I made two mistakes in college that I vowed to not make in med school.

1. I emphasized academics at the expense of forming social relationships.

2. I spent all my free time and fulfilled my social needs by talking to my boyfriend freshman year. We broke up sophomore year, and I found myself with no social contacts.

Once I realized the importance of social relationships for my health and happiness, it was too late. Most people had already formed their social circles and weren’t too welcoming of newcomers. College students aren’t much more mature than high schoolers in that way. Now I’ve come to realize that med students aren’t much better (or at all better).

My med school class is 170 people. Large enough that I’m not going to adore everyone, and small enough that I have to spend a significant amount of time with those very people. Every day. Eight hours a day. I’ve been here for a month already, and everyone seems to have already formed their cliques, while I have no friends. So maybe it’s not just that I missed my golden opportunity in college. It’s probably just that no one wants to be my friend.

I had dinner and a beer with a classmate of mine after a long day of school (I knew her from undergrad, so she doesn’t count as a new friend). I asked her how she gets to know people and what kind of activities she does with them. Unfortunately, her answer was that she hangs out with her MD-PhD cohort. I don’t really think four extra years of school is worth it to make some friends, so that plan won’t really work for me. I live in a house with third year students who are too busy with clinics to hang out with me, and in a part of the city far away from most of my classmates.

In the past, I instantly knew who I could become good friends with. Now it seems like there is no one here for me. And that is why I am stuck here, telling my thoughts to a computer instead of to my best friend.

One of the tacky activities my med school requires of us during orientation is to describe our core values. As it turns out (and this is an off-topic preamble) I apparently didn’t think it was worth my time to complete beforehand. During the summer, I was swamped with work for my internship that I flagged the initial email and completely forgot about it. I figured they would send us a reminder as the time got closer. During the entire summer, I received no emails from my new school. Absolutely zero. I had to look up what day I was supposed to show up. “Wow, they don’t do a good job communicating with their students,” I thought.

Upon check in at orientation, a staff member asks me for my Core Values assignment. I hadn’t done it.

“Why not?”

“I must’ve missed the email”

“You mean you missed every single one of the FOUR emails I sent you?”

I had no clue what she was talking about. She hands me a pen and paper and asks me to write an essay about my top core values on the bus to the orientation. “You’ll need it today,” she explained.

It wasn’t until the end of orientation week that I realized I had a new school email address, and that all of the communications from my school were directed there. When I signed in for the first time, I encountered mountains beyond mountains of email. Among those were these two from the staff member above:

—–

Hi

As of this morning, we have not yet received your core values and/or your retreat consent form.  We must have these in had by noon today.

Please make every effort to send us these documents ASAP.

——

Then a few hours later…

Hi again-

We REALLY need your core values within the next hour.  (we have some administrative work to do with them before tomorrow).

Please make every effort to send them to us ASAP.

—-

Other emails I had missed included multiple notices of social gatherings of my classmates with subject lines “Happy hour tonight!”. And here I was thinking the whole time that everyone else was invited to these events but me.

In any case, that was a long preamble. Let’s return to the core values.  Of course, everyone groaned at this activity, but I actually found it insightful. Then again, I am into introspection. Here are my core values as written in 20 minutes on a bumpy bus ride:

1. Acceptance: to whole-heartedly accept another person with their positive and negative aspects. To withhold judgment. To really look past the exterior of a person and see their core values that narrate their life. To give all that I can to another. To forgive others of past wrong-doing. To accept that I am unable to influence others and that they ultimately make their own decisions and are responsible to themselves.

2. Diligence: To strive for excellence in anything I set out to do. To put my entire attention and effort into an endeavor, no matter how small. To have a high standard for my actions, so that if anyone entrusts a task to me, they can be sure that it will be done and done well.

3. Accountability: To be responsible and trustworthy on the issues for which others depend on me, and to be responsible for myself. Don’t be late. Complete tasks on time. And strive to the best extent possible if otherwise. Take care of personal needs, including health and social. Addendum: Strive for excellence but maintain a minimum standard of competency.

—-

It’s ironic that my last core value is to complete tasks on time and I clearly did not do that for this assignment. This beautifully illustrates the fact that my core values describe the person I aspire to be, and that is still a work in progress.

A male driver runs a red light and crashes into a female pedestrian. Whose fault is the accident?

The woman’s. What was she doing out of the kitchen?

