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!
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