Hella Cool.

I am now back at my old university: getting my teeth into my dissertation, my final year and whatever comes next. I didn't want to shut down Berkeley Girl with the last image being one of sexual assault and inequality, so I will start by saying that the girl who wrote the last post was overwhelmed by the support and encouragement that everyone sent to her, both on and outside of this blog. She is doing really well, and taking steps to recover from and deal with her ordeal; she should be very proud of herself for her bravery.

This is my last post for Berkeley Girl. It's odd to think it's now been several months since my time at Berkeley ended, and how quickly the year passed. Settling back into the old routine at home has been more or less painless, although at times I still dress from head to toe in varsity gear, and my college sweater has become something of a comfort blanket. 

It was an incredible experience studying in California. I met some wonderful, enormously talented people who were a pleasure to work with. I was lucky to be taught by some fantastic tutors, who made my brain hurt enough that I left feeling considerably more clever than I did when I arrived. And I made some amazing friends, who are now scattered to every corner of the globe. I think what struck me more than anything else was the incredible drive shared among all the students to succeed, a drive that I'm certain will be realized after their graduation. Should their success ever bring them to England, I hope they look me up (Hannah Langley, I'm looking at you.) 

I hope Berkeley Girl has accurately translated the amazing time I had on my year abroad and the experiences- both good and bad- that will stay with me forever. There is now a new blog in the pipeline, which I hope will be going live in a week or two, so keep an eye on my various social media. (I'm going to buy a domain name! Like a grownup!). Thanks so much to everyone who has been reading and commenting through this last year, you have all been amazing.

For now though, this is Berkeley Girl saying thanks, Cal. It's been hella cool. 

Letter to the Editor

Three days ago I published an article talking about what it's like to be a Berkeley Girl amid the disturbing sexual politics that exist on the campus. I have since been overwhelmed by the enthusiastic and supportive responses to the post, and by the number of hits it has received; it's now the most-read article from the entire year.

Yesterday morning I got an email from an anonymous berkeley girl. With her permission I am publishing it on here:

"Thank you for writing that article. It's traumatically accurate. Last October I was assaulted, violently, in my dorm bedroom by a neighbor who lived down my hall. I'd had well over six drinks and was fading in and out of consciousness while he was hurting me. It lasted hours.

When word spread that I'd filed an anonymous police report, I was pressured to keep quiet. I was in denial until spring, when I got wind of rumors that I was believed to be schizophrenic because of my reaction to what had happened to me. 

After this I broke my silence to get a male perspective, and disclosed the details of my story to some male friends. They were horrified, agreed I'd been assaulted, and encouraged me to go to the police properly before it happened to someone else. I never pursued legal charges for fear of a Steubenville-cal firestorm, but the injustice is haunting and I was wondering if you could recommend any online media source that might publish my account anonymously. 

(Something else to note: UC Berkeley Hookups removed the anonymous submissions link after I'd sent in my story of the assault. It was never published. I've considered setting up a "UC Berkeley Sex Crimes" page in the same vein...) 

In any event, I know a lot of other girls who would appreciate that blog entry, so thanks again on their behalf."

Here is a Berkeley Girl who wants to shout back. If you've taken the time to read this post, I hope you can also take the time to give her a small shout-out with encouragement and support. Do it underneath this blog, or send an email or tweet via me. It takes a lot of guts to send an email like that, and I'm pretty sure she'd appreciate hearing that a culture of silence is something that should be broken.

[NB: At the request of the anon. I have created a separate page where she has uploaded her full account of the assault. You can read it HERE. Be warned that it contains graphic and distressing material.]

Being a Berkeley Girl

Ever since I got home I've noticed an unusual number of men leaning out of their car windows to yell stuff at me. One guy turned round in the street to walk past me a couple of times; another shouted ‘don’t you look nice’ from the window of his van; one stopped wherever he was going to watch me on a walk to the park. It rankled with me- and it’s odd because it wouldn't have phased me this time last year. Casually shouting stuff at girls in the street is just what a lot of men in London do. 

With a year’s stay in California under my belt I can’t remember a single incident of someone shouting at me, or at any other girl, in the street. I could wander easily around the campus in shorts that would have received a cacophony of blasts from car horns in England, but that no-one blinked an eye at in Cal. As a general rule, I felt a more comfortable, and more safe. But despite this there’s still something not right at Berkeley. Beneath the surface, and the relaxed ‘free spirit’ attitudes on the campus there is a dark sexual politics in play, which bothered me throughout my year of study abroad but that I only really began to notice in the spring, when elections for the student assembly took place. A colleague of mine at Caliber Magazine was running for a place on the Student Senate, and pushing the policy of a safer campus for girls. Stats show that roughly one in four girls at college will be sexually assaulted before they graduate, she explained to me. At Berkeley, a shocking 99% of rape cases go unreported.

“One in four,” I repeated later, aghast, to one of my friends, a sorority sister.

“Oh, yeah,” she shrugged, “a bunch of my friends have been raped.”

