The Ingress

Early Beginnings of a Whole New Life

3 January 2014, Davis, CA

Fifth day in the U.S. completed. What a ride it’s been so far. The predominant feeling, even now, is that I just really don’t know what’s going on. I am completely in control of all the little things I have to take care of, and I’m having a great time, but it just won’t dawn on me where I am. So far away, on the eve of such a massive adventure that will no doubt impact me profoundly, it is all so much to take in, and still much too unreal.

Starting with the mere idea of being inside America. Hirtherto a place victim to so many preconceptions and stereotypes, but none of them mine. On my subjective mental map of the world, the United States are a pristine blank spot. And here I am, coloring it in for the first time, inch by inch, image by image, encounter by encounter.

Before reaching my final destination Davis, YOLO County (can you believe this one?! this is too good), CA, I had one day for each of the best two cities here: New York and San Francisco. I could go on for a while about just those few hours, but I’ll keep it short.

New York – 30 December 2013

My New York day mainly comprised a virtually nonstop six hour walk through Manhattan, covering Chelsea Market, the High Line Park, Empire State Building, Broadway, Times Square, Central Park, the lobby of Guggenheim, the Chrysler tower, and all the streets in between. I was so surprised by the familiarity of it all. Sure, the buildings were a lot taller than anything I’ve ever seen with my own eyes, but I discovered there that TV and internet plant much more life-like images in your brain than you’d think. I wasn’t blown away by it or anything. And apart from the height of the buildings, New York was like any other world city really, like London or Paris. Actually, it shouldn’t be surprising of course, New York’s familiarity, it being the Capital of the Western World. This is where we all got it from, in a sense. The Original City. Still, somewhere I expect to find a completely different world, because all we ever do is emphasizing how different we are from those stoopid Americans. Here I was struck mainly by our similarities. Which was beautiful in a way. It’s what I’m always looking for in other, more exotic places: the peopleness in all those different people. At the end of my hike up north, by the big lake in Central Park, I was musing on these insights, and my numbness to reality – I still didn’t miss anyone, and New York didn’t affect me as much as I had expected – when a bespectacled young Dubaian engineer came up to me and asked me if I was “from around here”. Out of nowhere, I had a metropolis-exploration buddy for the next two hours. It was so nice to talk to someone, anyone, about anything. Share your experiences fresh as they are imprinted on your retina. It grounded me, made everything a little more real. Thank God for other people!

 

The crossing                                                                Elmo and Cookie monster on Times Square, NYC

San Francisco, 31 December 2013

Then I had one day in San Francisco. I came in exhausted, still jetlagged from my first flight, having had to get up at 2:00AM again this night, and knowing I’d have to stay awake for another while because it was New Year’s Eve, but I really wanted to make the most of my one day in San Francisco. Only problem being was that I had made no plans at all for finding people to stay with, who would also be willing to tag me along to their NYE parties. Some friends and family back home had asked around for me but all those contacts had fallen through. It was only on the day before that Eda, my awesome friend from Peru (who had given me her bed to sleep in, fed me pizza on the night of my arrival, and drawn a map of all the places I needed to visit in Manhattan that day) that I was staying with in New York, came to the rescue. Within a couple of hours, she had put me up with a girl, Morgan, she knew had just moved back from Barcelona. And what a rescue it was! I was happy enough that I would have a roof over my head that I need so floor, couch, I was fine with anything. But it turned out that she and her brother lived in a beautiful apartment completely redone by her parents to be rented out on Airbnb, and as we got in, she pointed “this is where you can stay” to a gorgeous, romantic, sun-drenched room with a king size bed. Then, she took me out driving all over San Francisco for four hours, I saw everything! And then she also took me along to the NYE party she was going to. And all of this in such good spirits and completely happy to tag me along. Such hospitality is just so heartwarming, what an amazing welcome to America I received from both Morgan and Eda. I had never done anything this outlandishly random and unplanned when travelling, and all I could think of it how well it worked out was this: You can’t imagine what you could end up with if you don’t risk to ask. Reach out, ask the question, ‘I need help’, have a little faith in that it will work out, and be amazed by the wealth of kindness and hospitality and warmth waiting for your call.

