Blanc...Abroad

massive update; better late than never

Dear family and friends,

As always, I have to start off by apologizing for being so long between updates on my life abroad, but I happen to have a decent amount of free time at the moment and hope that you all with bare with me while I give you a full description of the travels, mishaps and adventures that I have had since my last email. I’m not exactly sure when I last wrote you all, but it was probably around New Year’s, so let’s start from just after the “reveillon.”

Germany, a week of -21 degrees and the return of affordable prices:

Besides a few ski trips up to the Alps, my only trip outside of Lyon during my month-long winter break was when I took a week to travel and see one of my best friends from UCSD in Germany. Morgan was finishing up the tail-end of a semester in Gottingen, Germany in the north and although she warned me that there wasn’t much to do in the town for two days, let alone two weeks, I found a relatively cheap ticket on Lufthansa and headed out. I flew to Frankfurt then caught the ICE high speed rail train to Gottingen. For a week I hung out with Morgan and her other UC friends and explored the small, quaint city of Gottingen. After my first morning there we had already done the historic and scenic tour of the city which consisted of a few statues and a memorial to a synagogue that had been burned down in 1938 (apparently Gottingen had the highest concentration of Nazis in the country and still to this day has no Jewish place of gathering or worship). The rest of the week was spent catching up with a person who knows me better than most people in the world, and having that connection again made me realize just how much my year abroad has been a blank slate. Morgan knows everything about me and can interpret my life situations correctly and in the blink of an eye, while everybody back in France has no preconceptions about me but also no idea who I was before I went abroad. From either angle it is great, but reconnecting with my roots and spending a week feeling like my old, comfortable self was very refreshing. Another thing that I really noticed was how much cheaper everything in Germany is than in France. This is probably the first time that my mom is hearing this, but I actually brought a grocery bag full of food back with me to Frankfurt then on the plane to France filled with staples that either a) don’t exist in France or b) would cost me a month’s rent. Note: I did, however, get a bottle of Tapatio hot sauce that Morgan had brought me back from the States confiscated by the German customs agents; Europeans really don’t like their food spicy…

An ideal weekend of snow, foreigners and jeigerwine:

I don’t know how many of you have seen the movie “L’auberge espagnole” but I spent three days up in the French Alps just above Grenoble living out the script of the movie. I went up for a ski trip with my university that was a perfect mix of French and foreign kids enjoying some of the best powder that I have ever had in my life. Although there were seven other students from California on the trip (all of whom I like a lot), I chose not to room with them in order to meet as many new people as I could. My apartment was made up of me, a Frenchy, two Germans, an Austrian and a Swede. For three whole days we skied all day together with a handful of our other French friends, drank spiked tea and cooked huge meals. I have been pretty good all year about going out of my way not to hang out with the other Americans and to participate in activities that will get me interacting with as many new people as possible, but it wasn’t until I lived three straight days with such an eclectic group speaking almost nothing but French that I really felt at home with actually living in a foreign country. Our apartment got along so well that two nights after getting back to Lyon we had a “reunion party,” which consisted of everybody sipping delicious French wine and sitting around a table with two crepe grills going and everybody putting on whatever ingredients they wanted (nothing, and I mean nothing, quite hits the spot on a cold night like a fresh-off-the-grill hot crepe filled with warm Nutella!) I have since hung out with a few of the people from my group and am very certain that it will continue throughout the year. These guys are the same type of adventurer I am and I can tell that they are equally thankful for this incredible opportunity we have this year and want to take advantage of it as much as possible. I’ve learned that while traveling around Europe is great and seeing all this famous historical sights will stay with me forever, that’s not the goal. At the beginning of the year I could tell that I was itching to travel as much as possible, which is fine, but I was doing it more for the experience of traveling rather than the experience of where I was traveling to. It will be weird coming back to the States and feeling a little more sedentary and unable to travel, but this ski weekend really helped show me that you don’t need to hop on a flight or a train to travel, you just need to have the right mindset and the willingness to surround yourself with the same type of people. And sorry to get a little pensive, but we all had discussed our years abroad so much that weekend that I couldn’t help talk about it a bit.

