Business Today International Conference (BTIC 2013)

Freezing...

This weekend I had the incredible fortune to participate in Princeton's BTIC in New York.
Fully funded trip to NY to stay at the Hyatt and learn about emerging markets? Quadruple win.
Business Today is run wholly by Princeton students and every year they put on this amazing conference.
This year there were 130+ students from 20+ different countries attending.

Seriously awesome.
From Belarus to Pakistan to SYRIA to Taiwan to India to New Zealand to Kenya to Nigeria to so many more.
Did I mention there was a guy here from SYRIA? Jesus.
Unfortunately I didn't actually get to meet him but I did get to meet a plethora of really cool people who are doing amazing things with their lives. 

Also got to meet Eric Rose (first person to ever do a heart transplant on a child) ... so just a tensy bit of a badass (heavy sarcasm, this guy is amazing).

And David Cush, CEO of Virgin America. Also an awesome (and obviously absurdly accomplished) human being.

Eric Rose, CEO of SIGA

Also on my flight back I sat next to a hella cool guy going for his PhD at Colombia who casually happened to know Nicholas (Nick) Dirks, aka: new Chancellor of Berkeley.

His research is focused on British-induced Indian (real Indians, not Native-American Indian) slavery, post actual slavery. Absolutely fascinating. I had no idea that Indians were shipped to countries like Sri Lanka and Trindad and Tobago to essentially work as slaves. I won't go into further detail about what he's researching because I have no idea if it's proprietary/someone might steal it. 
Best not to risk it. 

But anyways, what are the chances.

Life is awesome if you just talk to people.
More and more I'm becoming convinced that it's not the places that change you life, it's the people and the interactions with them.

So don't be shy, put yourself out there, initiate conversations. Sometimes you'll get rejected and people will be like "uh, wth, don't talk to me."
The hardest part is telling yourself to get over that rejection and just move on. It's certainly something I'm trying to get much better at. Just talking to people without worrying that they will think I'm weird...cause if they do, well whatever. Let's be honest, I'm definitely a bit of a weirdo and spaz.

Vino :)

Desert at the Hyatt!

David Cush, CEO of Virgin America!

I like to pretend I'm cool.

Google Info Session -> Building a game!

So I went to a Google cloud info session and they taught us how to use the Google cloud platform to host websites!
Many thanks to +GDG Berkeley for hosting this.


Built a super duper complex and intricate game:
http://val-rps.appspot.com/

Haha, if you clicked on it you saw that it's obviously very basic and I want to go back to tweak it up and mess around and learn some HTML/CSS when I've got a spare moment.

But yeah went to this info sesh randomly (decided to go 5 min before it started) and it turned out awesome.

Pesca-Freegan? Super easy and healthy meals!

People always ask me what I eat.

So I'm largely a pescatarian, and a pesca-vegan whenever possible.

I don't think pesca-vegan is a thing, but whatever, it makes sense.

I eat fish and seafood and avoid all other animals products.

But if there is pizza at a party and I am starving, I will eat pizza. So yeah, I can't claim to be vegan, but I try.

Here's what my typical lunches are like.
IT IS SO EASY TO BE HEALTHY. Every night I spend about 20-30 min cooking dinner for that night, breakfast for the next morning and lunch for the next day.

 My staple lunch foods:

• Nutritional yeast (for a slew of vitamins, specifically B12) and Chia seeds (Omega's)
• Or if I have fish, I might not use chia/yeast since salmon is pretty much the only fish I eat and it's got B12 and Omega's
• Seasonal Vegetable (usually cooked in spicy mustard)
• SPICY MUSTARD. I devour this stuff like no body's business. 
• Wild rice/Quinoa
• Leaves (spinach, arugula, sprouts, etc)
• Other veggies that I have laying around
• Sometimes I'll make a creamy sauce (ex: blend together pine nuts/cilantro and lemon)
• Recently I've been cooking my veggies by just steaming them for a little while on a pan with spicy mustard, a few tablespoons of water, paprika, and whatever other spices I'm in the mood for.

My breakfast:

I love waking up in the mornings and starting the day off with a delicious green smoothie. Honestly green froth IS SO GOOD. Makes you feel so alive.

• Spinach
• Kale
• Rainbow Chard
• Green tea
• Wheat grass
• A little bit of fruit (frozen banana, frozen pineapple, etc)
  I liked to buy a ton of fruit at one time, chop it up and then freeze it so I've got a steady supply of fruit for 1-2 weeks

Yellow power = nutritional yeast
(if you've never had it, it's sort of cheesy flavored)
and brown powder = ground up chia seeds

Info session swag ftw!

Random Weekend Trip To Tahoe!

Awesome rock with strange pattern
I wonder what made it look this way
(with just one strip of rock being rough)

Went on a trip with some random (and all totally awesome) CHAOS people and it turned out fantastic!

