play hard

Just came back from the annual party of our company.

It's the best party I have ever attended at here!

Lots of fun - skiing, food, show, game, disco, live band, exciting people everywhere, many more. And everything is free.

Yesterday I flied to Reno with my colleagues and spent two exciting days there with no hassle of computer and work. After lunch we went skiing. The trails were much better than those at Mt High where I went with friends at couple weeks ago - much bigger area and much better snow. It was the host of Winter Olympic 1960. The altitude is about 8200 feet. If you are an experienced skier, you can ski all the way down to the starting point of the cable car at 6200 feet, which means about 600 meters in altitude difference, and then go up again with cable car. I wish I could do it. But I am still a beginner ... After a short instruction and some warm-up practice, I skied a long distance down to a cable car stop. No falling down! Then I took the cable car to return. But ... unfortunately I took a wrong one and was sent to a wrong destination -- it's much harder than where I was at the beginning. I was scared. But I had no choice expect to move forward. After falling down several times on the way I returned to the original site. Then I was more confident after this try and enjoyed skiing for several hours. Last time I thought skiing didn't fit me at all since I didn't have good balance and I am somehow fear of high. But now I changed my mind.

At evening I attended the big party. As I mentioned above everything is free and there were lots of fun. The dinner was served in three different theme restaurants. My favorite was seafood. You didn't need to pay tip for drinks since the company had covered it. Every room came with some show. After dinner there was disco in one room, live band in another room, and, as I heard, some game in the other room with total award about 8k$ - I missed it, otherwise I might win something .... I regretted that I forgot to bring my camera (left in hotel) to shoot some wonderful scenes. But in fact it was not so bad, since without it I was more free to join the crowded dancing people. I like the band very much. All the audiences were very high, sang and danced almost all the time throughout the performance (about 3-4 hours). But too bad I don't know the band's name. I heard that it's very popular at SF. They played many songs (I listened to most of them before but just couldn't remember the titles, except one: Jessie's girl. I remembered this because I have several friends with this name. And it's a nice song.

And besides these three party rooms, walking downstairs there were some people playing poker, majian, chess ... My friends asked me to go there and I played cards with some new friends from mountain view. We left there at 1am. I heard someone proceeded to a pub and stayed even much later. I got to know some new friends, and I met many colleagues from our office and I also met my mentor.

The best thing was that I was completely relaxed -- no hassle about work, just enjoying the time. Everyone looked so happy and excited. This is a young company and most employees are young. It's cool.