A Little Time

After the mania of the weeks at Berkeley, the rushes across campus, and crushes on Sproul, it’s so easy to cut the weekends loose and let them drift. Last term I spent great swathes of time in my bedroom; feebly telling myself that I had far too much homework to go out, while still achieving very little. Some days I’d never see the outside of my halls, just sit and struggle through a dense essay or a dusty book, listening to the industrial carpet dryers wafting stale air down the hallways. Enough to do a person’s nut in. 

Having made it home and back again in one piece, and passing all of my classes with good grades, one of my top resolutions on my return was to take one day a week when academic work could stuff it. I would have Me Time: the only condition being that I used it to do new things, going across the bay and actually seeing something of San Francisco, or exploring parts of Berkeley outside of the four roads penning the campus. 

My first twenty-four hours of Me Time began at about 9pm Friday night, after singing with Perfect Fifth in the Welcome Back Acapella concert. There was an aftershow party, and the twenty-first birthday of a fellow choirgirl to attend. With the Irish Aristocrat, the World’s Greatest Lover and the Laconic Australian in tow I went steaming away, determined to show these Yanks how the British drink. Reckless bravado. 

Acapella parties are like stepping onto the set of Glee. Every time I went to the fridge to pull out a beer, I had to manoeuvre round spontaneous scatting sessions, and people were able to segue into a five-part harmony rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ with no apparent effort. I had a conversation with a theatre major in possession of a highly convincing British accent, ‘helped’ the birthday girl with tequila shots, and learnt that one of my friends had been raised in a religious cult. An enormous bowl of vodka gummy bears had been provided for general consumption, which were easy enough to pick at once every half hour or so- but after midnight the hostess decided they weren’t disappearing fast enough, split us into teams and threw us into an eating contest. I swallowed a large tablespoon of them, and remember nothing more of the night. 

 

The second phase of Me Time began with slumping on the bathroom tiles the following morning, shaking like a leaf and heaving radioactive-looking bile into the toilet. Not the most fortuitous of starts. But, by the early afternoon, when I could stand upright without feeling an invisible pickaxe in my skull, I took the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) across the bay to visit the San Francisco Museum of ModernArt. 

'Guardians of the Secret' by Jackson Pollock

Architecture in central San Fran is fascinating- the buildings cobbled together like a five-year old’s collage, with old free-standing apartment blocks set against a chrome backdrop of skyscrapers. The MoMA is a two-block walk from Montgomery Street station, and costs eleven dollars for entry if you have a valid student ID. Eleven dollars well worth spending: the Irish Aristocrat and I spent a good two hours wandering through the exhibitions before the museum closed, and we barely scratched the surface. They seemed to have a little bit of everything- Picasso, Frida Khalo, Andy Warhol, even Damien Hirst’s petrified cow head, which in retrospect was not the best thing to examine with a hangover. And while I have no idea of the meaning behind a sculpture of brains, it was a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon, and a success in my first attempt at taking a little time.

peculiar brain sculpture

Next weekend I’m flying down to LA, where I plan to stick my hands into whatever stretch of drying cement I can find. Good times ahead!  

New Year, New Plans.

Happy New Year to all my lovely readers! 

There are some things in life which even the most expensive cameras will never be able to capture, and the view from the top of the International house, or when you’re heading way up into the Berkeley hills, is one of them. The bay stretches out like a piece of hammered grey slate from Berkeley across the bay, and San Francisco appears collapsible, made of cardboard or matchboxes, bleached white in the sun or lit up like Christmas after dark. Alcatraz rears from the tiny island in the middle of the water, and the Golden Gate stretches between the mountains on either side; little more than a dim, hulking shape rising out of the water when the fog rolls in, but with clear skies the scarlet paintwork strikes out at the clouds. 

On New Years’ Eve I stood in the cold with the Graduate, several inches deep in mud, and watched the fireworks flower over Westminster and the London Eye, and as the rockets burst overhead I felt a twang for the bridge and the bay. It’s strange being back in Blighty. Previous experience has taught me that once you leave a new place for home all your experiences immediately take on the consistency of a dream, and dim within moments of stepping onto the airport tarmac; and while I’m still carrying the faintest of tan lines on my back, the reality of what sun feels like has escaped me. Falling back into the old molds of life has been a strange counter-displacement. England is entirely unchanged, grey and oppressively damp. Having kicked my brain up into a gear I’d been previously unused to, I now have too much time on my hands, and am starting to pine for the West Coast. 

I have a new roommate arriving in the spring term. The wonderful Amy is leaving me, returning to sunny Australia. Her spontaneous twirling moments, personal boundaries confusions, and ridiculous antics have become so much a part of my Berkeley life, things will feel empty without her, but at least I have the Laconic Australian, Irish Aristocrat and World’s Greatest Lover to soften the blow. In any case, I’m now halfway through my year, and feeling the need to really start immersing myself in the American Dream. As such, here are some of my New Years Resolutions: 

  1)      Become less of a hypochondriac: Maybe it’s a means of compensating having to shell out $891 a term for student health insurance; but the number of times I’ve managed to convince myself I’m suffering from a fatal disease in the past few months is ridiculous.