Jokes start from grains of truth. Not absolute truths, but rather true societal perceptions. However, unless you want me to burn down your house, do not perceive me to belong in the kitchen.

Let me tell you about two separate incidents that happened less than 12 hours apart.

Last night, I was just frying an egg to add to my noodles. I needed to set down the frying pan for just a second, and even though it was still hot I somehow figured that I could set it on the wood table. Wood doesn’t burn, right? Well this was the result:

When I woke up, I made myself a sandwich and started the toaster oven. A minute later smoke is emanating from the oven. That doesn’t look normal. I open the door and my sandwich is on fire! I am freaking out. Despite my culinary incompetence, I have never started a real fire before! Someone always stopped me before I got to that point. I’m looking around for a fire extinguisher. Should I throw water on the fire? I run to find my roommates and see if they know what to do. Meanwhile, the oven door was left open. No one was home, so I ran back to check on the fire, which by now had burned itself out. So it wasn’t a big deal.

This is after I accidentally used my roommate’s kosher knives to cut meat, and set off the smoke alarm from baking cookies on wax paper and still gave the crayon-flavored cookies away.

I think I should just never enter the kitchen again.

Let’s revise the joke to this:

A burglar breaks into the house through the kitchen window and finds Crystal sneaking a midnight snack. Panicking, he grabs a knife and stabs her to death. Whose fault is it?

Crystal’s. What was she doing in the kitchen?

Mood: 7 finished studying biochemistry and about to turn in for the night. / Tired: 5, which is perfect for an early night’s sleep. Looking forward to a full 8 hours. / Spiritual Tired: 5 Feeling better than during the week from hell.

Hello, my name is Crystal, and I am a Settlers of Catan addict.

It’s the end of the week from hell. On Monday we started anatomy, dissecting human cadavers. Having just finished our first round of exams last Wednesday, I decided to take a break and skip all of our lectures on Thursday and Friday. Then I ended up going home over the weekend and of course didn’t get anything done. On the way back, my mom insisted on driving me from DC to Philly, which was sweet. We left early, 6PM,  so that I would get enough rest to prepare me for the week ahead. What was not sweet, however, was the fact that she realized midway that she had forgotten her license. So, we had to drive all the way home only to restart our journey because she is risk averse. We ended our six hour journey (should have been three) at midnight. So yes, I was a little frazzled and unprepared for anatomy at 8am the next day.

But it’s finally the weekend, which means the week from hell is over! And right now I want to end my ranting (maybe I’ll give a more extensive rant some other time) and the only thing I feel like writing about is Settlers of Catan. Why? Because I can’t stop thinking about it. In fact, it is taking me a lot of discipline right now to stop playing and write this entry. On my other screen I have the game room open and I can see the live feed of who is winning which games and by how many points. Most recently, King2000p won Drizzit1268′s game.

It started out innocently enough. I first encountered Settlers back in college, I believe sophomore year. My mom has a friend with two sons my age. We grew up going to each others’ houses, and also with them beating me up every time we saw each other. So, it is not surprising that I stopped going to their house as soon as I was old enough to be left home alone. (That is also for another story.) Their mom throws a Thanksgiving party every year, and my mom goes every year. That year, she happened to ask me to go, and I don’t know what possessed me to so, but I agreed. Well, I show up and they’re just playing computer games or watching football. Their mom was encouraging them to incorporate me more. I should’ve stayed home.

But then, they bring out a game. It is a burgundy cardboard box with German words on it. They explained the rules of the game: German settlers are shipwrecked and stranded on the island of Catan, and must build a civilization with the resources they find. I was getting more and more perplexed. I stopped them and told them that I would pick the rules up as we went along. I secretly made a wish that the game wouldn’t last too long.

From my initial skepticism arose intrigue and a competitive drive. As I collected my resources and made calculatingly favorable trades, I also figured out how to block the paths of others’ towns to starve them of their resources. It was giving me great pleasure to see these hypothetical townspeople of my opponent’s tribe suffer at my expense. I built my final city out of stone and wheat for the tenth point and won!

“This game sucks, let’s go back to playing halo.” They quickly ran off, leaving me to do the cleaning up.

As soon as I got home, I knew that I wanted the game. But when I looked it up on Amazon, it was way out of my budget. Forty bucks for a game?! I reluctantly let Settlers of Catan slip into the back of my mind.

The great thing about Thanksgiving break, is that Christmas break is not far away. Another family friend asked me what I wanted for Christmas, and I immediately brought Catan back to the front of my mind.