I don’t know what disturbed me more about this conversation, the fact that it had happened to more than one of her friends, or her general air of indifference: that “oh, it happens,” response. Somehow over time, a lot of girls on the campus have got it into their heads that this is just ‘how things are’, and that they just have to get on with it. There are crazy levels of accepted misogyny that are taken as a casual standard among the student community. Here, for example, are a couple of extracts from “UC Berkeley Hookups”, a public Facebook community, supposedly male and female-friendly, where students can submit anonymous posts about sexual encounters they've had on the campus. The community is primarily male dominated: and here are a few extracts from accounts that moderators considered totally acceptable to publish:

“So I met this girl outside SAE last weekend. Presumable pretty drunk this bitch asks me for a cig, and being the quick thinker I am I ask her to show me her tits in exchange for a cigarette. She says she has to take me to her room to show me. So she does, and then seeing the invested interest I had she asks if i want to feel them. She gets me inside to a secluded location, and by secluded I mean her, her sleeping roommate and her roommates boyfriend. At any second I figure they may wake up, so while Im trying to enjoy getting my rock hard schlong serviced I begin thinking of a master plan to save all of my cigs and exit the room successfully. When the time was right I covered this chick face like liberals cover Berkeley!”

Another, from an anon. male to a ‘conquest’:

“It is okay for you to be ashamed. By the end of the day, I'm still getting it in. In your pussy that is. As for the phone, those are pics of your slutty ass and or videos that you might have noticed me taking cause you were so shitfaced. Now that was a good night. PEACE OUT.”

Just the one more:

“To this blonde bitch that I took home last week named Katie or Kate or whatever who even cares…”

With screaming irony, the community moderator had also seen fit to post “Girls we need more of your stories!”

The mind boggles.

So I’d stumbled across this culture of shaming, of sexual objectification, and it distressed me that I’d seen far too many girls my age firstly putting up with it, and secondly shaming each other over it. But where had it started? Where was it coming from?

I can’t help but point a finger towards the frats. Of course in doing this I’m not trying to say that every Greek brotherhood actively facilitates sexual assault, and I’m not suggesting there’s no culture of sexual aggression outside of them: but it’s definitely where, in the past year, I saw the most concentrated sexual aggression towards women, and where I saw the most cases of people just shrugging it off as 'boys being boys'. The fact that Berkeley actually has a ‘date rape’ frat on the campus- yes, this is a widely accepted nickname among the students for a recognized campus frat- is so fifty shades of wrong I can’t get my head around it even now. At my first and only frat party, as I stood, sober and witnessing all these teetering girls being dragged about the floor by their considerably more sober male counterparts, I realized there was a guy following me. Considerably bigger than I was, silent and impassive he had latched on to me and was watching me from a couple of feet away, solo cup in hand. Not particularly bothered, but not keen to be leeched onto in such a way I left the room in the hope of losing him. Diligently he tailed me through every room of the three floored house, red cup in hand, never saying a word and always keeping a couple of feet behind me. Having run out of most of my ideas I tried the classic escape into the girls’ bathroom. He followed me in there. 

At which point I turned on my heel and screamed “FUCK OFF! FUCK OFF AND LEAVE ME ALONE, NOW.”

“Woah, alright,” he shrugged, raising his hands in slight bemusement. “Whatever.” And he left.

But what if I’d been drunk? What if I’d been reeling with alcohol, like so many of the other girls in that place, and separated from my friends, and not altogether knowing what was happening? And just suppose something had happened to me- how does the campus faculty handle it? Take a look at this article on the Huffington Post, written by a Berkeley student about her experience of sexual assault, and how the faculty responded. 

Now I’m not trying to bash the campus. I don’t think it’s just students, or just Berkeley that has a problem with sexual politics, it’s a problem America has with sexual politics. The misogyny, the objectification, the tolerance of sexual assault, it’s national. Nothing illustrated this to me better than what happened at the beginning of my second semester the, when the Steubenville Case was all over the media. Two high school boys in Ohio were found guilty of repeatedly raping a sixteen-year old girl, taking photographs of her and publishing them on social media networks.

The case went very public, and many of America’s major news channels covered the trial and mourned the terrible situation- for the boys. When the guilty verdict was delivered, CNN news anchor Poppy Harlow reported that it was: "Incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart."

Watch the clip. The victim barely gets a mention. 

I loved the experience of living in America for a year, and I loved every minute of being at Berkeley. But for a liberal, open-minded college in one of the most liberal open-minded states America has, there are many things inherently wrong in the way girls are being treated. Berkeley has long been an institution heralded as a flagship for change: so Berkeley Girls, it’s time to open your eyes to this culture. Because it’s not okay. And something has to be done. 

Sensational... Sin City

People in England may well be complaining, as our grey and cloudy country slips over into the third week of heatwave, but let me tell you: Vegas was hot. Oppressive hot. The kind of hot that comes from concrete and glass and tarmac. When we got off the bus- an eight hour journey as city gave way to rocks and shrubs and huge expanses of nothing- the road shimmered, warping in front of our faces. Every time we took a breath in, we could feel the heat on the inside of our lungs. The middle of the desert, and there was no wind.