 2)      Get out and see more of San Francisco. I’m determined to better get to know the place, outside of the basic tourist walks. Planning to start with a drink in a pirate bar...

3)      Go skiing in Lake Tahoe to beat the January blues.

 

4)      Start thinking about my dissertation. Requirements are that my large paper for my final year has to be in some way related to my year abroad, and I’m completely stuck for any ideas. Berkeley being such a hub of history, literature and art you’d think it’d be fairly easy to come up with some sort of idea, but inspiration is not striking.  

  5)      Have an All-American Spring Break. Last week of March. Beach, beer, bad behaviour.

 

 6)      Rugby-tackle Barack Obama.

May 2013 be prosperous to us all!

Post Pending!

Obligatory apology for the lack of post! It's Finals Week, all the students are on lockdown, but I am writing as we speak and hope to get a proper blog up later today or by tomorrow at the latest. In the meantime, here are some photos I took in a rather extraordinary bar in Truckee: how many guns can you spot?

This is real America

Blogger refuses to let me turn the moose the right way up.

Bo Billy Bob was a happy little reindeer.. until he got shot.

Spot The Guns

Thanksgiving! A Novice's Tale: Part 2

Five a.m is a heinous time of day, and the rain was hammering down as I, my roommate, the World’s Greatest Lover and one of the Twins dragged ourselves down to the Oakland Greyhound station. As a foreigner, many Americans have taken it upon themselves to protect me, in all my endearing European stupidity. I have been warned against many things:  including firstly, Oakland, and secondly, the Greyhound buses. But limited funds lead to desperate measures, and so, classically, we arrived for our bright-and-early five-thirty coach ride an hour early- because the ticket had told us to do so. The station was deserted asides from the four of us, a cleaner dozing on one of the benches, and a televised domestic abuse court case. Ten minutes before the scheduled departure the rest of the, more wizened travellers, arrived, and we were packed in. I stole a window seat and watched in fascination as an enormous man with a face and hands covered in tattoos settled in the seat across from me. I’d been told to watch out for the greyhound characters. We were shortly after joined by a middle-aged woman with a bleach job straight from the eighties and leather trousers, who staggered up and down the aisle for ten minutes shouting ‘IS ANYONE GETTING OFF HERE?’, several whey-faced couples and families, all due west. 

Truckee- It's as attractive as it looks!

I slept through most of the ride, apart from a brief interlude in Sacramento, where a blonde fireman started stripping off in the charred remains of a gutted house and the entire female contingency of the bus climbed across the aisles to press their noses against the windows. As we got into the last legs of the we found ourselves high in the mountains with redwoods on either side, and patchy snowfall- to the delight of one of the Australians, who had never seen snow before. An hour or so later we rolled into Truckee, a strip-of-road town. The shopfronts were all wood and plaster, old fashioned saloon doors, and the road, stretching into the distant white-capped mountains. After a late breakfast in a bar with ten rifles and several decapitated deer heads on the walls, we set out for the next leg of the journey. Our taxi driver was a slim girl in her early twenties, with knee-high boots, ripped denim daisy dukes and a check shirt. She looked like she’d fallen straight off the set of the OC, and examined us curiously. Backpackers, it seemed, were a rarity in Truckee. She had lived there her whole life, she told us as she navigated the twisted mountaintop roads, the glass lake stretching beneath us to the Nevada border. People came and went with the snowfall.

Emerald Bay

I was torn the whole journey- torn between gaping at the crystal expanse of the lake, and cringing in terror as she pulled out her mobile and chattered blithely away on it, while maneuvering 180 point turns on single-lane roads that wound down the side of a cliff. Driving and talking-on-phone laws don’t apply so much out here, it seems. But the sight of the lake was breathtaking, especially as we rounded the mountain to Emerald Bay with the innocuous-looking castle perched on top of the tiny island.  We were then deposited in South Lake Tahoe, where we embarked on a mega-shop, which included several kilos of potatoes, oversized  bottles of Australian wine, and a sixteen-pound frozen turkey. The last cab driver appeared in a beaten-up white van to help ship the two shopping carts-worth of food to our cabin. He had a magnificent beard, and tangled waist-length brown hair tied in a ponytail under his baseball cap.

“Will you guys be stopping long?” He said cheerily, as I climbed in and examined the NRA sticker on the dashboard. “It’s a lovely spot round these parts..” 

It was only a five minute drive from the main road, and he continued to regale us with stories of the lake as we bumped along a rough path, past enormous wooden houses with skis stacked up around the front. “Yeah, an awesome spot, just so peaceful out here in the woods- GET OUT OF MY ROAD YOU LITTLE ASSHOLES!”   

Two rosy-cheeked children sped past on their push bikes, waving at us. 

“Little shits.” The cabbie mumbled, then “Well folks, here y’are.” 

He dropped us at the cabin door and rolled away, leaving us with ten shopping bags and a small pile of melting snow on the front porch. We looked around, as the silence enveloped us. 

 “It’s a real cabin in the woods… What if zombies come for us?” 

“It’s fine.” My roomie unlocked the door, scraping  her feet on the mat. “If the undead come prowling we’ll just throw the turkey at them.”