“Just a game?” He asked me, “I’ll get you the game and the expansion pack as well, so you can play with more friends.”

So now I owned the board game and was playing it every chance I could get. With my brothers, with my friends, with my stuffed animals. Eventually, that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t find people who wanted to play it as often as I did. I had to move up to the stronger stuff: online Catan.

I found a website called Asobrain, which has a version of the game called “Xplorers”. It’s technically not Catan, so that they don’t get in trouble with copyright issues, but it is Catan. Some days I’ll spend hours on that site. When I lose a game, I get upset, and pledge to keep playing until I win to redeem myself. Of course, when I lose again I get more and more upset, and make more and more irrational gameplay decisions. Other times, the feeling of winning feels so good that I want to keep playing to regain that feeling. Of course, once I lose…. the cycle starts all over. I can’t count on my hands the number of times that I’ve started playing in the evening and stayed up until the morning.

It didn’t help that my last relationship was a five year long-distance one, and my then boyfriend also loved playing. Playing together online became our way of spending together. Even when I visited him and we were physically together, we would play online against others as a team. This continued until we were banned from playing together by Asobrain on suspicion of collusion (which I insist were not true!) That ex-boyfriend went on to nearly flunk out of college due to Warcraft addiction.

So then after these nights of game-addiction-driven insomnia happen, I vow that I will never touch the stuff again. I take the website off of my bookmarks. And it works… for a week or so. And then I start allowing myself just one game, which leads to just one more, until eventually I am back in the same cycle again.

I’m afraid tonight might be one of those nights. I don’t want it to be, but it’s just so fun, and it’s so difficult to tell when I am crossing the border between recreational gaming and addictive gaming.

And now to start a new game of online Catan…

My grandfather asked me to come over to his apartment today to help him with a computer problem. There was a website that wasn’t working for him. I dragged my 15-year-old brother along because he is much more knowledgeable than I am about these things, but I have the advantage that I can actually communicate with both of them.

Now understand that my grandfather is almost 80, speaks no English, and only learned to use a computer a few months ago. I hooked him up with one of our old laptops that were going to end up in the e-waste center, installed the Chinese interface, and showed him how to use the internet so that he could “watch Chinese TV shows”. Every time I go home, I find my grandfather sitting on the couch, watching the actual TV and a TV show on the computer at the same time, usually a permutation of Chinese news, soap opera, or Peking opera.

So you can imagine my surprise today when I took a look at the website he had trouble with and it was a porn website. And I had dragged my younger brother over to help as well! Well there was actually just one small pornographic advertisement in the corner, and the rest of the page was a Chinese forum. I gave my grandfather the benefit of the doubt and assumed that he was visiting a site that happened to have bad ads. That happens to me sometimes too.

“It’s not your computer, it’s the website that has a problem. Can you still use it as you normally would? Then just keep doing that.”

After we left, my brother told me, “I wish Grandfather wouldn’t ask us for help with a porn website.” That’s when I found out that, apparently, when I am not at home, my grandfather frequently watches porn on his computer in our living room, while my two younger brothers (15 and 17 years old) are in the house. I should’ve listened more carefully when those muppets from Avenue Q refrained, “The internet is for porn.”

“So what do you do about it? Did you tell mom?”

“No, it’s not relevant. He’s over 18 so he’s allowed to watch porn. I just ignore it. All males watch porn. Sex is a natural human process.”

OK that is an interesting and bizarrely mature way to look at it. I guess I never really talk to my little brothers about sex. What happened to my baby brother who liked Thomas the Tank Engine so much that he would ride the metro back and forth just for fun?

My other grandfather lived with us while I was growing up, and I would frequently walk into a room to find him browsing porn websites. Later, when I tried to use the computer, all the viruses and pop-ups from the porn website would appear. I told my parents and my grandfather stopped using the computer. Maybe I shouldn’t have tattled, but I was a ten year old girl and I was freaked out.

It is my initial response to think, it’s fine if you want to watch porn but you shouldn’t watch it in such a public place. After thinking about it some more though… no, why should people be so private about it? Why is it any different than watching a youtube video? We watch movies with sex scenes in them in public all the time. I’m pleasantly surprised that someone of my grandparents’ generation can have such a liberal mindset that he would ask his grandchildren to help him with his porn.

