This past weekend I made a trip up to NoCal (”Northern California” for those of you who aren’t cool enough to abbreviate…because abbreviating is obviously cool). My trip was split into three pieces: the greater San Jose area, San Francisco, and Berkeley.

I hopped in my car on Friday morning and made the five and a half hour drive through the desert by myself, with nothing to keep me company but the incessant singing of Lady Gaga (I swear, that’s the only music that plays on the radio out here). After stopping at a sketchy-looking Subway in the middle of the desert, I drove the final stretch to Los Altos, where I have some relatives. I got to spend some time with them eating good food, seeing Los Altos, and visiting Stanford. I even made my pilgrimage to the Apple Campus in Cupertino (I’m a dork, don’t judge).

The next day I went into San Francisco with the relatives and enjoyed a beautiful warm day. We walked around town, saw the Golden Gate Bridge, ate on the Fisherman’s Wharf, and absorbed some much-needed sun. It was good that I had been to San Francisco before, because the day went by so quickly! Before I knew it, I was hopping on the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to go across the bay to Berkeley.

I met Kevin on Cal Berkeley’s campus and stayed with him until Sunday afternoon. The campus was packed with prospective students and parents who were visiting for “Cal Day”, a festival which basically schmoozes prospective students into choosing Cal. Highlights of Berkeley included killer calzones, watching Sylvester Stallone in “Cliffhanger”, eating breakfast at a mexican rooftop restaurant, and making fun of the goofy parents who followed their students around on Cal Day (no offense to all the goofy parents out there, but foam visors went out of style a long time ago).

On Sunday I drove back to Burbank (with Lady Gaga), stopping at a Chipotle on the way. Nothing makes for a better five hour drive than shoveling a huge burrito into your stomach! If I had an extra day or two, I would have tried to stop by Napa and tour some wineries, but I had to be back to work the next day.

Today's Useless Fact About My Life In L.A.: If you compare the number of hours I spend driving each day with all of my waking hours in California this semester, it comes out to around 15%. That means 15% of the time I am awake is spent in a car. Whoa. (yay for hour-long commutes!)

Now hold on just a minute before you get upset at me. I know I haven’t really had anything to say for over a week now. And I know that you’ve all been sitting anxiously, unsure of what to do with yourselves, constantly refreshing this page and waiting for a new post to appear. Or something like that.

It hasn’t been my fault. The last week has been crazy, to say the least. April rolls in, and all of a sudden things are due, projects are assigned, and things just get very busy. BUT NOT TO FEAR, I have some exciting(?) news to share with you: I recently took a trip to watch a taping of The Price is Right.

Yep, The Price is Right. As in, the game show that elderly people watch with the same level of enthusiasm that college girls display when watching Gossip Girl.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not exactly the show’s most dedicated viewer. Last time I watched it, Bob Barker was still puttering around on stage. Now he has been replaced by Drew Carey, who is funny but lacks Bob’s charm and senility. Nonetheless, I decided to go since the whole trip was totally free and was organized by our trusty ICLA RA Team™, an elite group of super-students who plan awesome events for ICLAers almost every week.

Anyway, what I didn’t realize is that attending a taping is nearly a day-long process. We showed up at CBS Studios at 9am and waited around for FOUR HOURS before the taping began. Four hours is a long time to be waiting outside of a studio. But it’s okay, we passed the time by making fun of the horrifically dressed tourists. (I kid you not, this one guy had a handlebar mustache and wore bright purple elastic jogging pants and an ill-fitting homemade t-shirt with an iron-on image. Another long-haired guy was dressed in leather biking gear and looked suspiciously like Tommy Lee Jones’ evil twin).

The producers do a brief 30-second interview of each audience member to decide who will appear on the show. The screening process seems like an exact science and they do it very quickly. I am pretty sure I blew my chances of getting on the show when I told them that I had no idea what I was doing. I’m not sure why I said it, but that’s just how it happened. Amy, on the other hand, talked about her homemade macaroni and cheese during the interview, which made me hungry but also made me feel better about my answer.

Of the sixteen Ithaca College students there, we were convinced that at least one of us would be picked to play. But nobody was. And neither was Georgia, the old woman who sat at the front and was celebrating her 97th birthday. So I occupied myself with wearing a name tag, shivering in the cold studio, and forcing applause for the incredibly annoying intern who was charged with keeping the crowd excited.

This isn’t to say the experience was bad. It was actually a lot of fun to see how shows like this are made and to watch the people freak out in person as they learn they are winning things like a trip to Japan and a plasma screen TV. (The people who lost got a bird bath as a consolation prize, which I think is just cruel. You might as well just give them twenty bucks and call it a day). It was a unique experience and definitely worth trying, even if you have to wait for four hours to see it. Plus, there’s always a chance of winning a bird bath!

This weekend I am planning a trip to the San Francisco area, where I will inevitably be up to some mildly amusing shenanigans which I can discuss in a future blog post. Until then, try not to cry yourself to sleep at night. This isn’t goodbye.

Back in the day (at the end of March), I stumbled across a pretty cool opportunity at work. Mallory had managed to get tickets to a special advance screening of "I Love You Man" because she knew someone who knew someone at Paramount (gotta love connections). The screening was the day before the film was set to be released (actually the night before... our screening was at 7 and the film was released at midnight). So we left work a few minutes early to get to the Paramount Theatre at the Grove, where the screening was being held.

I had never been to any sort of special screening of a film before, but it was much different than your typical moviegoing experience. The most obvious difference was the lack of previews at the beginning of the film. There were none. Instead, we just started 15 minutes late, as if we had already watched the previews. There were guys in suits standing around with super-cool night vision goggles to make sure that nobody was filming or photographing the movie. And there were special "reserved" seats in the theater for Paramount VIPs. Fancy stuff.

The movie turned out to be pretty funny, and seemed to get a pretty good response from the audience. We grabbed some Pinkberry on our way home, feeling happy that we saw the movie a whole four hours before the rest of the world. And that was it.

But don't be fooled, this isn't the only exciting thing that has happened in Los Angeles recently. In other news...

• ICLA-ers Sarie Drake and Mike Citera were contestants on "The Price is Right" when there was a group trip to one of the tapings (I, sadly, wasn't there. I'm planning on going to the next one, though!)
• I got a chance to check out the impressive artwork and the even-more-impressive views at the Getty, one of L.A.'s most famous museums.
• We had a Nicholas Cage movie night, which was nothing short of pure ridiculousness.
• I went to a club in Hollywood with some friends. Pros: good music & cool lights. Cons: high prices & girls with obnoxiously tiny articles of clothing (seriously, just respect yourself).
• I took some friends to Manhattan Beach. We went home sunburn-free!
• I watched "Casablanca" for the first time this week.

I'll keep you informed of more excitement as it happens. This weekend is bound to be full of crazy stories. Saturday is our semester-ly volleyball tournament. Or as I'm calling it, the "ICLA Volleyball Tournament of Champions and BBQ Fun Fiesta" (ICLAVTOCABBQFF). Also on Saturday is International Pillow Fight Day, which means a huge group of people is gathering in L.A. to have a massive pillow fight. I am debating stopping by to check out the action, but it will be taking place around the same time as the ICLAVTOCABBQFF. I'll let you know if I make it there!