Denny Crane! Never lost, never will!

In case you were wondering, I do go to classes. In fact, the most interesting and fun ones have just started this week.

One is called Energy Law: Emerging Markets. Now, I suppose it is fair to say that, at least to U.S. standards, I come from a country that may be regarded as emerging. OK, a lot of you who have lived there in the last 8 years would dispute that to some degree but I hope we have made some progress (again, it depends on the basis to which we compare). Anyway, an interesting feature of this class is the professor who teaches it. He is an of-counsel (i.e. a working pensioner in U.S. terms) at a tiny law firm. Also, he speaks somewhat slowly. Normally this would be a good thing, since a lot of us don't speak English as a first language and this makes the guy more understandable. But he speeks reeeally sloooow. Some of you may know a certain attorney in the Frankfurt office of Freshfields, who is about the same age (approx. 65), speaks really slowly and lost a considerable portion of his hair (probably due to the case we had involving a certain arbitration and its challenge). This is one fact I cannot put aside. This resemblance is quite distracting. Anyway, the class is more or less a historic study of how former communist command economis have been transformed into something else. When I took the class, I thought to myself, I might as well tell these folks what life is like in such a country. I wouldn't have thought that most of the people who actually took this course came from such countries and apparently the teaching process has been reversed. We teach the professor of some things he missed while he was practicing in Russia in the 1990s.

Another class I took is Oil & Gas Law. Seems obvious to take when I try to major in energy law around here. What I didn't know was that this class is solely and completely about Texan law. No international or even interstate elements of any kind. Well, I came here to study some real American law, so I guess I'll have to settle with that. The professor is a really funny person. He's not so young anymore but is as energetic as no other.

First thing he said after introducing himself:

"Oil and gas law was not biult on rationality. It was built on the notion of MORE OIL!"

Another example of his realistic approach:

"Law is all made up. All you need is a set of words and you can solve any problem."

He has a pretty innovative teaching method: comics. He draws little comics while he explains cases and makes the class really interactive. Today, for instance, we were arbitrarily divided into three groups: "strict fathers", "black letter lawyers" and "nurturing parents". The purpose was to look at some issues from these standpoints, like what happens if some drills an oil well and drains oil from his neighbor's land.

A constant line he drops every other minute, that is when he finishes a block:

"Questions? Comments? Outrage?"

In any event, the best way to describe his way of speaking: Denny Crane!




Well, the main difference probably is the prof has no trace of arrogance in him.

working hours

I just overheard a conversation of U.S. law students, quite possibly 3 year J.Ds, talking about their future plans, interview sessions they've done or plan to do for internships. It made me wonder. I never really thought about questions like "Do I want to work with a big law firm, or I'd rather be an in-house counsel or even a prosecutor?". Also, it's been severl years since I graduated and I suddenly feel really old amongst these folks. It's funny to hear about the ridiculous "personality tests" these people had to face before being asked even a single legal question in their interviews. I try to restrain myself from giving tips to them. They'd probably dismiss them at first saying I'm from a different legal culture. But is the culture of big international law firms any different on the old continent and in the new world?

"You can keep your hat on..."

Just to take my fair share in battling against stereotypes, nobody wears cowboy hats in Houston. In the last two weeks I've spent here I've never seen a single person wearing cowboy hats of anything of the sort. Not even for marketing purposes.

(It seems the Californian surfer outfit is more popular.)

If you ever go to Houston...

and need to unwind, two of the best places we've found so far:

http://thedrakebar.com/index.asp
http://venuehouston.com/

I see cards everywhere...

Today I got not less than two cards in my mail. I finally received my university ID card, which doubles as a MasterCard debit card and also has a checking account attached to it (I can finally do my laundry! The landromats do not accept any other form of payment.). I also got my regular Visa checking card from Bank of America. So together with my temporary checking card, my temporary university ID card, my Hungarian debit card, my Hungarian ID, and my Hungarian drivers license I have 7 cards in my wallet. The interesting thing is that I can pay with 5 of these. Wish I had the money to use all of them... :)

Congratulations! You've found it!