The New Year’s party was also an invaluable experience, not because it was such a great party, but in fact because it wasn’t, objectively speaking, and the insight I gained from that. We had come to the house party of friends of Morgan’s friend, ran ashore in some tension going on between different parties, and so we went to a bar with the three of us to celebrate midnight there. Morgan’s friend had trouble letting go of whatever had happened between those people and was clearly preoccupied. The magical thing for me to realize was this: I had nothing here in this continent, so anything was something. I was perfectly happy with any sort of New Year’s party, however modest, and the fact that I had no social relationships here at all that could get tangled up and give me worries made me feel so light. I remember this clearly from my travels to Peru, four years ago: being lifted out of an entire existence you’ve spent years and years building up, is such a liberating experience and provides such perspective on it, even if what you are leaving behind is very dear to you, like my life in NL is to me now. Soon enough, I would get engaged in plenty of social relationships, but in that moment, at the turn of the new year, it was bliss, this burdenless existence, this blank slate beginning of a new life.

My first night in the Tricoops

Davis, 1-3 January 2013

Man, I really don’t know how to capture these first couple of days here in Davis. I am in the middle of a deep-reaching process. I’m witnessing a full-fledged genesis from the inside: a whole world unfolding itself in front of me, with a unique, Stephanie-shaped place opening up in it for me to occupy. When my train thundered off leaving me on the platform of a deserted little adobe-brick station lined with some crooked old palm trees, I had the words of the woman in the train ringing in my head, “Oh Davis, yeah it’s really small-town America.” This was it, this was where it was all gonna have to happen. As I walked into the 60,000 man strong town of Davis, the loudest sound was my rolling case on the cement sidewalks. Over the past three days that I’ve been here, more people have begun to trickle in, but it’s still very quiet on the streets of the village and the university campus. I actually like it that way. It gives me the opportunity to ease in, to first get acquainted with the space and only then the people. The quiet town, the beautiful and unfamiliar trees and birds and squirrels, the sweet-scented air and bright sunlight, the deserted campus, with empty streets, roundabouts, parking lots, grassfields, and buildings, all those things and I got our little private moments now, before all the people swarm in.

When I arrived at the Tricoops, the three student cooperatives in the middle of campus where I’ll be living these coming months, there were only 3 people. Over the past 3 three days, more people have started arriving, but all 40+ of us will only be here probably on Sunday, the day before classes start. I got the chance to familiarize myself with my room at my leisure, which I’ll be sharing with two other girls for the rest of my time here, and the rest of the house, which I’ll be sharing with sixteen other people in total. I can’t believe how lucky I am to have this place to come home to in these vulnerable, early beginnings. Especially at the international student orientation day today I realized how much more I’m already embedded in the world that is UCDavis than the other students. I’m so glad I didn’t have to be welcomed by nothing more than four blank white walls like the others. The Coops are really a fully alive and thriving organism that is taking me up within its middle with open arms. Last night they came and took me along to a concert in the city of Sacramento, half an hour drive from here. They really went out of my way to make me feel welcome: “We loved your video, we all really wanted you to come and live with us, you were a hot commodity”, and “I just said that we could drive past the IKEA so you’d come.” He had needed to convince me with IKEA because I still needed to get bedding somewhere. And so as I got out of the concert, they said “Alright let’s go!” and took a whole detour at 11PM especially for me to get my bedding. And in such good spirit, messing around in the store and making jokes all along the way. And during the show, one of them reached across the others to me and asked me “Stephanie, are you okay?” It’s those little things, so attentive and so warm… Man, I couldn’t have been blessed with a better home away from home. I can tell that now already, on the third day. An incredible time awaits me here.

The international student orientation today was also surprisingly helpful. You’d a expect a boring, tedious event with all this information you already knew. Instead, it really set something big in motion here for me. The past two days, despite the warm welcome I had had from the few Coop people that were already back from their holidays, had been zombie days a little bit. I didn’t what was going on, where I was, what was coming. All the new students at the international student orientation day provided a new social framework that placed me outside the Coop minicosmos for the first time here, which gave a better sense of the bigger picture of the UCDavis experience that lies ahead. The campus tour was a really magical experience. I could consciously notice my brain working hard to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together into the mental map of a new world. It’s incredible how fast you pick stuff up. In my three days in Davis, and my five days in the U.S., I have already accumulated so many puzzle pieces that I start reencountering them in the world around me here. Like I was surprised by how much that we were told and shown on the campus tour I already knew, after only two days of being here. A unique new life is gradually starting to take shape around me, and I’m being drawn into the universe that I am now still circling on the perimeter of. Soon, I will be so far in, I won’t even be able to tell all the pieces of the puzzle apart, and I won’t be able to look at this place with the open, empty, unknowing gaze I have now. I’m excited for it, but it’s also a little sad. This ignorance is bliss, and these early days, alive with expectancy but so light and unburdened by the weight of existence are precious to me now. I will cherish it a little longer, while I still can. Starting Monday, there’ll be no going back.        

Stéphanie