Hello Berkeley

My flight landed at two-thirty local time, on Thursday the 16^th of August.

Boarding the plane ten hours earlier, I walked past a wild-eyed man being detained by airport security, shouting “WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING HERE?”

As they reopened the aeroplane hold to throw his bags unceremoniously onto the runway tarmac, I decided not to mention to the officials how very similar my own thought processes were at that moment.

Two films and a nap later, the plane was coasting over San Francisco. I looked out over the bay, and realised that now this really was going to be home for a while. 

The Berkeley campus can only be described as a work of art: A vast, sprawling expanse of greenery and mismatched buildings, spanning eras from the 1800s to the present day. My accommodation halls are a cross between a colonial Italian villa, and a mediaeval castle. My room on the seventh floor has a slightly claustrophobic view of the rearing Memorial Stadium, which is still (very noisily) under construction. From the window in the common room, Berkeley spreads beneath me down to the bay and San Francisco rears in the distance, the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate vanishing into the fog rolling off the mountains. On the first night I sat by the window at four in the morning, staring out at the lights of the city, wishing firstly that I could share the view with someone and secondly that my brain would stop bouncing off the inside of my skull. 

The past four days has been little more than a whirl of administration. I have been officially checked in as a student of the University of California, and legally belong in the country. I have all the necessary documents for legal residence, and a working debit card. After a good eight years of resistance I have bought my first pair of genuine converse All-Stars, and have definitely fulfilled my ‘preppy’ quota of the week. For the past few days the campus has been filled with beautiful sorority girls, prowling in packs down Bancroft Way with armfuls of flyers, tossing their immaculate hair and lobbying the Fall ‘Rush’. I am simultaneously enthralled by and terrified of them. 

I toured the Doe Library, Berkeley’s hub for books and papers, a wealth of marble that seems far too grandiose to actually study in. To enter the building one passes under a bust of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and patron of learning, and the building itself is uncannily similar to the Venetian Library featured in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. One enormous hall sported the names of great authors and philosophers carved into the wood panelling around the room- Shakespeare, Dante, Galileo, Descartes… 

For the first time in a couple of years I find myself once again with a roommate: a fabulous Australian girl who answered my online profile with a dream of riding a unicycle. People have repeatedly confused us with each other, or decided we are simply the same person. We’ve had to put a note explaining that we are not a single entity on the door that opens into our ten squared feet of shared space; filled with an unusually tall bunk bed and two desks sat side by side, which are already exploding with books, papers and pieces of admin. Class hasn’t even begun yet.

I now find myself almost adjusted to the time zone, already catching the sunlight in my skin and hair, and raring to go with the next four months.