The travels before Berkeley

I left home, it was the 17th July I think. I was setting off for 3 weeks of solo travel, mostly, after tackling the 20hr flight to London. London was time with Annie - ballet friend of about 4-5 yrs, Latin dancer extraordinaire, a good friend, and one of the kindest people I've had the benefit of knowing. We shopped, and clubbed, and drank red wine and ate overpriced pasta, and took a dance class at Pineapple studios, grabbed the bargains at Portobello markets, sat in the 'must pay' seats in the park until we got kicked off, and took the late night bus back to her house in Surrey in the wee hours of the morning.

France was next. Lyon first. Then Nice. Lyon is old skool. Traditional. Friendly. Scary at night. Yummy pastry shops around every corner. Tapestry district. First films by the Lumiere brothers. Cheese with baguette. Fresh fruit and veg markets. Sock shopping because British Airways lost my luggage. Train to Nice. Over-touristy. Luggage still lost. Boulevard des Anglais. Beach entry fees. Themed beaches. Russian church, which closed just before I got there, yet the tour group on the bus were allowed through despite their arriving later. Nice Jazz festival, Simply 7 acoustic group, churros, standing on a tree to see, memorable night. Back to Lyon. Still no luggage. Fly to Rome.
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Italy = Contiki! Nick-named 'Piccola' by the hotel staff in Orvietto, meaning 'little' in Italian. It spread among the group and soon became synonymous with Patrice. So Rome, Orvieto, Sienna, Pisa, Florence and lots of little Tuscan villages in between. Clear beach, ball games, hot tanned Italian guys, pasta cooking, truffle hunting, clubbing, stain-glass churches and museums, 40 minute power shopping in Florence, the smell of leather in shops, those colour-coordinated Italian women with matching boots, bag, coat and hair dye. Fun with the group - Sarah, Laurel, Toni and many others.... let's not forget the group leader, Amadeus... and along with him come the girls who hopped from one Contiki to the next, unquestionably with the object of spending more time with him. Aw poor dears.

Greece for 2 weeks! 4 Islands! One person! A bunch of rude Greeks, good food, some bad food (poisoning), good tan, bad hotel room, good - no great - beaches, ancient ruins, museums, donkeys, hot springs, random kind Athenian tourists in Naxos who shared their day with me. So first stop was Athens. A couple of nights in the hostel there, then I checked by bag into storage and hit the islands with a backpack. Ferry to Mykonos from Pireaus port in Athens. A rough ride, and feeling a bit sick on arrival. I get there at 10pm at night with no place to stay. People are crowded around the port where the ferry docks when I arrive. Photos, laminated booklets, business cards, all in your face, talking, shouting, trying to get your business. 50 euro per night for a single person. So I end up asking 2 random girls if they wanted to share a room and split the cost. We do. They are Irene and Eraitz. We hit the town, ride on their scooter and eat fetta and salami for dinner on the balcony of the house we're staying at. I take a day trip to Delos - place of most sunlight, hot, ruins pirated to construct the Acropolis and other structures in Athens. A detailed history... but I can't remember it all... it's somewhere in my writitngs.

Next stop Naxos. Not so touristy. Do take a bus into Ano Mera, middle of nowhere. Do get lost in an olive grove looking for a Byzantine church and have to get a motorbike ride by a local back into the main town area. Spend a day with Athenian tourists, Nick and Zoe, searching for ancient temples and castles (which we find), spend some time at St Anna's beach?, get treated to a 4/5 course lunch complete with Ouzo (strong liquorice-tasting Greek liquor) and dropped off home at the end of the day. Lovely people. I recall swimming in the water just a couple of 100 metres from where the ferries and boats are docked in the main town area. It's as if people are walking down the street, decide they get hot, then jump off the side of the street into the water.

Santorini to follow. I thank my lucky stars for making it through the bus ride up the edge of the cliff from the port to the city. Psycho drivers, taking those corners ridiculously fast and ridiculously close to the edge. Santorini is picturesque. I see a sunset from Oia, with American girl Erin I meet on the day-trip. We glass-bottomed boated it to the small islands - the volcanic crater, the hot springs, take a donkey up one of the islands and decide to walk the way back down. We shared dinner (dolmathes, crisp bread and feta) on the side of a wall in Oia as we watched the famous sunset there. Turning around, I feel like I'm seated for a rock-concert. Swarms of people are doing the same as us. People standing, sitting, wherever they can to watch the light fall and fade below the horizon.

