First Quarter

Hey y’all! As many of you probably have seen on Facebook, I’ve been too busy living the life to post on my blog, the past few months. But here I am, sitting in my room, not knowing what to do, thinking to myself: this might be a good moment to post something on that dusty blog of yours.

So here we go. Since February 7th:

-          I have been part of the UCSB gospel choir. This might be my favourite constant part of my entire exchange. The teacher is a rather big black pastor (“Why do white people always clap on the 1 and the 3?! It’s 2 and 4! Black people ALWAYS clap on the 2 and the 4!”). We hold hands and pray before and after class, to thank God for bringing us together and enabling us to sing. Then the party starts. Every group learns their harmonies, and as soon as everything comes together we clap, dance, and just have a lot of fun. I would like to make a shout out to my fellow tenors, because even though we’re the smallest in numbers, we make the biggest sound. We’ve had a few performances so far, but my favourite is definitely a traditional Baptist church in the centre of Santa Barbara. It was an amazing experience: people clapping, dancing, and even crying. So much different from a church ceremony in Holland.
 

-          I have visited San Francisco. A large group of international exchange students split up into smaller duos to join regular UCSB students who drove back to their parents in San Francisco for the weekend. I shared a car with Gilles and two cool girls, and I still think it’s crazy to think that the ride between two relatively close cities, within the same state, can take over 6 hours. For the last part of the trip we had to take a BART, the train system of the San Francisco Bay area. In this train we met a goofy guy with his arm in a cast, playing a videogame on his laptop, who was coming back from a poker night. He turned out to live right next to the hostel we would meet up with the rest of the crew, so he walked us through the city centre of SF. Those four days we visited all the tourist attractions, among which the famous Golden Gate Bridge, the fisherman’s wharf, and the park with the little coloured houses and the SF skyline in the background. Every single neighbourhood had very unique and interesting architecture. As I can’t describe every cool restaurant, view, and person we met, I’ll highlight two. On the first day we walked (or: climbed) to the piers, and took a ferry past Alcatraz (that I’d miraculously never heard of). The ferry took us to a small town called Sausalito, from where we walked all the way over the Golden Gate Bridge (that thing is long!) back to the city centre.
Another really cool place we visited was a set of stairs with mosaic patterns in it. The timing of the climb was fantastic, because the moment we reached the top sunset started, and we had an absolutely stunning view over the city.

-          I have visited SixFlags. So this one day it was "bring your friend day" in SixFlags, an attraction park with lots of roller coasters. My roommate Jorge and dorm mates Olivia and Jaden invited me to come along, so this one Saturday we all got into Jaden's car and made the road trip to the attraction park. I thought the road trip itself was super fun, as we played bad sing-alongs and saw the beautiful sight of Southern California. However, as soon as we got there we found out that it was one out of three days in the year that the weather in California simply sucks. It was cloudy, rainy, humid and cold. Even in Holland this would've been considered a mediocre day, so you can only imagine how people felt who grew up in this paradise. Anyway, we didn't let the rain wash away our enthusiasm for the roller coasters, and we commenced on our adventure. Although some of the attractions were closed, most were still running and had huge lines. In the end we went on only 5 rides or so, but since Olivia knew the park they weren't just the average attractions. I'd like to mention two especially: in one of them you climb really high before actually getting into the roller coaster, and then you get attached as if you are crawling on hands and feet, but then without the floor, if that makes sense. So you're basically dangling there in a sexual position named after man's best friend, when suddenly, without going higher first, like any other roller coaster, you make an incredible drop with your head first. I screamed like a baby. My other favorite was more of a baby attraction: it was one of those big washing drums that spins around while you stand against the walls. Slightly less intense than the first one I described, but it definitely gave a very funny effect on your visuals and balance. After an entire day of sauntering through the rain and me teaching my dorm mates to say "neuken in de keuken" and "ik wil piemels" (I did not instigate this nor do I take responsibility for their future interactions with Dutch people), we got back into the car and tried to warm our numb bodies. After getting coffee at starbucks, we were driving on a small byroad when suddenly all lanterns disappeared and there were no signs anymore. Jaden immediately tried to stop but suddenly we dived through this hole in a fence, over some weird thing lying on the ground, into an unpaved construction area, where we manage to stop the car safely. Only after we got back onto the road we started realizing how bad that could've ended had there been a ditch, ravine, pond or wall. Being in a fairly Christian country I couldn't help but mentally cross myself and thank God for saving our lives.