Honestly, I think it’s cute that my grandfather watches porn. My grandmother died six years ago, and her illness left her almost a vegetable six years before that. Now, my grandfather has met and been seeing a new companion for the past two years. He even asks me to address her as grandmother, and brought her to my college graduation. Yes, it’s great that he can still enjoy sex in whatever capacity he can. I’m looking forward to a future when I am a grandparent and I can continue to watch porn and speak to my grandchildren freely about sex.

Mood: 8 Done with tests and spent the whole weekend relaxing at home! Tiredness: 8 Slept 10 hours last night! Spiritual Tiredness: 7 no more tests!

Now that I’ve finished my first round of exams, I can finally post the answers to the slides!

Collagen fibrils (thick blurry pink lines), elastic fibers (darker thin lines), fribroblast cells (nucleus visible only)

skeletal muscle

Cross section of ureter. Inner lumen can expand to accomodate urine. 

Mast cell (part of the immune system). The black circles are vesicles containing cytokines for immune and allergy response, such as histamine and heparin.

Tight junctions neatly arranged in hexagonal shape. Each “petal” of the flower is a connexon. Six connexons make a “flower” or tight junction.

Another view of the tight junctions. 

Fat cells. The intercellular space is stained and the inside is white because it is full of fat. 

Chondrocytes, the cells that make cartilage. Kinda looks like the Turkish Eye that protects your from evil.

Turkish Eye

Chondrocytes. Just kidding. More Evil Eyes

This one reminds me of a time lapse of the highway, but it is actually bone.

Connective tissue with collagen (thick orange) and elastin (dark thin lines)

Loose woven bone (that is, immature bone. Your body makes this kind of bone when you fracture it, and then later makes stronger bone over it.)

This is part of a growing bone where the cartilaginous growth plate meets the bone. This process is called “endochondral ossification”, or the laying of bone over a cartilage template. This process continues until you stop growing at puberty.

Osteocytes in lacuna. Osteocytes are the cells that make bone, and they carve out specific spots, or lacunae, within the bone material, or matrix. The vertical lines coming out of each osteocyte are canaliculi, which connect osteocytes to each other via gap junctions and allow them to transport materials and signal to one another.

More bone tissue, this time showing a cross section. The circles are called “osteons”, which are a unit of bone matrix laid down circumferentially around an artery, vein, or nerve fiber. Again, you can see the osteocytes.

So anyone get them right?

P.S. I am not a doctor.. yet. Anything I say here should not be used as an authoritative reference and should most definitely not be used as medical advice.

My first exams are coming up in two days. Looking through histology slides at 1AM in the morning ultimately means that I end up thinking less about the science and more about the “oooh… how pretty..”

I definitely want these as a poster print on my wall or even as the print on my dress. Ten points if you can guess what these are (I’ll reveal the answers in two days while either celebrating the end of exams or moping about how poorly I did).

This one reminds me of a area time-lapse photo of a highway…

Yesterday I told a story about Oceano Beach. Today I will tell a story that happened on the way to Oceano Beach.

My boyfriend and I left early Friday morning to make the four hour drive south on the 101 so that we could spend an entire day on the beach. Only an hour into the drive we were derailed by the highway signs for the Gilroy Garlic Festival.

“The Gilroy Garlic Festival just so happened to have landed at the right place at the right time?” I thought to myself, “How could I justify not going?”

“Let’s turn off here and check it out,” I suggested to my boyfriend. He seemed hesitant, so I reassured him,”We can get right back on the road if we don’t want to go.” Of course, I had no intention to do so, but I just had to say something since the exit was coming up.

It was a bit pricier than I expected. Namely, $17 pricier. For a festival where once we went inside, we would have to pay additional for rides and food? But it was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and the garlic smelled so good. My boyfriend wasn’t convinced, but that didn’t matter.

We could have actually saved some money. As we walked up to the ticket booth, the attendant asked, “One adult, one senior?” And she didn’t mean college senior. Apparently, my fashion sense is a little outdated.

“No, two adults please.” I let pride win out over thrift. That was a first.

It’s amazing that everyone in one town can be so fanatic about a thing like garlic. I mean, I’ve gotta give it to them, garlic is one of those things where great things come in small packages. You might think that the Festival would attract mostly out-of-towners and serve as a way to bring tourism traffic to this small economy. Yes, it is about that. But it’s much more about celebrating the vital force of the local economy and social foundation of the community. There were just as many locals as there were people like me.