Corfu is my last island visit. Completely different from the ones before. Venetian influenced. Gorgeous buildings, despite their run-down appearance. I decided to food-poison myself here by eating feta cheese after it had been left out in the hot unairconditioned refrigeratorless room overnight. Mmm not good. Made it to Achillon Palace the next day nonetheless though. Love Sisi's furniture and the murals on the ceiling and painted belly of the stairwell. The Achilles statute in the backyard, also pretty impressive. Drank frappe on the walkway beside the spiniada, swam in the water, random walks around the city on the religious public holiday I arrived (which left me wondering why everything was so quiet, until I realised it was the Virgin Mary's day).

A couple of nights back in Athens, checking out Ammonia and the Benaki museum - where you could spend days and still not cover it all. Flew out to Frankfurt, to change planes before hitting the US! Excitement to hit Berkeley at last after weeks of full days of walking, scarce showers, eating on the go and constantly changing surroundings. I loved it, but it was nice to have a place to call home for a while. I met my suite mates at Foothill and they were so nice, setting me up with everything including sheets and 'comforter' (read: doona) for as longs as I needed until I could hit a Target. Classes started. I made the treck down the hill in the morning, listening to the likes of Creed and Sting, then made the thigh-building climb back up the hill in the afternoons. Late mornings were consumed by sleeping on Memorial Glade - a big green grassy patch near the Doe Library, which attracted a great morning sun - or reading/sleeping in the old fashioned Reading Room in Doe. I loved ancient philosophy seminars. I was always late to my 8am Case Studies in Economic Development. And sometimes I slept in it. Other times I slept through it and never got there. Overeating in the buffet style dining commons and swiping in cards to register use of meal points we had been allocated. Hitting the frats with Marion and Nairi. Seeing the red cups, and the disgusting toilets and kitchens. Clubbing in San Francisco. Nights out with Sean, Neil and Nat - the aussie exchange students. These were some of the memories of semester 1, Fall semester, at Berkeley

The Year that Berkeley Stole My Heart

So, I'm sitting at Cafe Strada, renowned Bancroft coffee and free WiFi hot spot. It's 19th June 2008 and I'm due to fly back to Australia tonight. I've just spend 1 amazing year away, traveling Europe and the states, learning great things in my classes and meeting beautiful people. Why do I decide to start a blog just now?! - too busy having too much fun and seeing too many things to have done it earlier perhaps. No.. I'm just lazy and backwards!

I don't know where to start! I'm really going to miss this place. Its tree people, the smell of weed as you walk through that's a pungent as toilet freshner, the hippie tie-dyed tops lining Telegraph avenue, People's Park where the homeless are welcome, the politically minded voicing their opinions by Sather Gate, the organic food stand run by the students.. and then there's my room-mates, my dance team, my class-mates, my teachers and GSIs, and those random Berkeley personalities that are always in the same spot doing the same thing - the guy playing chess and guitar outside Dwinelle Hall, the polite and well-wishing homeless man outside Subway, the 'Everybody's Happy' man standing on his upturned box with a board covered in small-print propaganda.

I've met some amazing people here. Kind and generous, curious and ever-seeking knowledge, aware and motivated, ambitious, optimistic, and pessimistic, frustrated and wanting change, wanting to make change, party-loving, fun-loving, people-loving, music-loving, dancing-loving!

And I've visited some amazing places. Before I arrived in Berkeley I spend a month traveling through London, Lyon and Nice in France, Tuscany on a Contiki, then Athens, Mykonos, Naxos, Santorini and Corfu in Greece. Over the Winter break here I spend Christmas with Nairi, my suite-mate from Foothill, in LA. I spent New Years in New York with Vanessa, a high school friend from Adelaide, and Connie, a girl from Austria she studied with on exchange in Calgary, Canada. A week in Boston saw me visiting family I'd never met, and others I didn't know I had! Semester 2 (Spring) came and went, just as did the first. Always too fast. I returned from a 24 day road trip through the mid-West states 2 days ago. Truly a fantastic experience. We hit Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota. Our group composition changed about 6 times, a total of 11 people including myself were road-tripping with us at one point or another. I'll always remember these weeks... because I've written them, captured them on film and because I'll always have those other people to remind me of everything my terrible memory will forget!

Enough talk for now. A picture can say a thousand words. So I'll upload a few thousand pictures and hopefully that will give you a better indication of what I've been up to since I left Oz last year, than my babble ever will be able to convey!