London: of pints and blizzards

One of the greatest things in my life right now is that I only have classes on Wednesday and Thursday for the entire second semester, meaning that I have a gorgeous five-day weekend every week. This, of course, means that when my friend who is studying theatre in London for the year emailed me a few weeks ago saying that she was a little homesick and wondered if I could come visit, all I had to do was find a cheap flight from Lyon to London and voila, a five day trip to the UK! I had never been to England before so I was very excited to see how true the stereotypes of bad oral hygiene and fish and chips were, but mostly I was excited to see what it was going to be like being in an English-speaking country again. Up to this point I have lived in France, and traveled through Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Corsica (technically France but where they spoke enough Italian to be worth its own notation) and in all of those places I either relied on my own foreign language skills or my German-speaking friends to translate. You get very used to going around Europe in your own little world, to walking up and down streets concentrating only on what you choose to. But, the very first thing that I noticed after getting off the express train from Gatwick at Victoria Station was that I had no privacy anymore, because everybody around me understood what I was saying. All of a sudden, and for the first time in six months, I could overhear every single conversation around me without having to translate it in my head and I knew that I could no longer speak in American slang to avoid being overheard knowing that there was a very good chance everyone around me knew what I was saying. Besides the shock of hearing English everywhere, the weirdest thing was seeing signs and advertisements in English. When I first saw so many ads, my instinct was to translate them into English, or to try and read the words as if they were French, which obviously didn’t work. And speaking to strangers to order food, ask directions or purchase train tickets was actually hard for me at first, because I am way too used to approaching strangers while speaking another language, and saying “excuse me, sir, where can I purchase tickets to Paddington Station?” came out extremely forced and awkward-sounding.

Once I got over the culture shock of returning to something very close to my own culture I found myself in possibly the most diverse city that I have ever been in (sorry San Francisco, but London is probably more multi-ethnic then you are). For those of you who know me well, diversity to me mostly means new food to chow down on! Don’t get me wrong, I am in love with French cuisine, but my newly adopted land of baguettes and brie doesn’t exactly do grab-and-go, easy food as I am used to back home. The streets of London welcomed me with endless sandwich shops, pizza parlors, burger joints, authentic Asian eateries and as I would discover late Saturday night, chili cheese fries and vanilla milkshakes. I understand that this style of eating is an import from our oh-so-glorious American imperialism, and that I should be grateful that France has, for the most part, avoided it, but there was something extremely calming being back in my original gastronomic stomping grounds. Enough about the food, let me tell you about my actual visit.

We spent the majority of our weekend walking around exploring the city on foot trying to see as many spots as we could without seeming too touristy. My friend has drama classes from nine to five Monday through Friday, so while she has been in London for half a year now, she hasn’t had enough time to master the city, meaning that she was just as eager to explore as I was. We spent our days up and down Camden, all throughout the West End, on Portabella Market, in front of Parliament Building and Buckingham Palace and through every nook and cranny of SoHo and China Town. Even though I by no means saw the whole, massive city in only five days, I feel like I got a good enough feel for the city to understand it a bit. Lucky for me, Sunday happened to be the Chinese New Year’s parade which let me see a huge showing of culture diversity that doesn’t exist in the same way in France (plus, I treated myself to a delicious lunch of hot and sour soup and an incredible platter of black bean chicken). I was also lucky enough to spend a night with a British friend of mine who was an exchange student at San Diego last year, and he showed some incredible off-the-map parts of London, i.e. the coolest local pubs that I have ever been to. Besides getting the insider’s tour of London, I got to stay with him and his family’s house reminded me of my own so much that when I woke up Sunday morning I briefly thought that I was home. The Victorian style of skinny, long structures, the facades and the layout of the living room calmed me very much and if I closed my eyes I almost could believe that I was back at 4089 25^th street with my family. Four months from now I won’t have to pretend, weird.

It was damn cold in London the whole time I was there, but it wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that it really started to freeze and London was hit by the worst snow storm of the past 20 years. At night we all went outside and had snowball fights and built snowmen but by the next morning the snow had gotten so bad that all busses in the entire city were shut down and most businesses closed their doors. I heard a figure that England as a whole lost just over a billion pounds in revenue for the one day, but for those tourists amongst us, it meant a London winter wonderland of exploring the cities and seeing all of the landmarks and beautiful parks under a foot and a half of snow. The only downside of this was that the markings on the ground on intersections reminding me to look left or to look right to see the opposite direction of traffic was snowed over, meaning that on more than a few occasions I stepped off of a curb only to be honked back by some wrong-side-driving, fish-and-chips eating British tyrant who, to me, seemed hell-bent on revenging the loss of 1786 by running over a very confused Yank. Granted, as I am writing this I am still in London, and my flight is scheduled to leave tonight, so there is still a chance that I am stuck in London for a few more days, but let’s cross our fingers because for as much as I travel, I do have class that I have to get to and work that has to be done.

