I Can’t Think About Orientation Without Thinking of Orienteering

I can’t think about orientation without thinking of orienteering. Not that I anticipate you’ll be doing a lot of running around with a map and a compass (I would say that a fair percentage of graduate students have very little idea of what’s going on in buildings oncampus outside of their department,so maybe that would be a great activity…) but I think that getting your bearings with respect to Berkeley might help.

As you’ve gotten here,you’re probably aware that to the South are Oakland and Emeryville. Directly to the West is the San Francisco Bay,and on the other side of that is the Pacific Ocean. To the North is Albany and Kensington. East of Berkeley are the hills,the ridge of which is the county line between Berkeley’s Alameda County and Contra Costa County. If you have registered to vote,you will likely be called for Jury Duty and if you are a local that would be in Alameda County and consequently in Oakland or Hayward. The courthouses in Oakland are easier to reach,but if you are called to serve in Hayward you get mail from the “Hayward Hall of Justice” which I always associate with the Super Friends,although I have never made a super friend at jury duty. I did meet a grad student in Physics who I went out with,but that ended awkwardly and I probably shouldn’t talk about it. In any case,water is to the west, hills are to the east.

Besides its Super Friends association,you might associate Hayward with its eponymous fault, which was featured in the mid-Eighties Bond movie “A View to a Kill” (the last one with Roger Moore),and it surely appears in countless science texts.Tom Wolfe used it as a plot device once,too. While my love of geography doesn’t creep too much into geology, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that this fault runs through campus, as that could help you orient yourself too. In addition to causing parts of Memorial Stadium (where the football is played,but also a good place to run around and climb stairs and such) to creep a little over a foot in the past 80-some years,it is responsible for the occasional pants-staining terror of many a lab-manager on campus,what with the shaking and the bouncing that occurs everyonce in a while. If you’re inside,you should probably knowyour orientation with respect to stairwells and door- ways.

THEY’RE A GREAT PLACE TO DUCK AND COVER!

As long as we’re discussing things on campus, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to orient yourself to the
library system. There are something like 30 libraries on campus. Lucky for you in this day and age, they’re all accessible through Pathfinder,the online catalog searching program, so you don’t necessarily have to walk to the 29 locations where what you are actively looking for is not located. Not that you won’t find interesting things that way. Maybe you would stumble upon the
book that cracks open your deep seeded love and preternatural talent for ventriloquism. I guess you can still look these things up,but it’s much more…efficient. Anyhow,that would all be found via lib.Berkeley.edu.

If you do not have a computer or easy access to one,there are computer labs on campus: in the basements of Dwinelle and Evans, VLSB,Moffitt Library,Tan Hall,Wheeler hall, and,if you have an OCF account,Heller Lounge in MLK. I know that the OCF usually gets a plug in here for having classes in things every once in a while,but I feel it is worthwhile to reiterate that they do provide some excellent services and one should visit ocf.Berkeley.edu for more details.

Getting back to orientation,Berkeley is a place full of foot and bikepaths both on and off campus. There is good public transit via BART and the buses (which are an excellent deal at the price of nothing with your magical student ID card). AC Transit actually connects with a variety of other service providers so that you can actually get pretty far for pretty cheap. With your ID card,you could hop 2 buses and make your way all the way down to Stanford if you wanted to for 4 dollars. Intercollegiate rivalry at its cheapest!

There are plenty of interesting local food, and sports and musical things that occur locally though. If you are not enthralled by Cal Adventures (www.oski.org),you can go climbing in the Indian Rock Park Community, or, if you’re feeling a different kind of spiritual,there are over 100 places of worship in Berkeley alone. From African-Methodist-Episcopalian to Zoroastrian:you’re covered! I had made a map of the churches and such,looking for a correlation with liquor stores (there are much fewer of them than I would have imagined, but still enough to lead to some disorientation!) but studying the culture of the city and the dynamics of it’s economy and the trade-offs feels a little too much like work. Anomalies in price gradients are interesting;there is currently a 22 cent per gallon difference between Eastern and Western University Avenue gas stations (!), but those won’t help you find your way home. I would suggest exploration,it’s the best way to get to know a place.