You can’t really roadtrip without passing through Vegas, and with the international branding of Sin City, the place where anything goes,  you’d expect  it could never live up to the hype. But of course, this is America, hype means a different thing there. It was an acid-trippy adult fantasyland that begins with the mirage-like effect of seeing the vast pyramid and sphinx of the Luxor looming out of the blank desert, and then one by one the eclectic mashup of the strip that you’ve seen countless times on postcards. This was to be the grand finale of our trip: and while we never woke up with a tiger in the bathroom, it was one hell of an experience. 

terrifying clown

There's a lot that's weird and wonderful about Sin City, but the most beautiful fact is that once you get there (make it past the flights or the coaches, or whatever the bulk prices are) your stay can be insanely cheap. It’s just about finding the right places. We stayed four nights in the lurid Circus Circus casino, advertised from the front by a terrifying neon clown, who stood brandishing a glowing lollipop at the cars and buses cruising down the strip. For $25 the first two nights and a slight increase over the weekend we got a room with a hugely comfy king-sized bed, desk, armchairs, bathroom, fridge and tv. Each casino-resort is so vast there are always rooms going, and hotels slugging it out for who can bring in the most customers, so if you do a bit of research before booking you can often land an awesome accommodation deal. 

Once you're settled, sort out your transport. The strip is incredible to see, but it’s also vast, and in the heat, difficult to navigate. If you come to Vegas without a car, then before you do anything else, buy a three or a six-day bus pass for the ‘Deuce’. The buses are regular, incredibly well airconditioned, and an invaluable way of getting up and down the strip. Don’t think you can save yourself by walking. We tried that on the first night, and The Graduate nearly collapsed in the foyer of the Palazzo. You'll also miss out on some of the colourful characters who ride the Deuce. Why walk, when in a single short bus trip we not only saw a dishevelled drunkard lying across the seats shouting about how he was secretly an undercover cop; but a guy wired out of his skull- who rolled up to the back seats yelling 'WHO WANTS A GRAM? VEGAS, BABY!', slipped a packet of the white stuff to the incoherent 'undercover cop', and then collapsed next to us for a chat about England's best football teams.
 "Manchester United," he insisted, touching The Graduate's thigh. "That's the stuff." 

fun loving free thinkers....

I do think you have to be over 21 to enjoy Sin City. It was only after arriving we realized we were staying in a ‘Family hotel’, and even then I was truly baffled by the number of kids running around. The casinos were full of smoke and drunk adults, and beyond the initial amazement of the huge buildings I couldn't much see the appeal for younglings, or for the parents who have to shepherd them past the ‘over 21’ zones and back to the screamingly loud amusement arcades. It helps as well to enjoy some of the colorful entertainment on offer. On our second day we were approached in the street by a large florid man, who shouted "You look like a very happy young couple!" and then invited us to a very exclusive adults party at a club called The Jockstrap. "It's for fun-loving free thinkers." he said, earnestly. It was to his infinite regret that we told him we didn't qualify, not being over twenty-five: or married. 

"Did we just get invited to a sex club?" I mumbled as we walked away. 

"Yup." The Graduate nodded, giving me a discreet high five. 

After going on to get lost in Ceaser’s Palace and nearly contracting a second bout of heatstroke, we decided to take a bus downtown to explore the Vegas off the main strip; and accidentally discovered a magical place outside the Vegas of Hollywood. A ten minute bus ride off the main strip takes you into the grittier end of Vegas, the vintage strip set up and run for many years by the mob. Once the main Vegas Strip, this area has become fully pedestrianized and titled The Freemont Street Experience: half a kilometer of sidewalk under the biggest LED screen in the world.  Here the casinos are a shade grimier, a shade tattier, about a quarter of the size, but with a hell of  a lot more character. The Golden Nugget, with its flume through a shark tank; the Four Queens; the Main Street Station with its railcar buffet. The slots are cheap and the drinks are many.

Freemont Street Experience

99 cents? Yes please.

These casinos are full of 'secret' deals. Inside the Freemont is a bar and grill called Tony Romas, where after 9pm you can get a fantastic steak and lobster for only 11 dollars; head along to the Main Street Station and they’ll do you a frozen margharita for just 99 cents- the best way to get rid of your slot machine fodder. At Binion’s you can get a free photo of yourself taken with a million dollars, piled high in a pyramid, New Orleans themed casino La Bayou will give you strings of Mardi Gras beads whenever you come in to play a slot. International sensation the Heart Attack Grill has been 'fighting obesity since 2005' with its Quadruple Bypass Burger.








It's more manageable than the main strip and packed with free open-air concerts, fantastic hidden gems of bars and drinking joints. On our last, truly memorable evening, we saw ‘Marriage can be Murder’ at The D: a hilarious dinner-and-a-show murder mystery with heavy audience participation; puns strong enough to kill a horse, and slightly racist undertones (when the only Asian member of the audience stood up to speak the DJ drowned him out with a sample of Gangnam Style). Once finished we wandered our way into a biker bar called Hogs and Heifers; where fierce girls in jeans and fringed tube tops danced on the bartops and screamed themselves hoarse at the customers. It was a weird form of customer service: as a new party of people stepped tentatively over the threshold one particularly dangerous bargirl howled "THIS ISN'T A [expletive] COCKTAIL BAR SO IF YOU [expletives] WANT A DRINK I SUGGEST YOU WALK YOUR [expletives] UP TO THE BAR AND ORDER ONE!" before leaping back onto the bartop and high-kicking her way back towards the ale taps. 

