Bipolar Sunday

So much stuff happened between my last post and this one that I don't even know where to start.

It's graduation week in UC Berkeley and that means that campus is packed with students wearing caps and gowns, and their proud happy families.  There are commencement flower booths and receptions with food and drinks everywhere, and the good restaurants in town are all packed.  It's one of the happiest weeks on campus, and the weather has made its job in making these days even more special for the graduating students and their beloved ones.

On Sunday, I attended the College of Engineering Graduate Commencement Ceremony, not as a graduating UC Berkeley student (since I am a mere exchange student), but as my classmates' and Middle Eastern buddies' friend.  It was a lovely day, as you can see from the pictures shown below.  I felt very proud of all of my friends, in such an extent that I got very emotional several times that day.  It was very interesting to experience a graduation ceremony for the first time in my life - it's just like the movies -, and it was even more interesting to get to know most of my friends' families.  Don't you agree that, by knowing someone's family, you got to know that person better too?  The only not-so-good part of the day was that I missed my family like crazy, and kind of envied that my friends got to have theirs here for these days.

Sunday was not just graduation day for me, it was also packing and moving day.  Although I didn't really feel like leaving my "home" during the best months of my life so far, it was time to do so.  Ihouse is very pricy and most of my friends, if not all of them, are leaving this week, so I decided it was time for me to leave too.  The initial plans were to stay in a room inside the dear Villas-Boas family house, but they actually surprised me with the opportunity to live in a little cottage they have in their backyard.  Basically, I now live in a little dolls wooden house, and have my own kitchen, toilet and room.  It is so, so cute and I am so, so happy with it that my next post on the blog will be about it.

Moving to this cute place and starting to live with an awesome Portuguese family kind of helped me go through this awful goodbye season.  My friends and I have been crying everyday, anytime one of us leaves.  I make an effort to remind them and me that this is not a definitive goodbye and that now we have friends all over the world and more excuses to travel, but it is seriously tough to realize we won't live together anymore and that we probably won't reunite all at the same place and time again.  I guess this is how real life works...  Some people come, some people go, and we get particularly connected to the special ones.  The thing is that, this year, I met way too many special people.

Love,

Martinha