These pass few days I have been at orientations mostly, so here are some pictures of AAU buildings and other interesting buildings around my area.

The Morgan Auditorium, 2 blocks from my place. Apparently AAU's been buying over a lot of buildings around SF city, and so far whenever I walk around to explore or do grocery shopping, I keep bumping into AAU buildings. This one seems to be a former church. There's another auditorium 3 blocks in the other direction, just opposite Grace Cathedral, that is a former memorial building.

And the interior. Looks like it will look good with an opera or orchestra playing in it.
A cafe near my place. They used mosaic to form the owls.
Another building with a creeping plant on it.
The facade of the Howard Brodie dorm (dunno why all the dorms have to look prettier than mine) It's just on the opposite side of the road.Oh well, simple as it is, mine is probably the most convenient graduate student dorm available. 3 blocks from Chinatown, opposite the gallery, cafe and recreations office, and neighbours with the Clara Gil Stephens dorm,where the gym, pool and dance studios are and where busses pick us up when there are events. Let's see if I can sneak in to use their pool table as well...
A mural I passed by in Chinatown.
Here's a lovely picture of a double decker blister that has been developing on my foot. Wondering if I should burst it and get over with the limping period.
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Also, a a note for those of you who are about to go overseas for studies, the most useful thing that you can bring over is a roll of masking tape. You can:

1) Use it to tape things to your walls (like schedules, photos, posters, etc) without accidentally peeling of some paint when it's time to shift out.

2) Use it together with advertisement fliers to make emergency containers or envelopes (I used it to keep coins to use for the laundry machines, they only except quarters, so it's a precious commodity to me now.)

3) Use it to tape shut boxes, such as sugar. I'm too stingy to buy a proper sugar container.

4) Use it to tape together your electrical wires if they are too long and you like them to be neat.

5) Use it as a lint remover, because the quarter-only laundry machine happened to not be as clean as it should be.

6) And it just occurred to me that you can use masking tape to hide important documents , for instance, taping it to the bottom of your bed (I didn't do this though, or I wouldn't have typed it here.)

Actually, come to think of it, it might be a good idea to bring along some rubber bands, or you would have to buy them in those ridiculously big packets which you will never finish using. You'll have to bequeath it over several generations before it'll finish. Or open a nasi lemak stall.

And bring along a roll of toilet paper too, because the place you stay at most probably won't provide one for you.

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Also, I went back to Chinatown to get some carrots, and discovered that, here too, they have a practise of slashing prices of fresh food near closing time. That would be around 5 or 5.30pm for me. So if you are a scheming student like me, this is the best time to get your veggies. Bananas sold at 19 cents per pound or they would be thrown out with today's trash. Actually I did see a trash bin stuffed full with unsell-able (but still edible, you now how fussy customers can be. Also, it's probably more expensive for the shopkeepers to store and refrigerate the vegetables than to get a new supply from the wholesaler) vegetables as I was walking back, which is a big waste. I guess the wave of people who have started eating out of garbage bins as an environmental effort have a point. They get to save money in the process too, although you'd probably still have to have a pretty weak gag reflex.