Not sure it's one I'll be trying when I return to my waitressing job, but it seemed to work for them. 

I know the main strip is what you see in the films, but Downtown had so much fire and fizz that The Graduate and I spent most of our time exploring it. So sure, get your photos taken of the classic strip casinos, ride the rollercoaster around New York New York and splash out at the Ceasar's buffet- but then head down to the mob part of town. I think Sin City, whether you end up loving it or hating it, is something that you have to do once in your life: though I’ll reiterate that waiting until you’re twenty-one is more likely to land you the full drinking gambling playing experience. But there’s no age cap on standing outside the Bellagio hotel at midnight, as the star spangled banner plays and huge white sprays of water flying thirty feet into the air, and if you can put the hole in the ozone out of your mind, there's something truly magical about the sight of all that neon. 

Sin City. I sincerely hope it's not the last time I visit. 

Not the Vegas Blog

I know, firstly that I haven’t blogged for too long. Secondly, I know that what I’m supposed to write about, and what I suspect people want to hear about, is what I got up to in Vegas. Why wouldn't they? I got invited to an adult club night for ‘free-thinking couples’ for one thing, and that’s just a small fragment of a really mad four days. I’ll get to it, I promise.

The tenacious puppy

But right now I just want to write a bit about the fact that I’m now home again, and I've been out of Berkeley for almost a month, and thinking about that has put all sorts of things in my head; and for the moment writing about Vegas will only remind me that I’m no longer in Vegas, and no-one needs that.

So, I’m at home. And home for me right now involves a never-ending battle of wills with a ten-week old Portuguese water dog. I just spent ten minutes sitting in the kitchen eyeballing him through the back windows as he stood at the top of the garden steps he is too small to climb down, staunchly refusing to sit and thereby allow himself to be lifted.  

After an eventual capitulation I got him inside, wrote the first three sentences of this blog and then had to get up again and forcibly pry one of my father’s summer clogs from his deceptively tiny jaws.

He’s a tenacious little bear, and is not quite housetrained, which means that most of my time in England so far has involved sitting in the kitchen waiting for him to perform his next bodily function inbetween bouts of harassing our intensely world-weary Labradoodle. He is also agoraphobic, and has firmly decided the best place for him to sleep is in the wedge between the bottom of our oven and the floor, where he can quietly chew the flex cable and eat the paint as it strips away under the pressure. But goddammnit, he is a cutie.

Since coming home I went up to my old university to give a talk about blogging, for which I felt vastly unequipped, but everyone was lovely and generous, and I particularly enjoyed the question from the young man who asked whether blogspot was owned by Google; because if it was there was no way he was setting up an account there. Ain’t no way the USA surveillance was getting to him.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but everyone in California is really friendly.”

Somehow not the answer he was looking for.

I miss the friendliness and the happiness more than I could ever have imagined. Even with this wholly unusual heatwave putting some semblance of a smile on everyone’s face, I have never found the London Underground more isolating. Yes, the BART was expensive and slow, and apparently has been completely dysfunctional since I left, but you could always count on at least two entertaining personas on the ride across the bay. People would at least make eye contact, occasionally, instead of sitting in bubbles of festering resentment against everyone else trying to get to work.

I miss feeling productive, having an agenda. Sure it’s the summer holidays and that’s bound to go tits up, but given that my only employment is Puppywatch, at least until I can move back up to Norwich, I’m not surprised that my brain is going soft.

As someone who is only just getting into the ‘not going back’ mourning period, all I can say is that reverse culture shock just expresses itself in strange ways. I sat up way into the night last night watching promotional videos of the Berkeley campus and crying in a deeply self-indulgent manner; and I creeped out a guy on the train last week because he was wearing a San Francisco Giants cap, so I stared at him, glassy-eyed all the way to London Bridge station. I find it hard to write about America- a first attempt at a piece of dissertation writing last week became inexorably tangled in the Golden Gate Bridge suicides- and I get angry with myself, on a regular basis, for every incidence over the past year when I wished myself home again.

It’ll pass. I had much the same experience when I landed back from Ghana, and got over that without too much grief; so I’m sure that in due time I’ll publish something entertaining about that Vegas sex party invitation and the back-of-the-bus coke dealer who wanted to talk to me about Man United. For now though, I’m just going to rescue that tea towel from the puppy, and watch the Bear Territory video one more time.

San Diego: Drink it in..

A WHALE’S VAGINA

There:  I got the Anchorman reference out of the way nice and early. Now we can all move on with our lives. 