From the garlic themed decorations & costumes to the culinary inventions to the garlic toss to the “free garlic growing kit” (i.e. garlic) to to the Miss Garlic competition to the garlic braiding, I loved it all! You can never have too much garlic!

Here are just a few snap shots of the wonderful garlicky treasures of the Gilroy Garlic Festival.

Culinary Delights

Garlic ice cream is surprisingly good

Lunch of garlic mushrooms and garlic calamari

Garlic fries make my mouth water

Garlic Craftsmanship

Conclusion: Check out the Gilroy Garlic Festival if you’re in SF Bay Area in late July! It’s $17 your stomach will thank you for spending!

A post script to this story: my boyfriend’s car smelled like garlic for a week.

Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. One day, he saw a young man reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean. He came closer and called out “Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?”

The young man paused, looked up, and replied “Throwing starfish into the ocean.”

“I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?” asked the somewhat startled wise man.

To this, the young man replied, “The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them in, they’ll die.”

Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, “But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can’t possibly make a difference!”

At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said, “It made a difference to that one!”

—–

The story is adapted from an essay by Loren Eisley, called “The Star Thrower”. I present the story, abridged from Voices4Children.

I first heard the starfish story through my friend who was volunteering through Americorps for City Year. In his work with inner city youth, each life touched makes a difference even if the numbers are limited.

I haven’t devoted an entire two years of my life to changing others’ lives. But recently, I did have my own little starfish experience. Only it wasn’t with starfish, but a related animal, the sand dollar. My boyfriend and I went to Oceano Beach near San Luis Obispo in late July. After a full day of all-terrain vehicle driving on the Oceano Dunes, I walked the beach and was so excited to see what I found beneath my feet. My first sand dollar! Unfortunately, that first one had already dried and cracked in half, an early death brought on by a receding tide, sun, and wayward children. As I looked around I noticed hundreds of similarly cracked sand dollars. But every one in a hundred, there would be a wholly intact one, whose tissues were still moist enough to sustain life. The tide was going down, and just like the boy in the story explained, they were going to dessicate and die. So I walked down the beach, with my boyfriend begrudgingly following behind, and threw back into the ocean every live sand dollar I found over a stretch of two miles. I’m ashamed to say, however, that I am not as altruistic as the boy in the story. When I found an intact but dead sand dollar, I kept it for myself.

Don’t mind the clashing outfit. That same weekend, a ticket agent asked if I wanted to purchase a senior ticket, and I don’t mean senior in college.

Mood 5 It’s 2AM and I can’t sleep because that red-eye flight screwed up my sleep schedule/ Tired 7 should not be this high of a rating at 2AM!/Spiritual Tired 4 Although I had a great weekend, I’m unfortunately super behind on studying for our first exams next week. I hope I fall asleep dreaming about embryology, otherwise I don’t know how I will learn it all.

I’ve always thought that wine tasting is for snobs and old people. Well I guess I’ve become more of both, because since this summer I’ve made not only my first, but two additional, wine tasting expeditions. The biggest barrier to trying wine tasting was the intimidation. I was scared to look like a fool if I didn’t follow some protocol or I showed my ignorance of wine. I remember reading a lot of guides to wine tasting, but most of those resources focused on how to taste the wine (look at the color, swirl, sniff, etc). Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about what I like in a wine and in a wine tasting experience, but I wish I had been better prepared for managing my experience. So, this guide is a beginner’s attempt to that for you so that you will hopefully feel less intimidated to try wine tasting!

