It’s nearly the end of the semester! Which to me means, aside from the stressfulness of finals, reflecting on the fact that I am nearly finished with my first semester of college. How did that happen? Lately, I’ve been procrastinating and being super cheesy and thinking about my first semester experience and how it measured up to my expectations about college. One thing I noticed while I was procrastinating on Facebook was that I had managed to travel quite a bit within California in the few months I had been here.
(This is good background music to listen to while you’re reading this, if you feel so inclined.)
I don’t know about other people, but I looking back, I realized I hadn’t travelled outside of my hometown/city much in the past year even. So I was surprised when I clicked on my Facebook map and realized that I had actually journeyed outside of the physical Claremont bubble quite a bit. Coming into college, I would hear a lot about the “[insert college town here] bubble” and how you get caught up in it. To be fair, I definitely feel a bit disconnected from “the real world” at times, and I don’t really leave campus on small trips (to Target, or the Village, although I have made both trips a few times) all that much, but the amount that I have been off-campus was surprising to me. Particularly being an international student, I felt that I wouldn’t be off-campus all that much at all because don’t have anyone to visit (and don’t have a license even if I did… on a related note, such a huge thank you to everyone who has driven me places. Especially on those 7 hour trips up north…).
But over the course of the last few months, I’ve made it up to Yosemite National Park and the Santa Cruz area, I’ve been to San Diego twice, gone into Los Angeles multiple times, and been out to Halona. It’s been really nice to see so many different areas of California, and it has definitely been a cool part of my experience here. And to close on a ridiculously cheesy but completely truthful statement, every time that I left the campus made it feel more like home when I came back.
Where I’ve been this semester, according to Facebook.
*Disclaimer: I don’t actually know if I was on the 101 at any point because I’m terribly unobservant when driving, and even more so when I’m a passenger, but as soon as I started typing this post, I also started humming ‘California’ in my head, so…