A look back...my first week in the States.

As promised, I wanted to actually recall the events of my first week in Berkeley. Sadly, I left my camera in Durham during that week, so there are no pictures to accompany this post.

After the wonderful dinner and time spent catching up with my cousins, I slept rather soundly in my cousin J's bed (without the dog the first night ... it took me a few to crack). After all the travel and the workshop, I was pretty exhausted, so I slept rather soundly under the amazingly warm comforter through the amazingly cold Berkeley night. The next morning I roused early with the family, watched everyone eat breakfast, flip through the paper, shower and head off to school and work before making my way to campus for a meeting my Ph.D. advisor and a former post-doc at Berkeley who was in town for the workshop to discuss a project we want to work on involving quasilinear Schroedinger equations.

My cousins have completely remodeled their kitchen and added a brand new downstairs bathroom with a somewhat psychedelic sea shell like tile in the shower and the most amazing shower head in history. Needless to say, I was exceptionally clean by the time I forced myself out of the warm shower and onward up the hill to campus I had climbed so many times before as a graduate student. Due partially to all the walking I have done the last two years and partially to the cool weather, the climb did not leave me nearly as sweaty as it used to, so I was in a pleasant mood when I arrived at campus.

Most of my mornings were essentially identical to this, with the addition of getting up early enough and taking the dog for a walk so there would be no trace of evidence he had slept with me the previous night. The talks in the mornings were rather productive, lunch with the group always enjoyable, in the afternoons I got some other projects out the door, the evenings I had dinner and/or beer with my cousins or other old friends/colleagues, some of whom were soon to graduate and one who had just gotten engaged. All told, it was a hectic and enjoyable week full of math during the day and catching up with a little math once in a while in the evenings.

Two events though stand out. The first was Wednesday night when I went with a couple grad students and another post-doc to have a traditional Ukrainian dinner at a friend's house. Unfortunately, my friend M was out of town, but his wife N made quite a spread with homemade Borscht and potato dumplings. The whole meal was delicious and the company became even more enjoyable as the wine and ice cold vodka disappeared. It is my goal to along with the honorary Cretan citizenship I have been granted to one day get honorary Ukrainian citizenship, so hopefully this dinner added to my chances.

The next night was the last one I had in Berkeley. Because my young cousins had been busy all week with school and swimming, we worked out that I could dodge out of work by around 3 PM to pick them up by around 3:30 PM or so after school and take them to the California Academy of Science since we all wanted to see it.

First of all, it was the first day all week it actually rained, and it did so with vigor. As a caveat, I had been ridiculed all week by my colleagues and dealt with hassles at airports in order to carry a rather decent umbrella because the weather report had predicted rain during the week of my visit. Let's just say I was vindicated by that storm.

I met my somewhat drenched cousins outside the school and we headed into San Francisco. Along the way, we talked about their days and the kinds of things we hoped to see at the museum, but mostly it was a rather easy drive that took us right to the museum, where we arrived at 4:15 PM. It was rather clear on the web-site that the museum closed at 5 PM, so we thought we had a good shot at sprinting through to at least get a feel for the exhibits. However, the web-site had failed to mention that it was impossible to enter the museum after 4 PM unless you were a member.

At least the outside of the museum looked nice, and rather than accept defeat, we decided it would be fun to go to a bakery we all loved back in the East Bay for a snack and some more time. As we left the museum, we wound up sitting in the worst bridge traffic any of us had seen for some time due to the rain, meaning at 7:30 PM we finally just left the road and parked near Union Square to eat some tomato soup and chilli at a Boudin's in the Macy's basement. In the end, my cousins actually wound up really enjoying their meals, the three of us exchanged stories, opinions and ideas for many more hours than I had anticipated AND we found out the older of my two cousin's L had managed to pull off a 31 on her ACT. I was so proud of her and just enjoyed getting to know both of them again immensely. These were two people I watched grow up for 5 years of graduate school and being so far from them for the last two years was rather difficult actually.

Even though we were rather unsuccessful at everything we attempted to do that night, it wound up being one of the best of my trip because I had the chance to get reacquainted with two people I really love. After finally managing to get back across the bridge around 10 or so, we went back home, where I spent a little time with the whole family before heading off to say goodbye one last time to my friend C.

The next morning I was off for the great MBA graduation adventure of 2009, though of course my flight was delayed and diverted into Dallas due to a nasty storm and several tornadoes, but at least I was able to grab some Mexican food with my cousin M, a welcome surprise. It is so rare I get to see her these days and for a time we had dinner together with our grandparents once a week. Anyway, she plied me with fish tacos and a strong margarita and dumped me back at the airport in plenty of time to go standby on what turned into the last flight out due to continued storms. My actual flight wound up just being cancelled that night, which of course meant my baggage did not arrive until the next morning. Of course, I could not have had a trip go by without some crazy air travel story, so it was fitting this happened and rather fortuitous it happened in Dallas where I have a close relative.