On Tuesday, the 21st of February, the entire eighth grade class of Mare Island Technology Academy Middle School took a field trip to the University of California, Berkeley. 

I got to school particularly early so I could get one of the mandatory tie-dyed shirts at exactly 7:45AM before a line formed. It was a long 30 minutes for everyone to get their T-shirts. Then we waited with our advisory classes to get seated on the buses. I went with Ms. Alanis’ class so because there was someone I wanted to sit next to.  But as it turned out, my advisory and Mrs. Alanis’ advisory went on the same bus, so it didn’t make a difference.  

The bus ride to Berkeley took a little bit longer than expected, even though traffic was not terrible.  The bus parked in front of the Haas School of Business. We got our groups together and decided where each group wanted to go.  I chose to go see the tower first because we could see the top of it through the arch in the front of the Haas School of Business building. My group was chaperoned by Mx. Williams, Ms. Kay, and Mr. Contreras.

At the tower we took a picture of our group in front of the tower.  Then I noticed how you could see the tower through an arch.  I decided to capture that composition with my camera.  Unfortunately the tower was closed to the public so we could not go up to the top and see the view.

Mx. Williams was a great chaperone as he is a history teacher and seemed to enjoy telling us about the history of the buildings. We spent a good minute near the tower before moving on to the university library. The library was one of the best buildings on the outside and on the inside. We could not go into the rooms with books as college students were studying and working on their assignments, but we were still able to see the room through the doorway. One of the rooms was beautiful. It had a giant painting on the walls with amazing architecture and lighting. 

Then we went back down to the first floor and stopped to look at the glass cases with different book related items related to history of the university and bay area.  After that we left for the student store.

Walking down from the library was one of the most recognizable parts of the campus: the front gate. The student store, which was just ahead, just had a bunch of sweaters and jackets for the students and visitors. I bought a magnet for my fridge since my family has a tradition of always buying magnets from each trip. The store had two floors.  The bottom floor had adult size clothes and other trinkets for more mature ages. The top floor was more for younger kids.  It had small sized clothes, even baby clothes. Around the student store was the exit to the plaza and the town where more stores were located. 

My group walked out and stopped at Blondie’s Pizza to get some food. We bought pizza while the others stood outside.  We saw Mr. Farmer in the building, also eating pizza. After getting food we went up to the plaza again to hang around the Sproul Hall for lunch. 

After lunch we regrouped and headed back to the town so we could visit the People’s Park. When we got there I was a bit surprised because the park was an abandoned construction site with a bunch of homeless people in tents. I was told that the park used to have tall trees and was in fact a park, however, Berkeley wanted to turn the property into more dorm buildings like all the others around the park. People didn’t like that so they started to live there to stop the construction. Now the park just has a bunch of cut down trees and an abandoned vehicle.  

It didn’t look good. We eventually left the park to regrouped at Sproul Hall to depart for the buses.

When all the groups got together, we boarded the busses.  Just as we were leaving someone got a text from Ms. West that she wasn’t on any bus.  We had left her behind!  So our bus stopped and waited for her.  This made us more late than we would have been because of the traffic already, though, we made it back fine.

This was my first date too. In the morning, I asked someone out.  By all luck, they said yes! We spent the entire day together and talked. At the end of the day on the bus ride back I knew I did good since she asked me to hold hands the whole way home.