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A Taiwanese who likes a Mexican

Aerva, the company I work for, bought some tickets to the Mexico - Brazil game at Gillette Stadium. Mexico ended up losing 3-1. Booo. We planned to have a tailgate party at 6pm and go into the stadium at 8pm for the game. We weren’t prepared for the crazy amount of traffic. The only other place I’ve seen traffic that bad was Mexico City. We left Cambridge at around 4:45 and didn’t get to the stadium until 8. The road to the stadium has 4 lanes. That’s just not enough, it’s bad planning. The road was filled with Brazilians (and some Mexicans) cheering the whole way. My girlfriend wore my Mexico t-shirt (she looked very cute in it), and the Brazilians kept jeering at her. One little Brazilian boy stuck his head out the window and waved and she shouted, “Boo! I don’t like you!” It was very funny.

We had 3 extra tickets to the game and I tried to sell them via the MIT Clubmex mailing list. Because we had to pick up the tickets at the stadium, I had arranged to meet up with those who bought them before the game. They hadn’t arrived by the time the game started, so I waited around for a bit at the gate to see if they would get there in time. I texted them constantly, and they all replied that they would arrive “in 10 minutes.” Unfortunately, they underestimated the traffic. By the end of the first half I texted them saying that if they didn’t get there before the end of half-time the tickets would be gone. One person, who asked for two tickets, decided to turn around because they were just not going to make it even by the end of the game. They were really apologetic about it, and offered to pay for the tickets anyway (I declined, I felt really bad for them).

The other person seemed to be riding on the Clubmex shuttle, and he kept telling me that he was very near (even though he was not). He finally got there with 15 minutes left in the game. At that point I was really annoyed and didn’t want to go down to the gate to give him the tickets, but Sanjay, because he’s an extremely nice guy, said that he would go to the gate. That’s when Brazil scored two goals, and Sanjay missed them. He ended up meeting the guy at the end of the game, but he didn’t care about the ticket then.

The ticket experience was really annoying - I was communicating with these people took away from watching the game. I feel really bad for Sanjay, he missed a very exciting part of the game. The problem was that this was my first experience selling tickets. The rule from now on is: if you don’t show up by game time, the tickets are gone. I felt bad for these people stuck in traffic, but I should have been stricter.

But in the end, I had a fun time, even with the traffic and the ticket issue. We had a tailgate party after the game because we didn’t want to deal with the parking lot traffic, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. Hopefully we’ll get to go on more company outings like this.

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I just moved out of the apartment I shared with Ravi and Andre. There haven’t been any updates to the site in about 3 weeks because I was busy finding a new place to live. The rental market in Boston is freaking horrible. It’s a college town, so everybody’s scrambling to find an place to live for September 1st. It doesn’t help that the market is dominated by rental agents - 90% of the apartment rental listings are through agents who want a month’s rent as a fee. I was really spoiled by the rental market in DC. Over there you can always find a luxury apartment, close to the metro, direct from the landlord, 2 weeks before you need to move in.

I’ve spoken in the past to Boston rental agents and they say that you need to start looking 4 months before you need to move in. I didn’t heed that advice because I didn’t know what I wanted to do once my lease was up. Also not helping: a 3 week vacation extravaganza in July. Because I’m working at a startup I can’t quite afford to have my own place (it’s so frustrating) so I looked through Craisglist apartment shares for 3 straight weeks. I must have gone to at least 15 different places and written about 100 emails, but each place had at least 10 people competing with me, and I was never the “coolest” one.

Finally I found a basement apt in Back Bay (!), and it’s a very short commute to work, my girlfriend and MIT. The only problem is that I was looking by myself - the apartment has two bedrooms and there were people looking to rent the entire thing. I had to find a roommate fast, which was hard because the landlord wanted MIT or Harvard people. I brought in a lot of people to come see the place, but most had some issue that prevented them from wanting the place. One girl backed out because she was holding out to get an apartment in Harvard that 10 people were looking at. I doubt she got the place. Finally an MIT grad student decided to take it and signed the lease and a check on the day he saw it. I thought everything was fine until he started freaking out 3 days later and backed out. We (the landlord and I) had said no to a lot of people who really wanted the room. After another round of interviews, it looks like I finally have a roommate.

This photo was taken as we were cleaning the place for the last time. It was a great place to live, even though it was freaking far away from everything. By the way, thanks a lot to Raam for helping me move