Thanksgiving! A Novice's Tale: Part I

Tomorrow 'morning' (4am), the Dinner Crew begins an epic journey across the wastelands of California via Greyhound Bus to Lake Tahoe. Should we arrive in one piece, we will then attempt, with little understanding and no prior experience, to create an authentic Thanksgiving Holiday. So far this involves attempting to source- and learning how to cook- a turkey with twelve hours before dinner time; climbing into a hot tub with a bottle of cut-price champagne; and navigating a cabin in the woods with no car or understanding of the public transport systems.

What could possibly go wrong?

Student life--- sans alcohol

My alcohol tolerance is shot to ribbons. 

In reality it was never that strong in the first place: which I never complained about because it’s so cheap. The nights go with so much more of a swing when it only takes three drinks or so to put a girl in a merry place, although I wonder sometimes how I missed the genetic cast-iron liver possessed by my father’s side of the family. 

University life in the UK exists on a foundation of alcohol. The fundamental initiation of a teenager into student life traditionally involves the consumption of a crippling amount of spirits, wine, and whatever other ungodly cocktail mix you can make- normally consumed from a pint-jug or a pyrex dish, sometimes the odd saucepan or two. Ritualistically one must go missing, black out, have a minor nervous breakdown, or perform some act of stomach-curdling embarrassment that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. My one such moment of glory came a week in to my first term at UEA, when I consumed the best part of a friend’s Absolut bottle, passed out in a neighbouring kitchen, cracking my skull resoundedly on the floor, and then, having been put to bed by my long-suffering housemates, vanished for a four-hour window that I have no memory of whatsoever, sending them on a semi-frantic search of the lake with the conviction that I’d somehow managed to stagger from my prone position on the bed and drown myself. 

 

I haven’t been able to touch vodka since then, and highly I doubt I will ever enjoy it again. 

So the drinking is fun, and asides from the occasional few everyone does it: but it wipes out days at a time, particularly when you get into the habit of three nights out a week. Tuesday LCRS, Thursdays at Lola Los, and some sort of weekend shindig, not to mention the endless rounds of casual afternoon pints in the student union bar, and before you know it weeks have flashed by in a haze of terrible headaches and bedrooms that reek of stale beer and regret.

 At Berkeley, alcohol consumption goes by a different set of rules. Firstly, for many of the students drinking to excess isn’t even an option. Buying underage is a whole world of pain when it comes to actually obtaining booze, and if you’re discovered carrying a fake ID you can face serious legal repercussions. For many, the only option is to go to the Frats, and drink the warm, mass-bought Bud Lite (a punishment in itself), or the industrial plastic bottles of vodka, which strip away a layer of your oesophagus with every swallow. Once you’ve overcome the hurdle of actually getting drunk, you then have to deal with the consequences. Last week, when one of my friends arrived back at the IHouse after a night out in a visibly drunk state, he was discovered by a resident assistant and sent to alcohol counseling. Get picked up by the police drinking- or even carrying an opened bottle- in a public place and you could find yourself in a lot of trouble. Get caught underage and that’s your visa rights more or less gone. 

So while the occasional booze-addled session happens, it’s not the lynchpin of Berkeley society. For my part I’ve barely drunk at all- simply because there’s no way I could keep up the lifestyle I was used to at home while staying on top of my classes. And I’ve found that since my drinking habits have more or less dissipated I’ve lost weight, managed to get up every weekday for my 9am classes without extreme levels of pain, survive said day without having to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, stopped having to account for livid bruises that I don’t remember getting, or drink pint after pint of water to fend off ‘furry mouth’. It’s surprisingly pleasant…

On the couple of occasions when I’ve found a couple of people my own age to go out with, I’ve found the nice thing about America is that- drinking laws prohibiting everyone from really getting their lash on until they hit twenty-one- most of them have more or less the same capacities as me anyway. Where at home I’ve frequently been an embarrassment of a drinking companion, collapsing early in the evening and being put to bed, here everyone celebrates their intolerance together, and collapses in mutual harmony after two or three units. On Friday I went out for drinks with the boys from my Poetry and the Archive class, and it took two pints each to more or less floor each of us. We parted in an atmosphere of fogged wellbeing, and as I went reeling up the road towards my bed I was suddenly confronted with the awesome spectacle of the two-hundred-strong Berkeley Marching Band, who emerged from the gloom in full regalia and played their way past me. In my hazy state I came to the conclusion that they had stepped out just to celebrate my safe return home, and clung to a letterbox to keep myself upright, waving feebly in acknowledgement. There was no blackout, no vomit, and no stomach-curdling anxiety over my actions the next morning. I think I did very well.* 

All in all, I can’t say I miss the student binge-drinking culture from home. But this is in full knowledge of the fact that this time next year I will have fallen heavily back off the wagon, celebrating intoxication all the way. 

*(My roommate maintains that I subsequently kicked open the bedroom door, soliloquised at length about how much I missed The Graduate, and then proceeded to play Frank Sinatra songs while scrolling through photographs of him and weeping quietly: but I have no memory of this, and therefore consider it a fabrication.)