Sunnyvale, California

This week, I made a quick trip out to Sunnyvale, California.  This was an unexpected business trip - I had to represent our team in a series of meetings, when my boss couldn't make it.  I spent most of the day at our company's California HQ;

That evening, however, I had dinner with my oldest daughter and her husband.  I'm a lucky dad! I love these two, and always look forward to spending time with them.

For dinner, we always like trying new places - there are plenty of those in the SF Bay Area.  Tonight we settled on Korean food at a place called The Tofu House (full name is actually So Gong Dong Tofu House) in Palo Alto.

When eating Korean food, you usually come into contact with one of their more famous traditional dishes:  kimchi.  This is an evil substance that consists of fermented vegetables - usually cabbage - with a variety of seasonings.  While I'm sure it's high in dietary fiber, it can be quite spicy.  I think of it as hot garbage.

Others will certainly disagree, as it's very, very popular.  There are hundreds of varieties.  I believe the traditional way of making it, is to bury it in the ground to ferment.  To each his own....

On the other hand, I had a delightful dish called bulgogi.  This is marinated, BBQ meat.  While also traditional, this is much more my style.

It was simply delicious.  I'm glad my daughter did her research for dinner - she's really good at digging up these kind of places on the Internet.  We had a wonderful meal.  But it didn't stop there....

We decided that the awesome Korean food wasn't a proper ending to the day.  We headed to the Stanford Shopping Center, to a wonderful little place called The Creamery.  You can probably imagine what they serve:

My daughter has wanted a banana split there for a while...so we decided to split one.  It was, needless to say, good.  Her husband settled on a sundae.

That's a pretty evil look there, sir...

I distracted him while she snapped the picture...

After both of those culinary experiences, we had to walk around the mall, just to feel "normal" again.  I haven't been to this outdoor mall in probably over ten years...so it was a nostalgic walk through a place that  I used to visit often.

I had a real blast with the kids...I'm lucky to have so much fun when I have to travel to California for work ; )

Now, it's on to Utah...so I get to meet up with my wife and other kids.  I'm really excited to see them, as it's been a week on my own ; )