Silicon Valley

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We didn't get to see all of the PCH because we had to make it to Palo Alto (a suburb of San Francisco) in time for the dinner Peter's Mom had kindly cooked us. Although my friend Peter wasn't at home (he had left for Arizona to spend Christmas with his girlfriend( his parents still kindly took us in. His younger brother Paul was home from college and organised his friends to come over for a gathering. We played lots of drinking games with about 10 of his friends.

Palo Alto is in the heart of the Silicon Valley, the computer capital of the world. The founder of Apple Computer lives only a few blocks away from peters. What's weird is that he bought the block next door and planted you guessed it - an apple orchard. In the adjoining suburb of Mountain View, is the global headquarters of Google. What's really awesome is that Google wanted to give all of San Francisco free Internet access, the government didn't let them, but the entire City of Mountain View has free Internet. Security is extremely strict and we weren't even able to walk even closely to the building. We found a friendly security guard and hung out with her for a while. She said she sees the founders come to work every day. These guys were just geeky college students who had a great search engine concept back in 1999. Now they own a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars. There story is quite inspiring really. We also went to Intel and had a tour of their chip manufacturing facility which was extremely fascinating, especially as we have no industry like that in Australia. What was even cooler was the fact that everyone who visits Intel gets a free Pentium 4 chip to take home.