Judging by some soundbites overheard around half past midnight from under my window I guess I need to be more cryptic about people mentioned here. Isn't that right, dear P & R? :P :D

WTF?

This one's so bad it's almost good.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2KmzFABujM&NR=1

How to become a shopoholic.

This place is pure madness. Correction. People are mad. They demonstrating frightening symptoms of fixation, retardation and Britishism. Ok, this latter one is not really a problem, it is something rather unusual around here.

Yesterday I (and some other fellow international students) finally moved in to our rooms for the academic year. Well, I thought these are college dorm rooms even if they are singles and we only have to share the bathroom with one other person but the first impression most of us had was... outrageous. So we decided to get go down to Wal-Mart to pick up some cleaning products so as to make up for the cleaning the apartment managers insisted they have had done. Clearly someone visited the rooms and tried to do something about them, but this was certainly not the best cleaning job I've seen. We tried to call everyone we knew had a car to give three of us a lift to Wal-Mart. They were either out of town or didn't pick up so I thought we'd do this the next day. But the one of the guys insisted he could not go to sleep until the cleaning is ready and he doesn't mid staying up all night long cleaning the toilet. But this was a FRIDAY NIGHT! Noone can be so needy on a Friday night. Except for booze and women. This guy was persistent. So we went down to Wal-Mart by taxi. $10 for each of us. Then we asked the driver for his cellphone number and begged him to stick around to pick us up later. (The charm of one of the girls riding with us helped a lot in that department...)

Now if you think girls can shop for a long time, you're wrong. This guy and the aforementioned girl together were just.... (I can't even find words for it. Slow is like lightning compared to these two.) Not that they didn't move around fast enough, it's just that they kept changing their minds about everything. And this guy, who has lived in England for the last 4 years or so, just wined about how awful his bathroom looked for almost one straight hour. It wasn't funny after a while even though his rather British accent and choice of words. (Like "This toilet is dreadful. I haven't seen anything so dirty in my entire life." "Oooh God, what am I going to do now?!")

Oh, and by the was, never dare to buy blueberry juice ever. I tastes awful.

Once finished with this shocking shopping I joined another crew for dinner at a Mexican restaurant in another part of town. Another guy and myself went out with two other girls (both magnificent if I may do say so myself...) and yet another Spanish speaking guy. We grabbed a cab and headed for Midtown. Luckily, the driver had absolutely no clue where the restaurant was, didn't own a GPS and was constantly looking at a map with a flashlight through the whole ride. But we got there and it seemed we made no big errands. The food at the restaurant was fabulous. We had real good time, one of us convinced a mariachi that it was a girl's birthday so he sang songs to her for almost half an hour. Her face went red in an instant and stayed that way through the whole performance. :)

We then went to a club next door. (In Midtown there is virtually nothing else but restaurants and clubs all over.) The worst kind of Ibiza style techno dominated the place. But the others wanted to stay (because the other option would have been to go home and nobody wanted that really). After some beer it wasn't so bad but I could only enjoyed it after so many tequilas that I couldn't have stood still.


Today, however, was different in some way but basically not that different. We decided that we want to check out the shopping mall Galeria downtown. Since neither of us has a car and we tried to avoid being ripped off by some taxi driver, we thought it would be good to try out the (not so dense) puboic transportation system. It took us over an hour to get there. We had to change buses three times. But once we got there, it was like Westend, Mammut, Arena Plaza and 5 more of these put together. This would not be such a big deal except that the first floor was stores like Ralph Lauren, Cartier, Dior and the likes, the whole ground floor was just restaurants (not necessarily too good) and the second floor was mid-level stores paramount to Springfield (Abercrombie & Fitch for those of you who know these). Since I didn't bring too many types of shoes (and I was fed up by having my basketball shoes on nearly every day) I invested in a new pair of tennis shoes, and also bought some T-shirts. The Swiss guy bought some watch for about $600 and various items, it was sales tax holiday in Texas after all. (This means that on this one day the State of Texas did not collect sales tax on certain items like clothing so as to assist families buying stuff for their kids for the upcoming schoolyear. This generally meant a nearly 10% discount on everything but most stores also added their own discounts or had clearence sales.)


