My appointment at UC Berkeley officially starts on January 16, but Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so the university was closed. My actual first day of school is thus on January 17. By the way, this is also the first day of the Spring Semester, so I can see a much greater number of students than I had seen in my previous tour around the Campus. In front of the Sather Gate (essentially the southern gate of the Campus), I can find a lot of young students belonging to the university fraternities who are trying to convince new guys to join and who remind me all the American teen movies that I happened to watch many times in the past. None of them hands me a flyer, though: is it due to my lost expression or to my incipient white hair? 🙂

The first contact with the university is very formal, however: I have to attend a meeting where substantially I am registered and other formal procedures are carried out. Something similar takes place the following day as well, when I participate in an event organized by the International Office for professors and researchers from abroad. I will have to wait a bit longer for the actual first day of school. In the meantime, libraries and empty classrooms can suitably serve as temporary office.

P.S. Curiosity: what is the country which the greater number of visiting scholars, post-docs, etc. come from? Easy: it is by far China, which almost dooubles Germany. Italy is present in the top positions as well, in particular it is the 6th (preceded in ascending order by Japan, France, and the Republic of Korea). So it is indeed true that we Italians are everywhere and with some sort of pride I like thinking that today I am providing my little contribution to this statistics.