An education worth fighting for:

The reputation of France as a politicized, active country isn’t a myth. Maybe at the beginning of the year I became a little disillusioned by the labor politics in France after witnessing a handful of confusing, one-day transit strikes, thinking that the luster of 1968 had worn off and that the strike no longer held the same importance for the country. But in the last two months I have been working very closely with our political youth group and have been helping organize my university to prepare for the wave of student, professor and professional strikes that have been taking place the past week. The day before I left for London there was a nation-wide, inter-professional strike that saw millions across the country take to the streets in a peaceful showing of worker and student solidarity to demand from the government the basic standard of living that every single person deserves.

The idea of participating in demonstrations isn’t new to me, let’s be honest here, I’m from San Francisco, but what really touches me is the way that the country mobilizes with such force and determination. Comparatively, French workers have better social services available to them, and relative to the astronomical tuition fees for American students, French university students are charged peanuts, but that doesn’t stop them from fighting even harder. I have only been in France for six months, so I can’t even start to try and understand the mentality that drives the French to stand up so fervently for what they know they deserve while my native country stands relatively idly by while social security gets robbed, health care becomes nothing more than an overpriced and privatized bandaid on a gushing wound and public education is beyond underfunded and co-opted to the demigods of standardized testing.

The students at my university are up in arms because tuition fees have risen about 200 euro to just under 2000 euro, or the equivalent of half a course at a public university back in the States. These students have every right to make these demands, but why is it that they understand the inalienable right to an affordable and quality education while students at my own UC San Diego campus could barely be bothered to sign petitions to keep our campus from being carved up into “free speech zones” last spring? I know that the histories of our two countries are very different, but that is no excuse. The world right now is a disaster, plain and simple. And if the adults and ruling bodies who will leave this mess to us aren’t willing to do everything it takes at fix it before they hand over the reins, then the charge falls to us to bring about a better world, and that starts with assuring that every single member of society has access to a quality education so that hopefully we can learn enough to not make the same mistakes that we are currently faced with. There is still a long way to go for us to get to that point, but marching on the streets of Lyon singing songs for peace and solidarity with mobilized French students gives me hope that change can actually happen. Obviously I’m not living in the States right now and can’t relate to the situation back home, but I am so much more motivated knowing that in France people are being proactive at this moment to demand that governments answer to the needs of the people, the workers, the elderly and, of course, the students.

So there it is: a nice little summary of the past month of my life. I thank you for reading this far into it. It means a lot to me that you all care enough about me to join me on my adventures via these emails. I hope to write again in a month after a February that will see me in 10 different countries! Until then, all of my love and best wishes,

Jake

First Abroad Column

Here is the copy, along with the link, to my first abroad column for the UCSD Guardian, my home newspaper:

I had never been to Lyon before, but as soon as I arrived it was immediately clear why every person I consulted while choosing a city in which to study suggested Lyon without hesitation. My landlord met me at the train station, and after we dropped off my bags at his house, he and his wife gave me a tour of France’s second city.

Knowing that Lyon is home to just under a half-million people, I was confused when we turned up the street to grab the tramway rather than driving. I soon discovered that Lyon might be the least imposing metropolis in the world.

Lyon’s city center is an area of plazas and 18th-century buildings on the Presq’île (almost island) that stands between two gorgeous rivers running north-to-south through the city. We visited the closest thing to a skyscraper Lyon has and the sprawling hillside above Old Lyon, which, on a clear day has a view all the way to the French Alps.

Walking back down the hill into Old Lyon, I was treated to an experience few other history majors at UCSD get to try for themselves — a journey through the trabouls of Lyon. These underground tunnels originally served as passageways for the city’s famous silk industry, but during World War II they became the center of the resistance movement against Nazi Germany.

I have traveled to many historic landmarks in Europe, but going through the trabouls and knowing they were a part of my new home — and not just a stop on a family vacation — brought the history to life and allowed me to connect with Lyon on a completely new level.

We spent the whole day walking around Lyon and although I saw plenty of parked cars, I was never once apprehensive about being a pedestrian. In Lyon, instead of having to deal with crazed French drivers, the city’s main transport problem is periodic bicycle shortages. About 10 years ago the city started a huge project, which has now been replicated throughout France, to provide a system of free bicycles to all its citizens. I haven’t walked three blocks without seeing a long line of red bikes docked and waiting for a local Lyonnais to take one for a spin up the banks of the Rhône and through the gardens in the Parc de la Tête d’Or.