So much for extending my closet collection. I guess now I need to find out how to do my laundry around here. :)

Still Alive

For the time being I seem to manage in the not-so-ghost-town-anymore Houston. In fact, I need to hurry up with the administrative things before the J.D. and undergrad students find their way to crowd and block all possible administration sites.

This comes on top of some "light" reading we have been assigned: I need to catch up with 40 pages in Introduction to American Law (I only missed 1 lecture because of Davis) and have a new 70 pages to read for the day after tomorrow. Luckily, these are all topics I heard about in Davis, so at least the points are not completely new. In fact, I seem to know more of the case law at this point than the textbook discusses. I suppose this will not last forever...

Tomorrow I'm meeting one of my sponsors from Houston (as you may know I have multiple scholarships). She seems to be really excited since I'm the first person they've ever chosen to support. (Probably this fund is not too old.) I completely share her excitement.

Oh, and one of the surprising things was when I found a form in my University welcome packet asking if I wanted business cards. They will actually give me university business cards. Unbelievable! Geri, Petra, I think I'd still need some corporate ones, though. ;)

And now, a recent discovery:
(I hope some radio program managers also bump into this site.)

Ghost town

Today I met with some mates from the program here in Houston and went around campus to explore our possibilities. Since I was sleeping in till 10am I wanted to grab something to eat quite shortly. But everything on campus was closed. Even the ever-open Chinese restaurant. So I had to settle with Burger King oil soaked cheeseburgers.

At my permanent place (I can't wait to move in.) I was to meet a Swiss guy and ran into a Portuguese guy with whom we chatted on Facebook some time ago. So we decided that after forming a sort-of-European-alliance in this distant place to go around campus to see what we have. It a really big campus if toured on foot. I'll definitely have to buy at least a bicycle. But even if I have a bicycle, I'll still be locked inside campus because all the other places are miles away in every direction.

We then went inside the campus sports center. It's just fabulous. They have an Olympic size pool with diving ramps inside and they have a shallow pool on the outside, mainly occupied by children and adjacent family members charged with babysitting. The outside pool's water was rather warm, which proved to be not so comforting in the 100 F and rather humid weather. So after discovering that the indoors swimming pool had just the right temperature we only went back to the outdoor pool to dry and sunbathe a bit (I got burned even with sunblock on me.). I then tried out the hot tub they had inside. When these folks say hot, apparently they mean HOT. At first I couldn't go inside the water. After 15 seconds, though, it just felt right. I even had to explain to the Portuguese guy that Hungary is more or less a hot spring nation and I'm more or less used to such hot water.

Once finished with our deep end exploration of the sports center (it will be my second or third home on campus) we again were faced with the problems that come along with a ghost town. We had to find some place to eat. "McDonald's ist einfach gut." we agreed. Even though neither of us could be considered a fan. After such a long day my order was "The biggest Coke you guys have." and just to make sure I don't dry out completely "And a tall Iced Coffee." I said. Well, the biggest Coke was around 40 oz (approx. 1 liter) and the tall iced coffee was another 20 oz. I almost drank both instantly. I guess humidity is just on the outside. It's a different kind of hot weather here than in California. I had no problem with temperature in the 100s.

Houston, here we go!

This morning, after an excessive farewell party in Davis, I boarded my flight from Sacramento to Houston (through LA) at 10.40am. The airline was more or less nice (Southwest Airlines). At first I was worried that I won't make the transfer, as the layover was only 50 minutes, and once I made it I started worrying that my luggage didn't make it. Surprisingly, it arrived together with me.

When I stepped off from the plane, I was fairly surprised how different the real Southern accent is from what I believed. I understood everyone in California perfectly but here I really need to focus. Let's just hope that I'll get over it in a couple of days.

So I sought out the shuttle I arranged for myself previously and as soon as I stepped out of the air conditioned space at the airport, I started sweating like hell. I saw some high temperatures in California, sometimes over 100 F (around 40 C) but this kind of hot was different kind of hot (and unfortunately not the kind of “hot” I often found in Davis at night, if you know what I mean). It's really humid and at first it's harder to breathe. The air conditioning is overkill, they seem to like the temperatures in refrigerators. They must be penguins who couldn't find a better spot.

