15 Saturday

Morning coffee

Relaxed in the morning, drinking coffee and talking in the small courtyard area at Russell and Novey's place. In the afternoon Russell took us to the Malpitas Great Mall where we strolled around, had lunch at one of the eating places, strolled around again, bought some chocolates and came back.  This has been the only mall that we have been to where the crowds are anything like what we are used to at home. 

Lunch at Malpitas Great Mall

On our way there, Russell drove through the Cisco Campus. (Why do they call it a campus?) It is like a small town and occupied an area of probably several Hendersons.   Each of the three story buildings were styled similarly and painted in identical colors and would have occupied a land area a bit larger than the size of West City at Henderson. There were 15 - 20 of these buildings in the Cisco town. They had their own streets, huge wide streets with lanes double the width of our traffic lanes.  Cisco Way and Cisco Bldv.  Large grassy areas surrounding each bulding with planted trees and many magnificent palms. At one of the buildings, an ornate fountain in park like surrounds. (Head Office)?  Yet even Cisco has suffered in the dot com crash as I spotted two of the buildings that were completely empty, but compared with other smaller companies, they seem to be doing quite well.  Russell drove pass an area where building speculators had been caught out in the crash.  Building after building, brand new and completely empty, in some cases weeds covering the grounds up to the building walls.  Brand new derilects.  Many of the smaller technology companies went under 18 month, 2 years ago, just leaving the large ones with established markets and a large capital base and those designing product in niche areas like Russell's company, Ubicom.

The weather at Mountain View is now noticeably cooler in the mornings (about 18 degrees C) with an early morning clear blue sky and no haze. During the morning it warms up and into the afternoon it again gets quite warm (say 24 degrees C). This contrasts with when we first arrived when there was early morning low cloud which didn't burn off until mid to late morning.

In the late afternoon, evening, Russell and Novey watched a movie and then went roller blading while we went to the San Antonio mall for some more shopping.