January Travels

View from our house in Park City, Utah

As detailed in the past several posts I did quite a bit of traveling over winter break with trips to New York, Florida, and Taiwan before finally returning to LA.  But with classes and other responsibilities starting up again early in January, that obviously put an end to my travel plans, right?  No way. Already disappointed that I missed out on the Section A Ski Trip to Mammoth Mountain, which took place the first weekend of January when I was returning from Asia, I decided not to pass up the next two travel opportunities that came my way (which happened to be the next two weekends): trips to Vegas and to Park City, Utah.

The idea behind the Vegas trip was it was the same weekend as the Annual MBA Poker Tournament and also the CES convention (Consumer Electronics Association, a high-tech showcase of up and coming technologies).  Its common for MBAs to enjoy gambling, partying, and new gadgets and technology, so this was a popular weekend to attend.  I stayed in a suite in the Palazzo with 4 other classmates.  It was a nice upgrade over MGM and Bally's that I've stayed in at my previous trips.  The craps tables hit me hard, we ate some decent food, went to a club one night, and, of course, made my mandatory trip to dive casino O'Sheas.  I also returned to the Hilton Sportsbook Theater to watch the Giants beat the Green Bay Packers in their playoff game.  As Kolko later commented, this was a fitting full circle for me to return to the same location at the end of the year to watch the Giants win a huge game after we had been there together in Week 1 and saw them lose a terrible game.

It was a decent weekend, but Vegas probably won't ever live up to the shenanigans of Reich's bachelor party weekend there this past September, and I'm also starting to get a little over Vegas in my old age.  Too expensive and forced partying, I think.  Plus with such a large group going on this trip (there were probably 150 Anderson students or so), I felt it hard to keep track of people and what was going on.  On a sidenote, I will be returning to Vegas in June as part of Disorientation (the clever counterpart to Orientation which started our MBA experience, Disorientation is one last party weekend in Vegas before graduation.  The majority of our 370 student class will probably be there those few days).

The living room of our eight-person house in Utah

The excuse to travel to Utah the following week was that it coinsided with the start of the Sundance Festival, a world famous film festival premiering independent films.  I'm not a huge movie-goer, but it seemed like it would be a few fun filled days of male bonding with some of my better friends at Anderson, plus I was looking forward to the opportunity to going skiing.  With clear disregard for our class schedules, eight of us rented a house in Park City and left LA on Wednesday morning and didn't return until Sunday night.

The five days in Utah were a blast.  The house we had was nice and cozy, we went skiing two days, we saw a bunch of movies, we ate some good food, and through some random connections and good luck we even got invites to a few open bar parties for free.  The only real bad situation was that our rental car got smashed up when some 19 year olds lost control of their car and fishtailed into us (the accident took place right in front of our house too), so we were without a car for the second half of the trip. 

Weathering the storm on the slopes

I especially had fun going skiing for the first time in a few years.  It had been a very bad skiing season all over the country up until this week, but a massive snowstorm came through while we were in town, and all the fresh snow led to the best skiing conditions I have ever been in.  I've only gone three times previously, all in southern PA, so my experience at Park City Mountain Resort was a noticeable difference in quality of slopes and snow.  The second day we went the conditions were a little too rough for me (I didn't really have proper gear, or skill), but the more advanced skiers in the group said it was one of the most "epic" skiing days they had ever had.  I spent most of my time trying to relearn the basics of skiing and used the green (easiest) slopes, but ventured out on to a blue (the next level up) on the last day.  I'd definitely like to go skiing more often if possible. 

Obtaining movie tickets for the Festival was a tricky process because everything was sold out weeks before our arrival (even though we were given a timeslot to purchase tickets as part of our trip package, everything we wanted to see was already sold out at that time).  So the best way to get tickets was to have someone wake up early (6 am) to wait on lines and buy tickets for the group.  The two movies I saw were Hello, I Must Be Going and The Raid, which were both worth seeing and were as different as could be.  The first was about a down-on-her-luck 30-something woman who starts dating a high school dude.  Obviously that description doesn't sound like it's my type of movie, but it was actually really funny and sweet, and reminded me a bit of Juno.  The latter movie was an Indonesian action film which was as violent as any movie I had ever seen.  Entertaining mostly for sheer shock value, and because the entire movie was literally one long action scene.  Apparently the movies the other guys saw later in the day were terrible, so I saw the best ones of our group.

I'll save the details for another post, but I actually made another out-of-town trip almost immediately after returning from Sundance.  The next day, I had to take a red-eye flight to DC for two days in the nation's capital as part of my AMR project with the non-profit we're doing consulting work for.  Also, somewhere in January I also took some classes, did a lot of schoolwork and have had several interviews, but those all just seem like minor details in a fast paced first few weeks of the new quarter.