Julia and I went to pick Emily up at her dorm on Friday to take her to SFO. We moved out all the blankets/pillow/fan/lamp/etc. that was borrowed from my home to the car while she finished packing the rest of her stuff. She had post-its in an array of bright colors covering most of her walls and basically those are all the chinese characters she was supposed to have memorized in the 5 weeks she was there. My goodness, this girl’s Chinese is probably 100 times better than ours. I guess the only thing is that she doesn’t get as much practice speaking hence her desire to attend this summer program. So after she returned the keys to her dorm, we were all ready to go. The ride to San Francisco didn’t take too long, but her flight was delayed a couple hours so after she checked in her luggage, we had ourselves a nice meal before we sent her past the airport screening checkpoint. It’s been a while since I stepped into SFO’s International terminal, but a lot has changed since its reconstruction. Despite it’s huge size, it looked sadly underutilized. I guess their anticipation of the continued dot.com boom in the 90’s was the reason for this. Anyways, we enjoyed the large open space afforded by this renovation and had ourselves a relaxing time there. We picked up a hot meal at their food court and was surprised to see some familiar restaurant names at those food counters. They had Willow Street Pizza (which we ate at frequently in the past), Fung Lum restaurant (supposedly a good restaurant in campbell for wedding banquets and such), and Lori’s diner which we’ve also taken the kids to at the Ghiradelli square in SF (I love their old-style of making cherry cola). Then there was even an Il Fornaio inside the terminal past the checkin point, gone are the boring airport foods. Anyways, we took our time and chatted about other stuff including Emily’s 8-day backpacking trip in Africa. This girl has gone to more places than I have in my lifetime, but this trip to Stanford then onto Beijing University is the first time she’s been officially on her own (without any supervision from school teachers or administrators). We probably won’t see much of her for a while since she flies directly back to the east coast from Beijing, but I’m glad we were able to meet up if only for a few times before her life takes another couple leaps forward next time we come across each other again.