On Wednesday, while I still had the rental car, I tried to knock off as many things on my 'to-do' list as possible. The first task was to pick up a 'Markus' IKEA chair that I bought second hand from Craigslist for half the price it cost new. This is the same chair I have at home, although sadly in black instead of orange. Following this, I went to set up my bank account, pick up a student card and get myself a local sim card.
Setting up the bank account with Citi was, luckily, painless - I've heard stories of my peers being asked to keep a minimum monthly balance of $1,500 in their accounts which is absolutely absurd.
I also found it amazing that there is a whole office on campus whose sole purpose is just to administer student cards, but looking at the statistics on Wikipedia, I see that UC Berkeley has approximately double the number of students that Cambridge had (at 36,000). There are apparently larger universities around, my flatmate Natalie mentioned that the University of Florida has 50,000 odd students. That sort of scale is unbelievable.
Soon after, I had bought a local sim card on a MVNO called Ultra Mobile. This gave me a fantastic feeling of mobility. While OsmAnd+ is fantastic, Google Maps provides a much slicker navigation app and this really helped me out. The network in the Bay Area seems considerably quicker than back home too and pages load faster. (Ultra Mobile uses T-Mobile's network which supposedly has poor coverage in the area. I haven't found it a problem at all yet though.) Ultra Mobile also includes $20 worth of international calling credit each month which has proven very useful - I can call home at just 5c a minute.
Sadly I then had to return to IKEA for a third time to pick up curtains and a curtain rail. I later went back a fourth time to change the curtain rail for thinner rail that actually fit the hooks in my room. I also stopped at Trader Joes to pick up an inital lot of groceries (while I had the car) and Wholefoods to pick up cleaning materials and shampoo.
The groceries are sold in much larger packs here than in Europe. On average, at least at these two shops, they're more costly than at the places we usually shop at back home. You do, however, get larger quantities of everything, so perhaps it's not actually much more expensive. It's also probably not fair to compare these to normal supermarkets but more to, say, M&S and Waitrose. Food also lasts longer in my fridge. It's unclear whether this is because of the sheer size of the fridge or because of all the preservatives used in the food.
In the end, I was able to buy 32 ounces of shampoo for $6 (admittedly the most budget shampoo they sold) - this should be enough to last me until graduation... Another thing I learnt though was that when they sell shampoo as 'odour-free' here, it actually means it smells like cigarette ash when wet (but is hopefully odour-free when dry). I'll see how this affects my romantic prospects!
The groceries on the whole are quite exciting. Generally American supermarkets seem to be quite heavily filled with sweet and sugary food but they do also offer many of the products I love - which are considered niche back home. For instance, a good friend of mine introduced to an Eastern European drink called 'kefir', a fermented yoghurt drink. This is normally only found in Polish shops back home but is available in several supermarkets here. I also drink a considerable amount of almond milk - primarily for the taste. This has only just been introduced back home but is available in multiple brands and flavours here. Finally, the cottage cheese is as good as the cottage cheese you can buy in Switzerland which, up until now, was the best I'd tried. (Oh, there's also SO MUCH tofu available.)
After the fourth trip to IKEA, I returned the car to Hertz, carrying my fixie in the back. I had to fill the car up with fuel (or 'gas') before returning it. This was a hilarious exercise involving two trips to the cashier since, by this point, Halifax had blocked my credit card. Apparently buying furniture in America is considerably more suspicious than buying pizza in Italy, as I had done just a few weeks ago.
It was unclear whether, when asking for $20 of gas, I'd get any money back if the final amount came to less than $20. The cashier was terribly confused too and so I decided to pay for fuel in $10 chunks so as to minimise any potential downside. When, after the first $10, the gas tank still wasn't showing full, I went back again with another $10 and thankfully managed to fill the tank and get a refund for the $1.88 that was unused. Thus continued the slow journey towards naturalisation.
I cycled back to the flat without a problem, struggling up the final hill. The campus is built on a hill and this makes it nearly all downhill in the morning and almost entirely uphill on the return journey. It's particularly hard work on my fixie with an 18 tooth cog which is perfectly suited for flat roads but less so for steep hills! It requires basically spinning at 100% effort just to keep moving else there's a risk of falling off or veering into a parked car (as I've done once already). By the time I reach home my shirt is usually soaked with sweat. I'm hoping this will get easier with time.
I met my second flatmate that evening, Natalie, who recently finished a spell working for the Peace Corps in Panama. I plugged my Cowon into Ryan's set of Logitech speakers and spent the rest of the evening unpacking and using the replacement screwdriver I picked up to finish off the bed.
Continued.
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