Dude, where's my car?

Living here requires a car. The public transportation system is just not "cool". In the first month, I used a rental car, a poor Chevy Aveo that failed to merge with the highway traffic every time I went on. In that month, I was shopping for used-cars. Craigslist was my most frequently visited site at the time. I never had or bought a car before, so all I wanted was a reliable car that won't fail on me in the next year. I was luck enough to avoid too much hassle in looking at used-cars, because the first car I took a look at to test drive was in good condition, so I bought it.


This is my first car. I used my own money to buy it, without any help from my parents. It's a 1998 Toyota Corolla, in a mechanically great condition. Look at that baby purrr.

And now, after a year of great service, I have to sell it before I leave. I'm so glad it didn't cause me any headaches, like other interns' cars. I originally bought it for $3500, put in $800 of maintenance work throughout the year, and now exactly one year and 7000 miles later, I sold it for $4100. So basically, I spent $200 net (excluding gas of course) on a car for a whole year. What a deal! It was sad to let my baby go. Now I'm stuck at home and need to ask someone a favour every time I want to go out. Not having a car sucks.

Half Dome

Before our internship finishes, we definitely needed to tackle Half Dome. Located in Yosemite National Park, Half Dome is a giant round granite rock, sharply cut in half, at 8800 ft altitude. The hike to get to the top is 7.5 miles (12 km) long, ascending 4800 ft (1.4 km) of elevation. As can be seen from the picture below, the hike starts at the bottom of the valley, swirls all the way around 360˚, intersecting 2 waterfalls, and finally a cable-climb at the end to the very top point.

So I decided to go with 4 co-workers, full time ex-UofT-interns, last weekend. We left on Friday night to drive to a near-by town to nap, woke up at 4am Sat. morning, got to the trailhead by 7-8, and started hiking immediately. The average time for the hike is 12 hours, so we were prepared with plenty of food and water. Sandwiches, tons of snacks, and 4L of water each. It was actually too much, because our bags were really heavy and slowed us down.

This hike was the most intense physical workout I ever had. About an hour or two in, I was feeling completely exhausted. The sharp climb and the pace surprised me. So after that, I had to refuel and really tried to pace myself better for the remaining 80%. The climb got better after the initial hump, but I felt really tired for most of the way up. The end of the climb is the steepest point, which took quite some struggle to reach.

The last part, the bare rope climb along the side of the Dome, is extremely dangerous. One slip and you’re dead, no joke. Naturally, it moves very slowly, because the ropes can only accompany 2 rows of people (1up, 1 down) and people are all being very careful. When I reached the ropes, there were 200+ people in line waiting; the wait time was 2 hours! This only happens on Saturdays, any other day of the week is not this busy. We didn’t want to stand there for 2 hours, just waiting, so we took a break there on top of the half-hump to relax, catch intense UV rays to help out cancer, and enjoy the already fantastic view. Take a look at this video I filmed. To get to the top took 7 hours, but it was worth it!

For some reason the hike down seemed longer than the way up. It was especially damaging to my knees, but it was a hella lot easier on the heart. By the time we got back down to the trailhead, it was dark and the total hiking time came out to 13 hours. I was dead tired, that I didn’t even take notice of the uncomfortable bitch seat of a VW Golf. I probably lost 5lb that one day alone, and covered my workout duties for the next 3 weeks. Definitely glad to have done it though.

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