We ended up going off trail and hiking an unnamed peak. There is a whole different world on the different levels of mountain and everything was just so beautiful and powerful and  majestic, ahhh. Love it so much.

We went through fields of painful spikeys, literally did mountain climbers to get up the sandy parts of the mountain, rolled around in the snow and engaged in very intense pinecone throwing wars. 

I've decided that when I'm old I want to die on top of a mountain. I'll get a helicopter to bring me and my death bed to the peak of somewhere awesome, and I'll just fall asleep in perpetual happiness.

Anyways Day 1 was perfectly spent and we ended the night with some great locals that someone from our party knew.

Day 2 was exploring Lake Tahoe and hitting up a secret beach recommended by the locals and proceeding to build a house and then a bridge to get from rock to rock. It ended with some of us (myself included) jumping into the freezing cold water and having our hearts restart.
No regrets.

One side was totally dry and the back side
(not in picture) was completely snowy. So cool.

No name, but location of peak:
38°51'45.39"N 119°55'38.54"W

More super cool rock/lichen combos. I wish I knew what
all of these were in specific.

We named our peak Onward Peak in honor of the
weekend's motto.
Where are we going? ONWARD.

Lake Tahoe is stunning!

It was so beautiful that I decided to move in.
So I built a home out of logs :)

Yup, absolutely freezing.

Spined Turban Oak Gall!

I am in CHAOS (Cal Hiking And Outdoor Sports) and a Cal graduate, Anand Varma (look for him in the photo creds for bio/ National Geographic publications!), needed help finding the perfect example of a Spined Turban Oak Gall.
He needed a good picture for his research so he sent out an email blast to all CHAOS people, and I said I'd help look.

We went to Sunol Regional Wildnerness in SF and it's so beautiful there! Such a great place to hike/climb/boulder/jog/pitch a tent and have a picnic.
I honestly had no idea something this cool was so close to home.

This is a Spined Turban Oak Gall.
It forms when a wasp lays its eggs on valley oak leaves
and releases a chemical that makes the
tree grow a spiny, pink,
protective structure around the wasp's developing baby.

Just shows how I know nothing about anything.

Anyways I had a blast on this hike and will definitely be coming back to explore the Regional park more!

Along the way Anand taught all of us (a group of 10) about various nifty biological things! Some of which are in my photos/captions.  

Sheesh I have never even thought to look under the leaves of these oak trees and it blows my mind how these bizarre spikey pink things just grow there. Casually.

This was another type of gall (protective
structure for a wasp baby).
It was dehydrated because it fell on the ground and thus
couldn't get nutrients from the tree anymore. Inside you
can see the dead wasp baby.

One guy on the hike with us brought coffee grounds and a
bunsen burner type coffee maker. Then he just randomly
started cooking coffee. It was spiced Turkish coffee. A
delicious (and random) surprise!

These marks in the tree are made by a Yellow-Bellied Sap
Sucker (a type of woodpecker). The woodpecker will
make these carvings in the trees, wait for the sap to bleed
out, and then fly back to eat the sap and all of the bug that
got caught in it. Brilliant.

This is a Western Fence Lizard. It has this tiny little flap
right behind it's ears that serves no purpose other than a
home for ticks. No one knows why that flap is there but
some theorize that it's to help keep the concentration of
ticks in one place (instead of having them all over the
lizard's body, it's just on the random flap).

ALSO. SUPER COOL. The type of tick that carries lyme
disease likes these lizards but there is something in the
blood of the lizards that actually kills the lyme disease in
the tick. So the tick can suck blood and then leave to find
it's next victim, but it's no longer infected with lyme
disease!

Unidentifiable bug. Cockroach/cricket?

Random fruit we saw and cracked open.
Not sure what it was, didn't risk eating it.

Afterwards we all went to Saturn's for dinner!

Bloggin' Again!

My fav library (Morrison) at Cal

My friend from Australia, Aaron, is coming to visit America and I started looking up things to do here.

(currently addicted to roadtrippers.com)

And I realized how much of an idiot I was.
MY GOD AMERICA IS SO BEAUTIFUL.
It's so easy to take what you have for granted.
So I decided to make a blog about my travels through (mostly) the Bay Area, California and the rest of the States. :)
Most of the cool stuff will come around winter break when I have many a roadtrip planned, but I figured I might as well start blogging about the little, and awesome, things now :)

Like Berkeley.
(Where I go to school)
Berkeley is so freakin' cool.

Casual Kendo on the streets of Berkeley

Being away in South East Asia all summer and coming back has just opened up my eyes to so many things, one of which being the fact that there is beauty in almost everything. Even right outside of your window.

So yeah. I am going to be a tourist of my own home.
Because why not. 









Btw: my Asia blog -> valeriayermakova-asia.blogspot.com