Anyway, I arrived at the campus where I had some arrangements to secure temporary housing. I won't be able to move in to my permanent place until August 15, so I could either book a room at the campus hotel (amounting to $1,600 for 10 days) or accept a temporary room in “Moody Towers”. These guys must have known something. If you've seen any part of the series “Californication” you know who Hank Moody is. He's the 40 something trashy (and probably smelly) playboy type of “writer” whose life is completely messed up from top to bottom and lives in a sh*thole apartment. Now this apartment represents perfectly what “Moody Towers” looks like. I expected something like that but I had no clue that because of some water pipe renovation the whole building would be torn into pieces. But that's what it looks like. “Under construction” to be a bit euphemistic. Needless to say that nobody at the front desk seemed to know that I was coming so (luckily my Russian classmate arrived earlier) joint efforts had to be made to convince security that we supposedly have rooms booked for us.

When I finally got to floor 17 where my room is I thought it would be nice to grab some food. Since the whole campus looked like a ghost town, I was a bit scared that nothing will be open and I'll die in the middle of a metropolis due to the lack of nutrition. Luckily, the doorman or security guy or whatever showed me that there's a Pizza Hut just around the corner. So I decided to go over, sit down and feel as if I was in a civilized place. Fat chance. First, the pizza place “just around the corner” was a 15 minute walk. Actually it really was on the next corner but the corner itself was really far away. And there were no other corners until that one. I got to realize that there is just NO WAY to live in this city without a car. Even if I wanted to go down to work out I'd need to have a car to go to the other side of the street. Literally. And that's just campus. The highway I-45, which seemed like a nice little 2x2 lane highway on Google Earth has actually 6 lanes both ways. Crossing it is a hike in itself.

Also, I promised a Swiss classmate that I'll join them for some soccer tomorrow. (Me and soccer. Imagine. I pause here for a moment for you to laugh out loud.) I wanted to call the guy from my cellphone and instead of a ringtone a mechanical lady reminded me that I have only 5 dollars on my account. So what? By 10 cents a minute it should buy me 50 minutes. They didn't let me make an outgoing call until I refilled. (SMS worked fine.) Weird.

I also don't have Internet access. Not just in my room, practically there's no terminal I could get to. Each one would require me to use my student ID card, which I won't get until Monday. I'm locked in. Not just in the analogue world but also in the analogue campus due to the lack of adequate transportation.

Clearly there's lots to iron out. I expected that I won't be bored for this year but apparently every day brings a new and harder challenge.

Correction. I just managed to crack my way into the digital world. :)

Do U.C.? It is elementary, my dear Watson.

Tuesday was another day for a field trip. These things are getting better by the end of the course. Perhaps they should do nothing more than organize a bunch of these fields trips. (Maybe they should start a travel agency or something.) We went to visit the famous U.C. Berkeley and its law school.

As I later found out, the usual procedure would have been that we have the last week of classes at U.C. Berkeley. However, the constant campus constructions occupied almost the whole law school (even in Davis, so we had our classes in a different building), so they thought there was no point in shipping us down in Berkeley. I think they should have. It's a nice place. Generally. But when we arrived the scene looked like it was transported over to California from the Soviet Union. Ugly 70s buildings, which posed as "modern architecture" at their time. They are ugly. Plain and simple. Luckily, this was not true for most of the campus.

We started with a tour of the campus, conducted by 3 gorgeous undergrad students. They were a bit intimidated by the fact that the time was long one when we were high school students, they usually give tours for would be Cal undergrads and their parents. We got to see the tourist attractions: the Bell Tower, the oldest building on campus and the library with its "Harry Potter Room" or "napping room"(it really looks like as if it was taken out from Hogwarts).

Our guide


said the bell tower



was a replica of what stands on Saint Mark Square in Venice


except that it was not made of bricks and it was 3 feet shorter (out of respect for the original). Well, as you may see from the pictures they might need to update their guide preparation materials. :)

Anyway, the campus was fantastic, even though the law school was under construction. Having seen some parts of it, I guess they had a pretty good reason for renovation. (I didn't dare taking pictures.)