The face of San Diego

It took two hours to ride the Greyhound from Venice Beach to San Diego. For some reason that now evades me, I decided we'd depart LA at 7am- possibly to ‘get the best of the day’ having arrived in the new city. We therefore began in the addled blur that accompanies waking up at four in the morning after both our alarms failed to go off. I couldn’t tell you about the ride itself as I spent the best part of it snoring and wrapped around the Graduate in a way that afforded me the best possible comfort and left him with a pair of dead legs and a headache. When we pulled into the station, however, we found ourselves on the brink of a sea of people: as apparently the population of San Diego had also risen early to run some sort of rock-music marathon. Everywhere we went we saw people swathed in tin foil, gulping water and stretching out their hamstrings.

We stayed at the incredibly affordable Lucky D's Hostel, right on the border of the old Gaslamp Quarter: the hub for cheap drinks and young trendies. The deeply apathetic man on the front desk gave us the key to our room and told us we could check in- withholding the fact that the previous occupant was in fact still in residence, which was something of a surprise when I tried to get into the room.  Returning to the front desk we were unapologetically told to come back in four hours, but at least they let us dump our bags in the office. 

The Gaslamp Quarter is a medley of restaurants and bars that stretches for several blocks, marked by some ‘old’ iron streetlamps and an arched sign welcoming visitors and tourists. With so much local competition, this is the place to go when hunting for cheap drinks: the bars jostle each other for the best happy hour deals and cheap meals, and there’s something going on every night of the week.

Pecto Park, San Diego Padres vs. Toronto Blue Jays

 Lucky D's was right on the doorstep of the Petco Park stadium, so on the first night we attended our first ever Major League Baseball game: San Diego Padres vs. The Toronto Blue Jays. That we didn’t understand the league or the sport itself was nowhere near enough to deter us: after all, they had pulled pork sandwiches.  For $10 each we could sit on the grassy lawn on the far side of the stadium, so the field and the stands reared up in front of us, and the view- at least for two people who don’t know how baseball works- was perfectly clear. The game itself was about average in terms of exciting moments, but it was worth it for the moments when the cameras zoomed in on people in the audience, who displayed a plethora of reactions when they realised they were on display, my favourite being a middle-aged man, wearing only gold glitter from the waist up, who greeted the screens with a dramatic flourish and slow spin. It was so popular they replayed the clip for the rest of the evening.

As a city, I didn’t really know what to make of San Diego. It felt the most like a Sim City (designed by a fourteen-year old with no particular architectural merit) out of any place I visited: and the blocking system of houses and offices seemed more obvious than anywhere else I’d visited. But the public transport system was great: all Americans who tell you it’s impossible to survive without a car in SoCal are LYING, and much more affordable than San Francisco.

Outside the Old Town

 We took the metroline up to visit the historic Old Town, which was like the set of an old Western, full of small stores containing tobacco pipes and throwing knives; glass-fronted chocolate cabinets; a Wells Fargo Wagon; and shelf upon shelf of exotic dried teas. This small patch contained the origins of San Diego, where the Spanish settled and promptly left again, after finding there was very little fertile land there. With walking tours and lots of small exhibitions, it’s well worth a look. After a couple of hours exploring,we took a rattling bus up to the Cabrillo National Monument and Point Loma lighthouse: a perfect whale watching spot and outcrop that looks over the whole of San Diego, the naval aircraft hangers in the bay and the built up skyscrapers of the central district. It wasn't whale season, but there were a couple of fighter jets doing flybys over the Marina Bay, which in The Graduate’s books was just as exciting.

 

Speaking of jets, we also stumbled upon a small bar and grill called the Kansas City BBQ by the Marina, which was a filming location for Top Gun. The walls were full of paraphernalia, the ceiling was hung with bras, and we shared a rack of ribs with the cheekiest sparrows known to mankind.  

Silverback Gorilla at San Diego Zoo

Although Sea World was slightly crippling in terms of entry fee, we couldn’t leave without visiting the San Diego Zoo. We missed the pandas (the queue to get in to see them was ridiculous so if anyone has their heart set on the black-and-white beasts I’d suggest you get there as early in the morning as you can) but managed Gorillas, Tigers, and a very enthusiastic Polar Bear. If animals are your thing then set aside a full day to explore this extraordinary menagerie.

Of course, the people were all insanely friendly. On our last night we found a bar serving Tezcal beer for $1.75 and got chatting to a helicopter pilot. He was so delighted with our accents he rang his sixteen-year-old son and made me have a conversation with the poor boy- I could feel the awkwardness seeping out of the phone- and then bought us a pair of luridly blue shots and told us all about the collapse of his first marriage, and the time he flew over a dead lake in Nevada and accidentally interrupted the shooting of a porn film there. Then he offered us a free canoeing trip on his Uncle’s river in the Napa Valley. Only in America…

Next stop, Vegas. You stay classy. 

Read my latest blog for US News and World Report HERE

Venice Beach: sun, sand, and- more sand.

The Los Angeles I’d heard of was the one I visited last January: the shimmering expanses of tarmac, the somewhat jaded Sunset Boulevard and the kitschy Universal Studios. The Graduate and I saw none of that having finally flown from San Francisco. Instead we marooned ourselves in the bohemian outlet of Venice Beach, Santa Monica’s sketchier sibling.