To have access to the Velov system you must be a tax-paying resident of Lyon, and since I only just signed the contract for my apartment, I’ll have to wait before I can start exploring the city on two wheels. It’s obvious how French people stay so much fitter than we do; they live such an active lifestyle.

The overall health of French people also gets a big boost from their mentality on eating, which is all about quality over quantity. In Lyon there is enough quality food to keep me happy for a thousand lifetimes. I am beyond lucky to be living in the gastronomic capital of Europe — it’s just a shame that I can’t afford any of it.

One of these days I’ll starve myself for a bit, save up some euros and treat myself to a few Lyonnais delicacies, which are known to be some of the best dishes in the world. And until then, daily tomato and cheese sandwiches on the best bread in the world will keep me more than happy.

Considering that my diet this year will consist of pasta and stir-fry, it’s great that I found an incredibly cheap produce store just around the corner from my apartment to get tasty fruits and veggies to spice up my otherwise bland dishes. Oh, and even cheap bottles of wine here are actually legitimately good.

When I was in middle school I spent three weeks touring France with my family, so I vaguely remember that the country, the people and the culture wasn’t radically different from what I was used to back home. Even with that obvious knowledge, part of me still hoped that somehow the place where I was going to spend my junior year abroad would be entirely different from anything that I had ever seen.

That part of me was disappointed when I remembered France isn’t exactly remote. The cars here are more economical than in the United States, the currency much stronger and I’ve been told that even the food at the French McDonald’s tastes better.

While walking through certain French neighborhoods, I could have sworn I was in New York’s SoHo or San Francisco’s North Beach . Even the average Frenchman seems to know more about American politics than most of my compatriots back home.

Life here is definitely similar to the States, as I’m sure it is in all first-world countries. But in my first month in France, I found so many little differences that added up way too quickly and before I knew it I was experiencing a new obstacle daily, regardless of how familiar my new surroundings might have been. Some challenges have been more blatant, and thus easier to handle, like ending up 30 minutes away from the correct metro stop because at the time “Gare de Venise” sounded exactly like “Gare de Vennisieux.” Others have been far subtler; these challenges will be the ones that will give me the opportunity to grow and step outside my California-grown bubble.

I can only hope that this year will keep getting better and prove to be a life-changing experience. For that to happen, I need to continue having the right mindset of que sera, sera: whatever happens, happens. I need to have enough confidence in myself to make as many mistakes as it takes for me to improve. Of course, a little more outstanding French food and a few bottles of fine wine sure won’t hurt.

Summary of France so far

got into Paris on August 6th (wow, that seems like such a long time ago at this point) after a day of traveling that included three flights with lay-overs in North Carolina and Philadelphia that lasted a combined 14 hours. I spent my first 5 days hanging out in Paris with my friend Ben at his house. His parents were on vacation so it was just me and Ben with all of Paris at our dispossal. We spent most of our days walking around Paris and exploring the side streets and random parks. For a native Parisian, I was surprised that Ben had never been to some of the random places we stumbled upon, but that turned out to be a good thing since it was just as exciting for him as it was for me. We also took the TGV down to Marseille for four days and spent most of our time there reading on the gorgeous beaches of the riviera. We stayed at the youth hostel there, and aside from it being located on the highest point on Marseille, it was an awesome experience meeting so many foreigners and exploring the city with them, as well.

After being back in Paris for a few days, I had the pleasure of seeing some of my best friends from UCSD who were in Paris, too. My friend Lara was on her way back from spending the summer in Beirut, Lebanon and our other friend Cody is in San Sebastian, Spain for the semester and took a flight up to Paris to stay with me at Ben’s house for three days. It was the perfect way to prepare for a year away from home to hang out with two of my besties in such a wonderful setting. It really helped me get fully mentally prepared to not see friends and family for basically a year. Well, I guess that’s not fully true, I’m actually going to see my family quite a bit when they visit me and I have a huge networks of American friends who are studying in Europe this year, but seeing Lara and Cody was incredible and a fun way to end my summer.

The move down to Lyon was a little more complicated, but just as exciting. For the first week and a half in Lyon, all of the UC kids were housed in the Centre International de Séjour, some residences that were pretty much out in the boonies of Lyon. It was cool meeting so many of the other UC kids (all UC’s are represented in our program, but the majority are from UC Santa Barbara or UCLA), but it took a while to get from our housing to the center city for classes/meetings/anything, and we were also sans accés à a kitchen, which meant we were eating nothing but baguettes and kebabs (no real complaints, just that it gets expensive and boring eating that three meals a day). That first week was taken up mostly by orientation meetings and tours of the city.