We also learned a bunch of funny stories about both U.C. Berkeley (Cal, as they call it, because it was the original University of California, which later expanded to multiple campuses, such as Davis.)and their arch rival: Stanford. Football (the American version) is really popular here. In fact, they plant the school spirit by giving the best seats on each game to freshmen for free so that they get to become part of (and soaked with) football. Every year sometime in October the Big Game against Stanford takes place. At one time, Stanford students brought a huge axe and started cutting down some decorations in the stadium. Cal students were so outraged that after the game they started chasing Stanford to get the axe and eventually they got it. Now Stanford started chasing the Cals to get back the axe through San Francisco (it's quite a distance, I might add) and even had the police involved. The police closed down all way to ferries through the Bay (which was the way home for the Cals), so the Cals found a butcher shop and cut down the handle of the huge axe. One student hid the head under his jacket and a gorgeous female student distracted the posting police officer at on of the docks, so they managed to sneak back to campus. Next year Stanford stole the axe back. Then the Cals stole the axe back. This went on for a couple of years and then the Presidents of both universities agreed that whoever wins the Big Game each year gets to keep the axe. By the way, the story started 1899. The story in more detail at Berkeley's site. And in the spirit of "audiatur et altera pars": the Stanford version.

Btw SFO pictures available at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/akovi2/

Houston? They have a problem.

For those of you who are watching weather forecasts: I'm not in Houston, yet. I'll have a flight on Saturday and see if there's anything left of the city.

"If you're going to San Francisco; Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair."

I didn't. It would have made me look silly. In fact, I haven't seen anyone wearing flowers in their hair in SFO.

We had a field trip to SFO on this Saturday (Aug 2). We were dropped off at Union Square and had the whole day to ourselves, no specific program was arranged for us. So, I thought I'd follow my classic way of exploring a city: simply walk around.

At first, I went in the "wrong" direction, as I immediately found the worst part of the city: what I like to call "Queens" after the Queens part of NYC. (I didn't dare to check out the Bronx in NYC.) People on the streets looked like junkies and hookers (or both) so I tried to find my way back to the financial district and hoped that it was not the only decent part of the city.

So, when I found my way back, I went on up North. Suddenly, signs started to change. At first, I though it was just the beers I had yesterday evening but no, the signs really became illegible to me. I pulled out my map and saw, I reached Chinatown. It's just like in Józsefváros, except that it's an actual district and it looks way better. But just like in Józsefváros, you can buy just about anything. People have their stuff out on the street and there's almost a street full of barbers and hairdressers.

Then after a while signs returned to normal. Or so I thought. The letters became familiar again, but I still could not make much sense of them. The Italian quarter. Every pole on the street had a mini Italian tricolor painted on it.

Still going North I bumped into the Bay, namely the famous Pier 39 with lots of seafood. Interestingly, there were like a hundred seals sunbathing on some wooden establishments made for their enjoyment. Skipped the tour to Alcatraz Island, it was clearly a tourist trap. Not that much into prisons anyway.

It was 2pm already so I started to inch back towards Union Square for he scheduled pickup (scheduled for 6.30pm). On the way back I stopped at a nice little restaurant in the Italian district and had the most delicious pasta in modern history. :) Only their Tiramisu was better.

In the financial center I finally got around to shop for a new pair of jeans (the old ones were really worn down) and imagine that in the middle SFO, I actually bought a pair for less than $7 (!).

Photos are uploaded to the Picasa storage area, and here's some other guy's video which really captures the atmosphere of the whole city.

court battles

Just came back from court. The "Supreme Court" that is. :)

We had to argue on behalf of the "Santa Fe Independent School District" that their policy allowing for non-sectarian and non-proselytizing (I actually had to look up these words...) benedictions and invocations does not violate the Establishment Clause and the Free Speech Clause in the First Amendment. I had 5 minutes. Wasn't enough obviously. They said we did a good job, with my co-counsel, Mr Eishi Takahasi. Even though the "presiding judge" was biased against us, he used to try civil rights litigation cases arguing for the plaintiffs.

Good exercise, though.