My cousin Felix from Canada is in town for the Fancy Food show in San Francisco (talk about work, he said on the last day, all the "exhibitors" give out free food cuz they don't really wanna bring it home, sounds pretty good to me), I haven't seen him for something like 15 years so it was great to catch up

We met up in Stanford and his friend graduated last year and she gave us like the best tour. I know all these people from Stanford and I've gone to the campus a bunch of times but I've never really gotten a tour from an insider, it was awesome. I love touring campuses, it's so uplifting, all this education to be had, all this hope, I'm not sure if I'm happy for them or depressed about myself, bleh

She showed us all the cool stuff starting with the different workshops where she had classes and even taught as a TA. The design loft look so cool but she didn't have the combination anymore. We walked back out to the GBS (Graduate Business School) and it looked pretty sweet. She said the students there think they're so the shit but she wasn't very impressed when taking a class there

She took us to Cantor, a small museum I've actually never noticed (on the right from the Oval, if you're driving into campus). They had all these great Rodin pieces (I just happened to visit the Rodin museum in Paris so it was a trip) outside, a massive Thinker piece inside. We saw some great stuff including an immense Native American canoe carved out of a redwood and a plaster figure of a working man, it was so life like, brilliant. Oh yeah there was this horse made out of wood and it was actually cast in bronze and the artist used patina to give it the wood appearance

Outside the museum, I saw an impressive work by English artist Andy Goldsworthy. He specializes in natural art installations, some of them are only temporary but the Stanford one, circa 2001 is a permanent one. Goldsworthy usually uses material from a given area to create his pieces (in this case, redstone). Stone River a grand snaky creation that was completed iin 6 days with a total of 6,500 stones that weigh 128 tons. It's built in a way to make you think it extends beyond the area where they dug for the stones. Some amazing stuff, it's trippy to walk around there, very cemetary-ish

The campus has some great running tracks, trails and routes, biking to get around is almost a must

After that, we drove around a bit and she showed us grad housings, where she illegally planted a tree (go girl!), different buildings, faculty and other group houses. The Stanford campus is pretty grand, I know the money can probably be spent elsewhere but the alumni and all the corporate money can be clearly seen at work here