You can’t mention a trip to LA these days without singing the praises of the Megabus. If you’re trying to get around America without a car (and I can now confirm that we’ve managed a very successful three-week roadtrip without one) then Megabus would be one of the first go-to places I pointed you. While it currently has a limited repertoire, only ferrying to LA and Sacramento from San Francisco or Oakland, it’s crazy promotions means that if you book early enough you can get impossibly cheap rides. Our eight hour trip down the coast to LA cost us five bucks each- less than a return fare on the San Francisco BART. And the bus wasn’t even sketchy: we had all-too-effective air conditioning (I wore two jumpers the whole way down and was still shivering like a leaf) free moderately-effective wifi, and some good reclining seats. We were even sitting next to a thirty-something Dungeons and Dragons master called Greg, so the conversation was lively.

When we eventually stepped off the bus, The Graduate balked and hissed ‘let’s get away from the engine, it’s boiling at this end’. It was only having hauled ourselves a few feet away that we realized the overheating bus engine was not at fault, but that this was simply the temperature at this end of California. Having heard about LA’s somewhat limited public transport (you Americans are way too used to your cars: get on a bus sometime) we were at a slight loss as to how to get from the Union Station to the beach, when Greg the Dungeonmaster stepped in and offered to give us a ride down in his car. Then Graduate responded with enthusiasm, I with slight trepidation that increased as he led us us past several haphazardly parked police cars and a street liberally roped off with yellow police tape.

“It’s totally fine,” Greg said cheerfully. A helicopter buzzed overhead.

We did make it down to the beach in one piece, reminding me again that most Americans are actually just friendly, and arrived at the Samesun Venice Beach Hostel. In lieu of a doorman there was a slightly addled chap in a dirty vest, who shouted “DO YOU SMOKE WEED? DON’T LIE TO ME, I KNOW YOU TAKE THAT SHIT,” as we walked past him.  

Murals at Venice Beach

Despite the initial alarming reception the hostel was great, but we didn't spend too much time in there because we were out on the sand. The Venice Beach boardwalk is sandwiched between Santa Monica and Muscle Beach: a space full of mad graffiti, street artists and skateboarders. The long flat expanse of tarmac on the edge of the sands is a perfect place for spending a lazy afternoon, and there’s always something going on. Take, for example, the numerous ‘Green Doctor’ booths dotted amongst the buskers and tourists, where for the advertised price of only $40.00, Americans could be diagnosed as stressed out or depressed and given a medical marijuana permit by a man in a green tracksuit and matching baseball cap. I don’t know what I was more amazed by, the mere presence of the booths, or the fact that they were never empty. Head far enough North or South, and you’ll reach the slightly more upmarket Santa Monica, with it’s pier and shopping district, or the Marina, which feeds into the Venice Beach canals and some big ol’ yachts.

Anyone feeling stressed?

Hitting the beach was the best way to stay cool in the middle of the day. The Samesun hostel had a cupboard full of boogie boards for the residents to take out (there are also any number of places to rent bikes, surf boards, and boogie boards along the boardwalk), and a couple of volleyballs. The Graduate and I amused ourselves with one of these for several hours, gaining looks of askance from the local muscle beach inhabitants who take the game very seriously- one man even came over just to tell us how terrible we were.

The food was amazing all week; there are lots of boardwalk bars and affordable restaurants on the edge of the sand, and more upmarket jobs with valet parking at Abbot Kinney, a few roads deep from the beach. The only thing we could feasibly afford there was some upmarket deli pizza.

Margaritas at Casablancas

I've been hearing all year that the further south you get in California, the better the Mexican food becomes, and for anyone thinking of heading the Venice Beach way my strongest foodie recommendation would be to walk to Lincoln Boulevard until you get to a very run-down looking roundabout next to a Whole Foods. On the roundabout  and go for a Margarita and a Calamari dish at Casablancas. It's an amazing little place, where flour Tortillas are thrown together on a flattop stove in the middle of the restaurant, and a maitre’d pushes an old fashioned drinks cart between the tables, throwing together hand-crafted cocktails as he goes.

So yes, we missed the Hollywood sign, the studio tours and Beverly Hills, but didn't regret it for a second. If you’re heading to LA for a summer weekend, hit the beach. You won’t be bored.

Sunset at Venice Beach

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If you're going to San Francisco...

There are over forty-seven named hills in San Francisco. In the past five days, I think I’ve walked most of them. The Graduate has no idea when he will next see the city, so he drags me around the city at high speed. It shames me to think I’ve been here for a year and yet seen more sights in a single four-day period than in something close to eight months.

A plywood waitress at the Golden Gate Grill 

We have walked, either alone or in the company of my brother, stopping off on his way home from Australia, around all the best known parts of the city, and my feet are feeling it. On Saturday we had breakfast at the Golden Gate Grill off Union Square, a loft-like upstairs diner with large planes suspended from the ceiling, booths and circular seats topped with red leather. at around $10 for a stack of pancakes it was a pretty good breakfast, enough certainly to sustain us as we climbed from Union Square to the Coit Tower ($7 to get to the top), at one of the most famous peaks of the city. San Francisco was doing what San Francisco does best: a protest march, and Market street was flooded for hours in the afternoon. Thousands were marching against GMO situation, in red smurf hats, bumblebee costumes (no, I’m not sure either), bearing placards against the patenting of Mother Nature.