1. Start small. My first wine tasting experience featured a full day of winery hopping in San Benito County (about two hours south of me). In retrospect, I wish that I had tried a smaller tasting experience closer to home for only a couple hours. That way, I can practice my swirling techniques (sometimes I try to swirly my wine and it just wobbles back and forth, that’s when you feel really dumb), develop my taste buds, and learn the vocabulary of the trade (I had no idea that cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay were types of grapes, or that reserve wine meant limited production, or that you should say “can I revisit this wine” instead of “can I have some more”). Although you pretty much have to drive to the country to get the full experience and taste local wines, many cosmopolitan areas have tasting rooms that feature wines from diverse geographic areas. It’s also less likely that you will run into “wine snobs” who make you feel stupid just by sitting next to you.
2. Start early. Most places open at 10 (some at 11) am. The first time I started at 1PM and even then it was too late. After a two hour tasting and tour, we had only enough time to fly through three more before closing time (usually ranges from 4 to 6pm). The third time we walked into our first tasting room seven minutes after they opened, and still only managed to finish by 5pm.
3. Don’t be afraid to admit that you’re new to this. After letting the staff know that I am there for a tasting, the next thing I like to say is, “I’m a little new to this.” They won’t look down on you in anyway, and they are usually happy to answer questions (to break the monotony of pouring for hundreds of people every day and to show off their knowledge).
4. Ask questions. At most places, if you don’t ask, the staff won’t say much to you (I have encountered some wineries that are exceptions). What most servers do is recite the description of the wine to you, pour, and move on to the next party. Although I like tasting the wine, I also like learning about the history and character of the vineyard and the production process. Some good questions I have stuck with are:
   • Where does your name come from?
   • When was the winery established? Has it changed ownership?
   • Who is the owner? The winemaker?
   • What kind of wine do you specialize in? What is it about the area that is particularly good for that wine?
   • Has it been a busy day/weekend/season?
   • Where is your estate/vines? Where does your production take place?
5. Take your time. Talk to people. Enjoy the sunshine. At first I felt a lot of pressure to finish as quickly as I could, especially if the server has made his or her rounds and is standing in front of you with a bottle while you still have a half full glass. I would then chug the rest as if it were a beer at a college party (see #6). You can talk to the owners/servers if it is a small place, or enjoy the company of your party if it is a larger place. Don’t be shy, you can also talk to your neighboring parties, who often have interesting (wine related or not) experiences and can give you advice. Take the time to enjoy the environment of the winery. Wineries are simply beautiful places in and of themselves. Many larger ones feature bocce ball, art, or outdoor gardens. Go outside with your glass. Don’t feel like you have to be stuck to the counter simply because the servers are there. Sometimes they will come outside and serve you. Otherwise, you can just return to the counter when you are ready for the next round. Don’t venture too far or you might get detained by the police for public drinking.
   

   Enjoying the gardens at Medlock Ames in Alexander Valley

6. Dump if you don’t like it. If you don’t like a wine, don’t feel like you have to drink it. At first, I thought that since I was paying for the tasting, I would be wasting my money if I didn’t drink all of the wine that I was entitled to. If you are planning to visit multiple places, you will imbibe more than enough alcohol to keep you satisfied. Also, if you saturate your taste buds with bad wine, you won’t be able to taste the subtleties in the wine that you do like.
7. Ask for a grounds tour. The first few times I had a grounds tour, I had bought a packaged deal through groupon or travelzoo. These can be good if you are unsure of where to go and want an orientation to the area and to wine tasting. I found that most places will just take you around if you ask for it and they are not too busy, without charging anything. Some of the larger places also have established tours at specified times. One of my favorites was the wine cave tour, where we walked around a wine cellar in an artificial cave.
   

   At Pietra Santa, I bought a grounds tour and got to see where they barrel their wines

8. The swirl. We’ve all at least seen people do the swirl. It helps to bring oxygen into the wine and release the aromas. The first time I did it, I felt pretty reluctant. I felt like an impostor, partaking in this highly specialized ritual of which I had neither knowledge nor skill. JUST DO IT! You won’t feel so stupid after the first time, and it really does work.
9. Keep your glass! My first time, I assumed that we would get new glasses between each wine. That is NOT the case! I put my glass down on the table, walked around for a bit, and by the time I returned, the server had given my glass to another person. When he came around to pour the next round, I simply had to tell him that I didn’t know where my glass went and that I must have misplaced it. He didn’t have another one, so he asked me to walk around looking for it (although I knew that was pointless since the glass was in the other customer’s hand!) I couldn’t tell him the truth, because the other customer had already taken a sip from my cup, and would probably have been pretty angry for being given a used cup.
10. Don’t get drunk. So far, I haven’t been able to manage this one. I usually drink so much that I immediately pass out afterward. I guess the trick is to keep drinking water, eating, and taking breaks.
11. Don’t feel pressured into buying. It might feel awkward to walk away without purchasing a bottle, especially if the tasting is complimentary, and especially if you are the only party there. However, realize that it is perfectly expected. Not everyone will love the wine, and you should only buy if you love it. After all, you’re committing yourself to finishing at least a whole bottle of it, right? Wineries stay in business, and your purchase won’t make or break it. It is polite, however, to thank them for the tasting before leaving (especially if it was free).

Pietra Santa in Hollister was among the most beautiful facilities I've visited

Who can say no to the natural beauty of wine country?