I finally arrived to Berkeley, and due to popular demand (I know my fans want to keep up with my activities) I am upgrading my impersonal blog with some pictures of my adventures.

I arrived and I ended up living a couple of days with Ming, an old friend from Maryland, while I searched for housing. I also visited Sylvia, who lives in San Jose, (the heart of Silicon Valley, where Sylvia is learning how to be a technology entrepeneur ;) ). She made a wonderful Ajiaco, my favorite dish! While I had the car I also visited Elina, an old friend from the University of Massachusetts. We went to have lunch in Stanford. Stanford looks like a Resort and Spa... I can't imagine how people actually study in such a place.

This picture in the left shows the EE building in Berkeley, where I have my office. It is a little bit old, compared to A.V. Williams back in Maryland. The office is also very big and a bit noisy, so productivity is not the best. Most of my time has been spent on administrative affairs, I needed to get my keys, accounts, access codes, and computer... furthermore I need to manage the TRUST seminar series, maintain the TRUST seminar web page, send email reminders, order the food for the refreshments served in the seminar etc etc.







Berkeley is an okay city. It has its charm, but its not very pretty. I took this picture from the last floor of the parking lot where I used to park the car I rented. The building in the front is the post office, and in the horizon you can see the Bay (and with a little bit of imagination you can see San Francisco, which is just across the bay)















After almost a week of searching for a place to call home, I ended up settling for this small studio. My apartment is the second to the left in the second floor. It is very small and quite pricey, compared to what I had in Maryland, but on the other hand it is only three or four blocks away from my office.








The layout of the apartment is very simple. At the end you can see the kitchen. The good thing is that I receive frequent company by the next door neighbor's cat. A very friendly animal :)




















I also ended up buying a bike to commute around Berkeley. To go grocery shopping, downtown, to the metro (I can take it inside the metro) and I guess also to commute to the office. The way to the office is uphill so it takes some more effort than coming back. The bike is Giant, and it was $230, but buying lights and locks increased the price by almost $100 :( damn the Californian tax also!!)













In my first trip to the grocery store, just by chance, while I was waiting in line to pay for my shopping, I ended up grabbing a couple of dark chocolates. It was until the next day when I brought them to work that I realized I had bought chocolate from Colombia! The brand is E. Guttard, and it says in the back that the Trinitario cacao beans used to make this chocolate were grown in the San Vicente de Chucuri Valley of Santander in Colombia

Now I have a real reason or excuse to keep buying chocolate. I need my energy and the support for our industry!










However not all things are as good as they sound. This weekend I was food poisoned, lost my credit card and also for the first time since I have been using the clip to my belt for the cellphone, the cellphone fell to the ground.... in fact in went directly into the water drain of this street in the picture on the left.









After a very eventful couple of days I managed to wait in front of a drug store until they opened to buy some medicine (mostly pain killers), then I went back to the places I had been shopping
and one of them had my credit card. There was only one problem left... how to rescue my cellphone from the sewers! I called the police and the firemen, and they all told me that I had to contact the department of public services of the city of Berkeley for help. The problem was that I was asking for help on a Saturday, and the department of public services was only opening until Monday, and there was a heavy chance of rain during Sunday, which would have washed away my cellphone in the sweres!! So I ended up going Sunday morning to a hardware store to buy a "reacher" and after several failed rescue attempts (which left my cellphone very badly scratched ) and a friendly crowd of Taiwanese exchange students (the support crowd was essential, or else it would have been very awkward to lie alone on the streets looking for stuff in the sewers) I was able to get my cellphone back!! :)