MaterialsInMotion

Today we had a field trip to downtown Merced! My friends and I decided beforehand to take the 1:30 PM shuttle there so that we could have more time to explore the area before 4 PM, which was when we’d have to Joystiq, an arcade that COSMOS had rented out for everyone in the program for four hours.

First, we followed two TAs to a coffee shop called Hola Cafecito because they had recommended this place for matcha. However, when I looked at pictures on Yelp, the matcha looked super faint and slightly murky, so I resisted the urge to buy a drink, though I could not resist the urge to try it and asked my friend who had bought one to try hers. My suspicions were right—as one of my friends from table tennis would say, it tasted like “milk with a grassy fart.”

After the disappointing matcha, my friends and I went to a taco stand called Tacos Aguilar, which was recommended by the graduate students helping my cluster during labs. Again, the Yelp page worried me because there was only one review, but the graduate students assured me that this place was a local favorite and recommended us to try the carne asada tacos. Fortunately, this recommendation worked in our favor: the steak was juicy and cooked to perfection, and the tacos tasted great even without sauce (the sauces all looked suspicious, and I wasn’t sure if they were okay to eat).

After finishing our tacos, we visited several miscellaneous shops, such as a bookstore, a thrift store, a record store, and an ice cream parlor, before heading our way over to Joystiq. This place had the World Cup playing on their projectors and TVs, so we spent the first hour watching England just barely edging Norway out of the tournament. Then, we spent the rest of the night playing various games, such as giant Uno, air hockey, beer pong (without the beer), skee ball, and the boxer machine, and finally ended the night with some karaoke!