And before I go any further into what I’m doing here, let me take the time to adequately describe Lyon. It might be the most beautiful city that I have ever been to. And for a native San Franciscan to say that means a lot. It has a population of about 400,000 people and it never takes longer than 30 minutes to walk from any one corner to another. There are two rivers that run through the middle of the city and in the past few years the local government has put millions of dollars into making the walkways along the rivers the most popular destinations of the city. There are parks, fountains, skate parks and gardins all along “les berges” and on a nice day, the whole city turns out to enjoy them, but the riverway is so spread out that it never feels too crowded. And then there are the many plazas and old cathedrals that are everyway in the “presq’île” and Old Lyon nestled along the hills (that actually served as some of the main resistance points to the Nazi regime during WWII.

I was lucky enough to get my housing set eariler in the summer, but all but about 5 of us in the program of almost 50 UC students had not figured out their housing situations before getting to Lyon, so the majority of our first week here was put aside for everybody to scour different housing websites, make rendez-vous to meet landlords and hopefully find a place, which at this point all but two students have successfully done. My apartment is about a 5 minute walk from the main train station, which has been incredible for being able to get to anywhere in the city real quickly. It is just me and my roommate, Yetem, in an appartment that I believe is 48 square meters. The entire place is beyond fully equipped, from beds, to couches, to every single possible kitchen utensil and dish to a TV and DVD player to cleaning supplies and stereo equipment. I am in the converted living room which is a bit annoying that I need to move my bed back into sofa position if we have people over, but for the most part I can keep it as is and there is no problem. Yetem’s room is on the other side of the apartment, so there is no noise problem and it really looks like it should be the perfect housing situation. Yetem and I get along incredibly well. He is from Ethiopia but has studied in Lyon for the past two years at the engineering university and speaks perfect French, English and Ethiopian. We have been only speaking in French, but it is good to know that if I really need to be able to say something, I can. Since he knows the city so well he has been able to take me out and show me around, all while introducing me to his friends and showing me the great, local spots of Lyon.

I am in the secind week of a two-week orientation course called the Intensive Language Program, which is basically a refresher course in French to get us ready for taking classes at the French universities with all of the other French students. It has been helpful, but still nothing compared to living with Yetem and hanging out and speaking with French people. Real classes start next week, and I cannot wait. I will be studying at the Institute d’Etudes Politiques (Science-Po), which has its campus right along the Rhone river. We had our orientation meeting with all of the other international students today and it was great to meet so many other students from all over the world and to learn about the social and athletic clubs that we can join. L’IEP is a very prestigious university that has only 1,600 students and really small class sizes, so for a student used to the huge, public universities of the UC system, this should be an amazing experience. We were given the list of available classes, so I know what is being offered, but I will not know exactly what I’m taking for a few more weeks. Apparently in France, unlike the states, you go to all interesting classes for the first few weeks then you decide which ones you actually want to take and sign up for them then. The L’IEP in Lyon is especially known for its Arab studies department, so aside from my normal European history classes I hope to take some more interesting classes and branch out towards other areas of studies, as well.

My next post will include my final schedule of classes!!!

Arrival (even if posted 2 weeks late...)

8 August 2008

After many years of daydreaming and months of hard work and planning, I am finally in France. To get to the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris I first had to take the red-eye flight from San Francisco to Charlotte, North Carolina where I had a 10-hour layover before hoping on a quick flight to Philadelphia where I finally boarded a plane to jump the pond. It was a combination of my excitement for heading off to France and the bizarre flight schedules that led to me sleeping for a grand total of zero hours throughout the entire 24-hour travel ordeal. So naturally, when I showed up in Paris on Wednesday morning, my first thoughts were not to go catch up on sleep but to get a jump-start on my French adventures.

I met up with Ben at the local then we dropped off my bags at his house in Montreuil where I took a long-overdue shower and had some lunch. I turned down Ben’s proposal of resting up in order to take the metro into town to explore the city. We went first to Pere LaChaise cemetery and spent a few hours walking around there, visiting the many famous gravesites and historical landmarks. Then we walked down to the Place de la Bastille and along the river. Ben had to go back to the local for a meeting, so we agreed to meet up four hours later to get some dinner with his friends before heading off to a movie, and we parted ways.

