update from Cal

Hey there all - long time no blog, hey?

Well, just wanted to bring y'all up to date with what's going on over here at Berkeley.

It's been an eventful week for me - getting moved into my new accommodation, exploring Berkeley, paying a couple of visits to San Francisco to get my bearings over there - and continuing to encounter the wonderful wierdness that is UCB.

So, this week was international student orientation - so the first couple of days of the week, all the international students trekked down to the Berkeley International house to listen to people talk at us about Immigration, Campus safety, Academic success etc etc. For the most part, that stuff was pretty boring (I'd heard most of it at my check-in session a few days before.) On the up side, I did win a membership to the YWCA (erm.... I guess I'll just give that away to someone slightly more female than I am), but more importantly, I had the chance to meet a whole bunch of other international students. Amongst the international students, there are a bunch of different categories - there are older students here to do graduate studies, there are new students here to do their whole undergraduate degree at Berkeley (lucky people!), and then there are EAP students like myself. Overall, I figure EAP students probably make up about 20% of the international student group - but we've tended to bunch together so far. Point being, I've met a bunch of awesome people here, and it's good to be able to hang out with people who are having the same kind of experience as you are. Lots of Brits amongst them, a decent number of Aussies, a few Mexicans and Brazillians, and a couple of NZers and South Africans - a fun group, all up.

Also this week, I moved into my permanent accommodation for the semester, the Sigma Pi frat house. All in all, I'm happy with what I've got here - while the house as a whole is exactly what you'd expect from a house full of unsupervised 18-21 year old college students, everyone around here is real friendly, and I have a good spot here. The room itself is big enough for a bed, a desk and a couch - in fact it's about the size of some of the double rooms I've seen elsewhere. There was a microwave and a fridge here when I arrived, which means I can keep my breakfast stuff right here in my room, and I could even heat up meals if I felt the need. There's a couple of windows, and one of them looks out onto the bay and the San Francisco skyline (though it is quite far away, and, as is San Francisco's wont, often fogged over) - the picture here might be too small to see it properly - if that's the case, check out the full size original (In this pic, you can see the student residences in Berkeley in the foreground, then the Bay and the Bay Bridge, Yerba Buena Island and, in the far background, the Transamerica Pyramid, Bank of America building and the rest of the SF downtown skyline). Additionally, this place is only a couple of blocks down the road from I-House, where about half of the international students are staying.

At any rate, I've made it a task to become more familiar with the shape and layout of San Francisco proper. Unfortunately, getting around in SF is not cheap - the BART subway system is convenient (there's a stop at the bottom of campus, a 10 minute walk or short bus ride down the hill from here), but expensive - to get from Berkeley to San Francisco and back costs US$ 6.80, and they don't have student discounts or daily unlimited ride tickets like we do in Melbourne. Luckily, there is a way around this expense. With my Cal student ID card, I get a sticker which gives me a free ride on any AC Transit bus, which services most of the East Bay. AC Transit also has a bus which passes outside I-House, and goes all the way across the Bay Bridge to downtown San Francisco. Anyway, long story short, the Bus is free, but takes about twice as long as the BART, so I think visiting SF will depend largely on how much of a hurry I'm in - cost VS convenience and all that. still, it's an amazing city, and I'll definitely continue to make the trip across the bay, especially when there are views like this to be had:

So, one thing that continues to impress me about Berkeley is the extent to which its residences are active and engaged in their littel piece of the world.

Case in point: The tree sitters I think I mentioned these guys in an earlier post - they've occupied a tree in an Oak Grove which the University want to knock down in order to build a High Performance Sports Centre. Well, the other day, we had a bit of a Hippy VS UC skirmish. Basically, I was walking down the street to I-House (which is right next to the Oak Grove in question), and saw that the police had blocked off the roadleading up to the hippy's roadside encampment.

So I go to check things out, and am confronted by the sight of a man, sitting at the top of a tree, yelling at a crane which appears to be hovering dangerously close to a dude whose perch hardly looks stable to start with.

Anyway, turns out the whole thing wasn't as major as it initially appeared - the university was in fact just cutting out some dead branches from the other trees, but even that was enough to attract local news crews, a healthy band of hippies and hippy-sympathisers and about a dozen cops.

   Note: The Hippy shown here is Zachary Runningwolf - reportedly the original treesitter, and currently a candidate for Mayor of Berkeley.

Note: The cops shown here are probably there because, last time the University sent arborists into the oak grove, the tree sitters started throwing human waste. I am totally serious. Only in Berkeley.

Anyway, after that little bit of excitement, I went for a walk down to the Berkeley Marina - the fishing pier there stretches way, way out into the water, and you can get awesome views of Downtown SF and, in fact, most of the San Francisco bay.

Also, I encountered an enormous, wierd looking bird (points for anyone who can identify what it is) which didn't seem to mind when I got ridiculously close to it - so lots of birdface closeups, as below.

So, that more or less sums up my week in Berkeley. This coming week is 'welcome week', and on Thursday my first classes, so I will be sure to keep y'all updated on how things go.

'til then,

Jono.

PS. As per usual, all my photos from the last week are up on Flickr - so if you're after more shots of hippies, Cops or wierd looking seabirds, why not pay a visit?