Sing-a-long Grease in the Castro

Public transport- some of the best California has to offer- was the biggest drain on our funds. Taking the BART in and out once a day came to about eight dollars, and the muni transport (the trams, the metros and electric buses) was $2 a ride. Even on the day we walked through a riotous carnival in the Mission District to the Golden Gate Park- about five miles up and over hill with a detour through the Castro- we must have spent about $15 each on getting to and from, then around the city. Still, if you can cope with the size and frequency of the hills, I'd say get walking. You'll be amazed at how much ground you can cover in a good pair of shoes! 

Despite leg cramp, we refused to be deterred by the hills, and picked up rental bikes from Shattuck Avenue’s bike station to strike out across the Golden Gate to Sausilito on Tuesday. This was my second time crossing the bridge, and this time I noticed, asides from the amazing views of the city and the churning water below, that there were phone boxes placed strategically along the eight thousand feet of metal girders and suspension. Small plaques above the phones said simply There is Hope. Make the call. 

It was windy as hell out in the middle, and although I knew the gentle shaking under my feet was down to the car engines, I suddenly couldn't get back off there quick enough. We freewheeled down to Sausilito and wandered the streets before catching the ferry back to the San Francisco waterfront. I probably won’t go back onto the bridge, at least not for my remaining time in America.

Mission District Carnival

I think I'll always have regrets for not managing to make more of my time around San Francisco and Berkeley, but I am so happy to be having the opportunity to show some of my favorite people what I’ve been up to and where I’ve been living all year. I really believe it will make returning to the UK a little less lonely. 

Next stop, LA! 

Lakes and Mountains

The Graduate and I tread carefully around each other. He landed, heavy-eyed with jetlag the day after school finished, was given the briefest of looks at Berkeley before my parents and brother arrived in a silver jeep and whisked us towards Nevada. Four days in and I’m still jumping at the fact that he’s there.  It’s one of the hidden clauses of the long-distance scenario. While the eventual reunion is the climax everyone is pushing for in this long, hard, slog, what you never seem prepared for is that you have actually spent a large amount of time apart. Even if you've emailed and texted and spoken via webcam on almost a daily basis, you have still forgotten how to simply be together. There are small things about him I've completely forgotten. He reminds me of them with a vague frown. Details of Christmas are hazy.

Cabin

What with Thanksgiving and skiing this is my third visit to the lake, this time on the North side in Carnelian Bay. For people visiting California, especially for new and upcoming Berkeley students, I can’t recommend this place enough. Take a weekend away from the campus time and come up here to breathe some proper air. We stayed in a second ridiculous log cabin, this one with huge cathedral windows that have sunlight pouring in on us at all times of day and panoramic views of the cedar pines surrounding the house. I moved from bear territory to bear territory: in the cabin information pack are instructions on how to not get eaten. For the sake of anyone planning a trip up here, who may not be wilderness-savvy:

IF YOU ENCOUNTER A BEAR IN YOUR YARD:

Do not run from him, this may stimulate his instinct to chase.

Let the bear know this is YOUR territory and he doesn't belong there

Don’t be afraid or submissive

Yell at him, bang pots and pans, throw rocks. Make him think you are a bigger bear than he is!  […]

And so on, and so forth.

Emerald Bay

On Tuesday we drove the car up to Emerald Bay, approaching the south side of the Lake, which holds some of the most astonishing scenery in the area. The mountains- still capped with snow, even at the beginning of summer- rear out of the water with such alarming force, you  can’t help but wonder if someone stuck them there as a joke.

Instead of racketing through in a pell-mell taxi ride we stopped this time, and hiked past Eagle Falls down to the beach. There’s a large stone building called the Vikingsholm down there, a little way back from the sand. It was built in 1929 by an American woman who was so impressed by old Nordic Architecture she had a large summer house of Scandinavian design designed and built in the cove. Because the holiday season won’t begin for another month it was shut, but The Graduate and I could get into the stone-flagged courtyard and amble around the perimeter.

We hiked up a lot of hills for the rest of the week, and rafted down the Truckee River, (it does, as the taxi slogan suggests, get you wet), through some Grade III rapids. We each tested the water at Meeks Bay, The Graduate lasting the longest with maybe half a minute of submersion before staggering out with the unanimous shout of ‘WHERE HAVE MY LEGS GONE, THESE APPENDAGES DON’T FEEL LIKE MY OWN” while visiting Californians stood, mouths agape on the sunny shore.  

If you’re going to swim, get a wetsuit first.

The Graduate on the beach. No filters, everything really is that blue. 

Now back in Berkeley, having parted with my mum and dad and arrived within reach of a reliable internet connection, The Graduate and I are gearing up for the next three weeks. Starting in San Francisco, we’re heading down the coast first to LA, then to San Diego, before we trek across the desert to Fabulous Las Vegas. Once we've managed to lose all our money on the blackjack table we’ll fly back to the Bay, possibly chasing The Great Outdoors with Yosemite National Park, or maybe heading to a beach town for a day or two of surfing.