I have been to Paris before, but do not remember all that much from my previous trips, but having taken a class on the history of Paris in the spring, I was eager to visit the places that I had just learned about, and with four hours to kill on my own in a foreign city, that seemed like a perfect plan. I walked along the Seine, trying to stay on the South Bank to keep in the shadows to avoid the blistering Parisian sun. Despite the heat I was thrilled to spend the afternoon and early evening walking from Notre Dame on the Ile de la Cite to the Pont Neuf, and along Rue de Rivoli towards the national gallery and the Louvre. I ended at the Tuillieres gardens where I picked a comfy-looking bench to write in my journal and take a quality, hour-long cieste.

That night Ben and I went out with his friends to eat, and I bought just about the only thing on the menu that I could afford, un sandwich grec avec frites, basically a lamb pita with fries, which was actually really good and for 5 euro, really filling. We all then went to the outdoor film festival where they watched an old French movie and I picked up where I left off in the gardens and took another lovely nap.

The next day I slept in until 2:30 in the afternoon (beyond a rarity for me), and went with Ben to play a game of soccer with his friends (or fut as I while call it for the next year. It was really fun and I actually was able to play decently, balancing a few horrible mistakes with the occasional quality touch or pass. All of the people that we played with were extremely nice and didn’t seem to mind at all playing with an American who occasionally butchered their beloved sport.

With only two days of France under my belt I feel very confident and optimistic about the year ahead of me. Right now my language skills are adequate; I can hold a conversation for as long as I wish with Ben, but I find myself using the same type of vocabulary and often repeating myself grammatically. It is a bit frustrating not being able to communicate perfectly, but I know that as long as I work really hard to improve myself and am never afraid to be social and make mistakes in speaking that I should have no problems in the long run.  I have been studying from my French grammar books and reading a children’s book on the history of France that Ben leant me, and I plan on being very diligent about taking my French studies very seriously. I can already tell that in only two days I am feeling more comfortable speaking and have already picked up new words and phrases.

We are going to Marseille at the beginning of next week for a few days of relaxing on the beach; life is very tough for me, I know. I will post another entry when we return, so until then!

Two weeks left

With less than two weeks to go before I hop on my flight to France the magnitude of what I am about to undertake is starting to set in. Of course I have my worried about not being able to speak French quite as well as I would like to and about budgeting enough money to last me the year, but more than being nervous about leaving I could not be more excited about what lays ahead.

Later this week I will actually run a “practice pack” to see if all my clothes can fit in the kelty backpacking pack I plan on bringing. Besides that, I have a few random items to buy but am pretty sure that I have gotten all of my financial/medical/random necessities in order. That only leaves saying all of my goodbyes and getting mentally prepared for the year ahead of me. This has been a very trying and maturing summer, which in the long run is probably a good thing to have had to endure before leaving home for a year to live in a foreign country with older people in my apartment without returning to the US for the whole year.

Time until departure: 13 days

Summer is finally here

As my first ever blog entry, and as somebody who has not really gotten much sleep for the past three weeks, I must first apologize for the unstructured writing and wandering ideas that follow:

After making a quick, 14-hour stop back home in San Francisco a week and a half ago I am preparing to finally get back to the city and let summer get under way. After finishing my last final of spring quarter, I packed up my apartment and drove back up home with just enough time to unload everything, do a load of laundry and get a few hours of sleep before waking up at the ass-crack of dawn to catch a flight to New York.

Why New York? I had won a scholarship to participate in the GIlder Lehrman History Scholars Finalist program. It ended up being one of the best weeks of my life, and I met some truly amazing kids there. We spent all day studying the American Revolution and got to travel all around the city along with meeting and getting the opportuinity to talk to some of the top American history scholars around. As a UC-student, I had never really been able to interact with kids from outside of California, so this program, with its 46 other students from all over the US really was a new experience for me. Let’s just say that the night life of New York was more than enough incentive to want to return to NYC for graduate school; the academics are a pretty sweet icing, though.

I am in Philadelphia right now spending some time with my mom and grandpa and will hop on a flight back to my beautiful city by the bay tomorrow night with only about five weeks to enjoy it before starting my abroad experience. Blogging seems fun, although I can’t shake the feeling that I am a narrator in a movie, simply describing what I already know has happened. Now if only I could get Morgan Freeman’s voice to narrate what I write to the occasional person who accidentally sumbles across my blog…