-          I went skiing with my dad and his girlfriend. My dad and Lucienne came over to visit me for a week! I toured them around campus, Isla Vista and the beach, and we had some pretty damn good dinners in downtown Santa Barbara. In the weekend were to go skiing in the San Bernadino mountains (1.5 hour from Los Angeles, isn't that weird!?). Although the weather could've been better, some snow had fallen during the preceding week so I didn't look too bad. So, in Santa Barbara we stepped into the car in shorts with the sun shining bright, and 3 hours later we got out of the car in near-freezing temperatures. Looking up to the Bed&Breakfast we would stay in I had to suppress a feeling that can be best described as a combination of the excitement and fear Hans and Gretel must have felt seeing the candy house of the witch. The house was decorated from top to bottom, there was not a single spot that didn't contain a Christmas wreath, angle with a trumpet, flower ornament, or animal woodcarving. The inside was even better, with incredibly cheesy quotes, family pictures, gaudy little statues or Christmas lights filling every square centimeter of the walls. As our room was the Angel Room (there was also one devoted to Paris and one to the Godfather) I felt enlightened by His presence as soon as I walked in, and from that moment I knew I was going to sleep like a baby in the bed that was about half the size of my own bed. That night we got dinner and went to get our ski gear, which was surprisingly relaxed. Apparently there was a techno festival on one of the slopes, because everyone in the village expected many visitors that weekend. After a night of lying diagonally to make full use of my manger, we went out skiing. I hadn't skied for a while but it went surprisingly easy. However, the snow wasn't really good, the techno festival was a joke and there was a total of 4 slopes. Thus, when the weather started getting worse the next morning, we decided to spend our Sunday in LA and go to Beverly Hills and the Getty Center (where they had an exhibition of my favorite painter: JMW Turner!). All in all a very interesting weekend.

-          I have visited Sarah and UCLA. For Sarah's birthday Gilles, Vera and I decided to pay her a visit, and took advantage of the occasion to also see some more of LA. First stop was UCLA. The buildings there are so much prettier than in UCSB, so we had a great time (they don't live on the beach though, so I guess that cancels each other out?). We decided to sit down in the grass of the sculpture garden, without any knowledge of what would happen to us next. An army of nerds marched into the park, including homemade swords, grenades, and arrows. They put all their weapons on a hill, and started preparing for what looked like a more complicated version of capture the flag, with us in the middle of it. As the leader skateboarded by us, we asked him what was going on. He explained that this was the engineering study association, that each group of engineers was represented in a "district", and that they were to reenact the Hunger Games (the hill with weapons obviously was the cornucopia). He also added that it was really nice to be on North Campus for once (the humanities side of campus), as they were not used to being exposed to the sun or women. He also told us that we were "declared obstacles", so if we wanted to hinder people in running away from their murderers we were completely allowed to do so. And then the fight broke loose. The mechanical engineers immediately slaughtered the one poor guy that represented the aerospace engineers, and the chemical engineers seemed to have formed an alliance with the civil engineers. This went on for a few hours and we were very entertained. We ended up inviting a few of them to Sarah's birthday party that she was throwing that same night, and our new friends actually showed up. The rest of the party was mainly a lot of fun, since I finally got to meet all the people that Sarah had told me about during the year she was in Utrecht. We made a lot of cool friends and crushed some of them in games of beerpong.

-          I finished my courses of the quarter with a 3.75 average GPA. Although, in the beginning of the quarter, many people had advised me to take 3 courses instead of 4, I was cocky enough to still take four classes. This ended up being a smaller workload than what I'm used to at UCU, so besides from doing all these awesome leisure activities described in the passages above, I actually managed to get fairly high grades, and finished my quarter with an A+, an A, an A- and a B+. I also got an A+ on the gospel choir class, even though I didn't hand in the only essay that was to determine our grade. I guess the teacher either really liked my singing or just didn't read any of the papers..

This was a quick overview of my first quarter here! I'll try to keep track of what I'm doing in my second quarter (it's already more than halfway done), and I'll probably create a new post after finals. :)

Have a good one everyone, and don't hesitate to contact me if you wanna chat more about my experiences here. Or about other stuff of course. Bye!