yahoo! were visible along the highway.  We existed very close to them and drove to the Marriott hotel.

After parking the car, we started to search for where my "performance" of Florence would take place.  Outside of the building, I met up with my good friend, Paul, who said he would be coming to go see my "performance."  The teacher's checkin table pointed to the left and told us to go to the student information center.  I was required to report to Ballroom A-C.  

All of the fine composers made their way into the room.  One of the state contest winners managed to write a film score, and played it on a projector.  All students were required to say a few words before their performance of their composition on the grand piano.  As for me, my performance is on a DVD, since an orchestra cannot play it live.  Therefore, I managed to say a few words, and then give the DVD to the director, and sit down, and have the audience watch.  For my "performance" of Florence...that will take a while to upload. I will make a new post when I have time to upload the video - or rather when I get home.

Paul and my family continued traveling home, and midway, around Oakland, we went downtown to go eat dinner at a Chinese restaurant.  The food we ate included deep fried fish, roasted chicken, bok choy and sweet and sour pork.  I did not indulge in everything because I do not eat red meat, as a lot of my blog readers would know already.

We continued traveling back to Hercules after finishing dinner.  Paul lives around Hercules Avenue, so we drove there first.  Afterward, my dad took us to the area by Bio-rad to see if the police closed off the area for the fireworks.  The security manager told my dad that only employees with their badges will be allowed into the parking lot to watch the fireworks.

With that information, we drove home, and unpacked slightly (for my parents and brother stayed at Arcadia for my first week at COSMOS) and took a shower.  My dad and I left to go to Bio-rad to see the fireworks.  

The video of the fireworks in Hercules...it is about 80 MB, and I will update this post when it is on YouTube.  Actually, no, I won't be able to upload this video, because there was an uploading error at home.  The problem is that I don't have the file with me in UCI, and it is at home.