P.F. Chang’s is a good choice for a restaurant when you are tired or lazy to think about the portions, and just want something tasty. The selection itself is huge, as usual in Chinese restaurants, and everything is tasty, as again usual in Chinese restaurants. Nothing is spectacular, though.
The restaurant itself is large, and as most chain restaurants, lacking personal touch. The service is once again excellent, and the food comes pretty swiftly. Price is not bad either. Somehow I see having take away a better choice than hanging in the restaurant, maybe it is the non-personality of the dining hall combined with the mall surroundings.
P.F. Chang’s, 900 Stanford Shopping Center, Palo Alto, CA, USA, +1 650 330 1782
Despite Babbo’s not so welcoming entrance in Stanford shopping center, the restaurant is worth a visit to have a lunch while shopping. I would not go there as a sole destination, but it works more than well in a casual lunch or dinner joint.
The food is Italian with some American influence. Surprisingly enough, the portions are not huge, but sized right for average people. You don’t feel bloated after leaving the restaurant.
We ate pastas and salads during lunch time. Pastas were great, but I cannot recommend the salads to anyone. I’ve never seen so weird version of Caesar salad. It was nowhere close to the normal delicious salad, but more of a new way (that didn’t work) of putting the salad together from the same ingredients.
Babbo’s, 717 Stanford Shopping Court, Palo Alto, CA, USA, +1 650 321 1488
I’ve been a happy Mac user for more than three years now. During that time, there has been seldom any issues with the computers, and compared to the Windows experience, using computers has been a bliss.
Until yesterday evening. When I woke up my MacBook Air from sleep, it was extremely slow, like it was running in 10% of the power available. Finally, I had to do a hard boot on the laptop. It was still slow, so I had to boot it again with the power button. Then it got itself in order and was its responsive self.
This kind of incidents, of course, make me worrysome for the data. I’ve been backing up my laptop with Time Machine, and I plugged in the portable hard drive as soon as possible. The backup took ages. I finally left the computer to do its magic and went to sleep. Only to find out that the backup had failed.
I’ve continued my sage today, running Time Machine almost constantly — it is still running, and it is almost midnight. The computer slows down now and then, but the backup seems not to go anywhere. And being an Apple OS, there is not that much of helpful information on the Time Machine dialogs. It is either “preparing backup”, “backing up” or failed.
I need to dig up some more data, and try to pinpoint the failure. Until then, I probably left the system to run the backup every night until the problem is found, or the backup succeeds.
Calvin Klein clothes are in the verge of luxury brands, but not quite yet there. The brand is more than normal premium (that would include Banana Republic), but for me none of the US brands have been able to grow into a real luxury brand such as Prada, Gucci or Louis Vuitton.
Despite or due to that, their outlet store has a number of interesting items. The clothing has better tailoring, especially from European perspective, compared to the “normal” US brands — that somehow make too wide or otherwise not fitting clothes.
The outlet prices are already quite low, and sale periods can effectively halve them. So expect good deals.
www.calvinklein.com, Outlet #019, Central Valley, NY, USA, +1 845 928 6550
Our London trip reservation didn’t go through SAS system. Their website showed me the confirmation page, but I didn’t receive any confirmation mail. After waiting a couple of days, I logged in their site and found no reservation. Their pretty non-polite customer service — they are hiring Estonians to do Finnish customer service, and the Estonian service attitude is really low in general — didn’t find the reservation either. Fortunately, there were still seats available with points, and I could rebook the trip.
This time it went through, and I got the emails and everything. The incident, however, decreased my already quite low confidence on SAS website. It has been down several times, the reservation system breaks down while you trying to check the prices of flights, and the single sign-on system they are using is slow and in general really badly implemeted.
If someone from SAS is reading this, forward this message inside your organisation: a) Fix your website, it is in shameful condition, and b) train your Estonian staff to understand when to make an apology or at least sound sorry for the hassles you have out your customers through. And maybe also c) I’ve tried to use your feedback channels earlier with pretty bad results, so you could fix this, too.
Guess is a brand that I’ve got a love / hate relationship with. Their brand is so blatantly looking like a cheaper version of Gucci that is advertised with very sexual imagery. This bothers me heavily, and nowadays I’ve started to frown on Guess’ handbags. They just look too cheap to me.
On the other hand, they’ve got some really nice clothes, and I do own a few Guess t-shirts. Maybe clothes are not that archetypal as bags when defining luxury brands and those brands that would like to cheat their way in to the luxury club, including Guess.
If this does not bother you (which I guess is the case with most of you), the outlet store is an excellent place to buy a lot of young and trendy stuff with quite low prices. They have also a smaller section of children clothing that is worth checking if you have offsprings.
www.guess.com, 442 Woodbury Court, Central Valley, NY, USA, +1 845 928 1294
Victorinox makes, at least in my opinion, the best luggage in the world. I’ve fallen in love with their ballistic nylon series, they are both functional and beautiful.
When founding that they’ve got an outlet store in Woodbury, we checked it pretty thoroughly — and bought a new bag to carry all our other finds back to hotel and eventually back to Finland. It is a bit weird to buy European stuff in the US and carry it back to Europe; and save money by doing so. The price of the bag was about half compared to a similar bag in high streets. It was not exactly the same bag, but close enough.
The store is very strong in bags, but there is other paraphernalia, too. Unfortunately, I didn’t pay too much attention to them while looking for the bag, so I cannot say more about the selection.
www.victorinox.com, 964 Grapevine Court, Central Valley, NY, USA
I’ve accumulated a plenty of points when I was working for a company with Finnish-American-French set-up. Now, the points are expiring, and thus there is need to spend them by travelling.
The supply of SAS flights with points is surprisingly poor. Most of the interesting places that I haven’t been yet are virtually impossible with points. Even when checking the calendar far ahead, up to May 2010. Finally, there were two practical choices left: Milan or London. We’ve visited in both, and sort of know what to expect — neither of them is a children-friendly city during winter months.
I’d love to go to Milan for shopping, but Sanna wanted to get to London, and truth said, it is fine for me, too. It is probably easier for boys, as there is more to see on the streets — double deckers, London cabs, the tube (well, that’s not on the streets, but it has been always a thrilling experience for my sons — maybe they are budding engineers…).
We found also a good hotel with decent price near Oxford Circus. We’ve been once in a hotel in the same area, and it does really make a difference. Suddenly, London is very compact city, as almost everything is in a walking distance: Hamleys for boys, Selfridges & Co. and Liberty for Sanna, and Waterstone’s Piccadilly for me.
