If you aren’t familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk, then I urge you to check out his personal video blog and hit Internet show Wine Library TV. Since 2006 Gary has been producing the show in order to educate people who might not have a lot of experience with wine in a completely unpretentious way. Basically he has made tasting and understanding great wines easy and fun for everyone - he describes himself as “the wine guy for the average Joe.”

Tonight, Gary held a live filming of his 500th episode at Crushpad in San Francisco. I finally had the chance to meet the man with the plan and honestly I can’t even express how incredibly talented and warm he is. What a down to Earth guy that knows how to treat everyone as his friend and almost dare I say, as family. The night consisted of a few hours of tasting not only some great wines from local vineyards but also a ton of bottles brought by guests. We tasted an awesome variety of wines from Pinot Noirs to Cabernet Sauvignons to Riojas. I also had the chance to finally meet Gary’s brother AJ albeit very briefly because he was under the weather (hope you’re feeling better!) and a ton of other people I’ve chatted with on Twitter but had never met in person. It was a great night all in all, the episode should be up tomorrow. Check it out!

As promised, here is my first San Francisco landmark photo. You might recognize Alamo Square Park from the opening credits of Full House, actually I’m almost positive you’ll recognize it because it’s been burned into my mind since early childhood. The park is right off Hayes Street and entails an almost 45 degree walk uphill (over exaggerating a little) to get there. Since it’s only a half mile from my house I think I might head back more often to hang out on the grass and read a book.

You know you want to hear it:

Photo credit: Madhu

I’m here, I made it! It was rough at first - flying into SFO with two gigantic bags and making it up to my friend’s in Berkeley was an unbelievable hassle, especially when you don’t understand how BART works. I spent the first week checking out apartments that I found on Craigslist and not a single one was how it was described. “Renovated kitchen with stainless steel appliances” translated to renovated in 1984 with yellow appliances and a strange odor permeating the carpets. I’ll spare the gruesome details. As I was starting to become pretty glum, thinking all was lost, I met up with another friend who took me to his buddy’s house on Haight to chill. His buddy mentioned that he was taking off for the summer to do some traveling and half-jokingly I asked if he was interested in subletting. To make a long story short, I got hooked up randomly by a friend of a friend who by some weird circumstances was best friend’s in high school with someone I know back in Philly.

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It’s literally been a month since I last posted on here and I am really ashamed with myself. At the same time in my own defense I have been astonishingly busy. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t put my trip to Israel into words. I have a ton of pictures to prove how unbelievably breathtaking the trip was and I will post them on here soon. If you are friends with me on Facebook then you can check out the photos right now.

I’ve spent the past two weeks working on packing and moving out of my apartment in Philly and booked a flight to San Francisco for this coming Saturday the 21st. As I mentioned in this previous post I’ll be out in the Bay Area through September interning, but what I didn’t mention before is where I will be working. I’m going to be splitting my time between two companies - Vivaty a web start up with an exciting distributed platform that allows users to immerse themselves in different virtual scenes and LaunchSquad a public relations firm with deep roots in technology and social media. I can’t even express how excited I am to get out to the west coast and work with brilliant, new people.

San Francisco is going to provide a lot of motivation and some great experiences that I will most definitely be blogging about as much as possible, so please check back to see how things are going!

I’m sad that the blog has been a little stale lately but I’ve got a lot of stuff going on recently. First off - I’m traveling to Israel for 10 days on a birthright trip through Sachlav. The entire trip is paid for by Taglit-Birthright and we have an outrageous itinerary planned that will take us throughout the entire country and on trips such as kayaking in the Jordan River and visiting the Kotel (Western Wall). Also, I decided to rent a cell phone in Israel so I won’t use use my BlackBerry while I’m there. As I mentioned in this post awhile back I want to enjoy my vacation and stay away from e-mail and Twitter.

For those of you that haven’t heard, when I return from Israel I’ll be moving out to San Francisco to pursue internships at both a PR firm and a software startup for the summer. I’ve visited the city by the bay several times over the past few years and fell in love. I can’t wait to get a feel for the lifestyle out there and figure out if it’s somewhere I’d want to be when I graduate next year.

I plan on taking an unbelievable amount of pictures in Israel and I will be sure to post them here when I return.