Wandering around Berkeley

I went to the Berkeley campus with my roommate & 3 other interns yesterday. The trip is a bit under an hour each way. The area surrounding campus has a smorgasbord of ethnic restaurants & a fair number of student-oriented stores, like a bike shop & a skateboard shop. The campus itself is massive (compared to UW) & set on the side of a hill, which meant we had an uphill climb to the other side.

Unlike UW, Berkeley has campus maps all over the place, which allowed us to plot a course that let us see most of the buildings without getting lost & having to revisit landmarks repeatedly. The campus is also very clean, which we attributed to the fact that they probably have enough money to hire a cleanup crew on a regular & frequent basis. We also noticed a surprising number of infants being carried around or pushed along on strollers; another departure from what we're used to at UW.

After our long climb up the hill, we arrived at the football stadium, where a game was in session against Santa Cruz, which is apparently the #3 ranked team in the state. We considered going in to watch the game but sticker shock convinced us otherwise. Instead, we sauntered through the frat district, where we saw hordes of drunken undergrads standing on the roofs & balconies taking to each other loudly. By this time we were in need of a little something so we consulted one of the omnipresent campus maps & headed over to the shopping district on Telegraph st.

Here we were confronted by a veritable bazaar, with aging hippies hawking all manners of trinkets, mostly handmade. There were also a few mainstream stores & eventually found an inviting pizza joint with a deck out front. The place made excellent calzones and even had a hippie sitting on the deck with his large dog. Every so often, he would sing along with the music, which never ceased to amuse us. Having stuffed ourselves silly, we decided it was time to leave as the sun was threatening to set & so we walked back to the car & drove home.