As I had rapidly mentioned in one of my previous posts, my initial accommodation here in Berkeley was booked for the first weeks only. In fact I had planned to find a temporary solution on Airbnb until the end of January and then look for the definitive accommodation once arrived on the spot and once become acquainted with my new town. Of course in the past months I had signed up in the various Facebook groups where people offer and search for a room or a house, and eventually it was not so difficult to find a good solution. Indeed, here it’s all very dynamic, both supply and demand are quite high e you can easily find something. Additionally, people rarely look for their lifelong house here – and this is the case for me, obviously – so one tends to be quite elastic in his/her demands. Of course it is better not to talk about the prices… I will come back on this topic, probably. However, when I saw that a nice room just 200 m far from my previous Airbnb house was offered, I didn’t think twice and I finally got my place for the next months.

I wrote “next months” instead of “for the rest of the year here in Berkeley” because I will be travelling around Europe and the US in June and July for conferences, weddings – not mine 🙂 – and other duties, so also this time I decided not to go for a long-term solution. In the mean time I will try to better understand how my summer agenda will take shape.We’ll see.

However, on February 1 I had to say goodbye to Amy – my Airbnb host – and I moved in my new apartment. The operation was quite quick, as I only have one suitcase, one piece of hand baggage and a backpack. However, here’s the hitch… The new room is in a house which hosts some UC Berkeley students. One of them, Johnathan – yes, two h’s – has been doing an internship quite far from here and thus he was looking for someone to sublet his room to. The apartment and the room thus already had all the necessary: what I had to buy was just the bed sheets and the comforter. No problem: with John we immediately found on Amazon what we were looking for. Now, one nice thing here in Berkeley – among others! – is that there is an Amazon pick up center right at the Campus main entrance, at the Martin Luther King Student Union, which of course I chose as a delivery address. The plan was very straightforward: quick move early in the morning, workday in my office, Wednesday’s seminar at the ERG department, pick up of the bed sheets and of the comforter, and finally road to home. Easy, isn’t it? The only problem is that, as you might have heard, last Wednesday here in Berkeley we had strong protests related to the planned speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, which resulted in the police intervention and… in closing Martin Luther King Student Union! Hence no bed sheets, no comforter, no nothing.

Now, it is quite clear that the alternative would not have been to sleep under a bridge in a Siberian night, but since Amy still had my room available… Well, you got it! Hand baggage, another 200-meter move and real move delayed by 24 hours!

Here are some of the pictures published on the Facebook post: nothing exceptional, but in the end I don’t need a castle…