With any luck the internet connections en route will be more reliable than those of the past week, so keep following, and I’ll do my very best to keep the blog posts lively.

Who doesn't love a chipmunk? 

Away we go!  

Transience

I feel very peculiar writing this. It's about ten pm Pacific Time. I've handed in all my final papers, my parents have come, fleetingly, and gone. I have climbed up to the big C to watch the sun set over Berkeley with my friends and I'm now sitting, in my gutted student bedroom, for my last night in International House. On the other side of the world The Graduate is in a car headed for the airport, and tomorrow I will see him for the first time since January, ending, for the time being, my long-distance relationship.

I'm still here but everything feels very fragile. I've passed too quickly from being a student into being a tourist, I've had to start saying goodbye to some wonderful people, and I feel almost cheated by time for passing away so quickly. I haven't had a moment of closure, particularly, except for a few hysterical tears on the handing in of my final paper. Berkeley looks to continue indefinitely, but I only have about forty-eight hours left. So, yes. Transience. Not a student, not entirely a tourist, not at all sure how to feel about the fact that this year is coming to an end. I wanted to write before The Graduate lands, because tomorrow is going to be a disgustingly happy day for me and my emotions will be trampolined up into the stratosphere. I've had adrenaline running through me all week. But it's also the end of student life at Berkeley.

I'm hoping to blog a lot in my last four weeks. The Graduate and I are heading first to Lake Tahoe with my family, then back to San Francisco for a few days before turning our sights south. Los Angeles to San Diego to Las Vegas, before flying back North, and after that is anyone's guess. Perhaps Yosemite, somewhere with some Redwoods.

So stay tuned, there should be some fun stories. And from Berkeley, thanks very much for reading. Berkeley Girl has had well over eight thousand hits- let's get it to ten before I fly back to the UK!

X

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California Happy Theory

The other day I was writing a list of do’s and don’ts for The Graduate, who has never been to America before. At the top of the list was:

DO: expect to be faced with some of the most wide-eyed sincerity you’ve ever encountered. It’s not a joke. Californians actually are that happy.

I’ve been puzzling over this ever since I moved out here and started living through these beaming smiles and excitable moods. I was initially convinced the entire country was trying to subtly mock me, and spent the first month staring over my shoulder to check I wasn't walking around with my dress tucked into my knickers. A while later, and with no underwear situation presenting itself I had to uncertainly arrive at the conclusion that actually, this is just a happy place. 

GLITTER DRAGON 

I’m not saying I haven’t seen stress or the occasional attack of rage while out here. Particularly around the campus people like to push themselves to their limits, and it often shows. But as a general rule I’d say everyone seems around sixty percent happier- at face value- than they do in dear old Blighty. Take last weekend, for example.  I went to the 14^th annual How Weird Street Fair, a peace and love fest that was a veritable orgy of glitter and dancing and nudity. There were thousands of people of all ages, out enjoying the sunshine together; there was a big sequinned dragon, face-painting, several accordions  and an art bus driven by a six-foot transvestite. The fair crossed four different streets, and all afternoon the vibes were just... very positive.

Dancing at the How Weird Street Festival

We do have festivals in the UK: there are all the big music numbers- Glastonbury, Reading, Latitude- where people go to swim in a lake of mud for four days... There’s Gay Pride in the Summer, and the famous Notting Hill Carnival. But it’s much less of a common thing to have a couple of thousand adults, kids and dogs casually get together to have a dance to some weird folk music- especially for free. Next to the financial district of the city.

The sun evidently has something to do with it. I know this because the Laconic Australian doesn't find the infusion of endorphins radiating from the Americans we meet nearly so unusual as I do. And yes, London is not quite as accommodating of joy as San Francisco. It’s much harder to cavort around in a bikini and body glitter when it’s grey and sleeting outside your sitting room window. No-one wants to smile at a stranger when the  hems of their trousers have just been soaked with filthy rain water by a passing bus.

But there's still more to California Happiness. Perhaps it's all the easy-access dope that people consume. On 4/20, (which I now correctly know as ‘weed day’), the Laconic Australian and I went out to watch several hundred Berkeley students gather in Memorial Glade, light up several rounds of joints and create one enormous communal hotbox*.  The campus security trundled mildly around the scene in their little golf carts, but otherwise everyone was more or less left to take most of their clothes off, and get on with it.

Perhaps it’s just that Californians exercise more, and across the board there’s subsequently more of a natural endorphin kick.

In conclusion, I’m still figuring it out. I know for a fact that the people of England could do with some more sunshine. Perhaps all Londoners just need to get a little bit more naked, share a big old spliff**; throw on the odd glitter-infused unicorn horn and go hula-hooping in Trafalgar Square every couple of months.

Maybe we all just need to chill out.

*I know an open-air hotbox is a useless device. 

*In case the idea of my open-air hotbox didn't convince people, then for all and any current professors or prospective employees who are reading this, I don’t smoke dope. Even if I wanted to I wouldn’t know where to begin with that kind of enterprise. I am famously inept at such things.