First day in California

written on Monday, 21st June, 2010

After nineteen hours of travel, with stops in London and Los Angeles, yesterday I arrived in Mountain View, CA. It is a beautiful place.

Mozilla takes great care of the interns, so now I am living in the Oakwood apartments, roughly a mile from the Mozilla offices. There are three other interns living with me at the apartment (one from the bay area, two from other parts of the states), and there are about two hundred interns at the complex, most of them interning at facebook. The weather is warm and sunny at about 70° F (about 22° C).

When I was looking for my roommates (they were out when I arrived), I had what I am going to think of as a stereotypical Silicon Valley experience: The first guy I asked invited me to his BBQ. Turns out he works at Google, and all his guests were Stanford graduates. Of course, one of them is just now getting his startup going. Another one of them actually worked on the Django project in Lawrence, Kansas together with the folks around Adrian Holovaty, Jacob Kaplan Moss and Simon Willison. So that was absolutely great.

Today we visited the farmers market, where strawberries cost half as much as in Germany and are four times as big. We just went out for some beef and vegetables, which we will put onto the grill later. I can't wait for tomorrow, when I will be meeting the people over at Mozilla...