California, here we are!

Here I am in California, wahoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I've just created this blog so I can put some photos and info from my trip here for anyone who is interested! I just arrived in California on Friday evening and I've taken care of a bazillion things already. Here are some highlights!

• Got a bank account at Wells Fargo, swwweet. Got cheques too (except they call them "Checks" here!) haha.
• My girlfriend Kristen came with me for the first week so we are travelling around together, and we got $150 US of groceries yesterday, it was nuts! I went to the Emeryville Pack and Save and it was a pretty decent place to shop, very close to work too so that is good.
• We went to the IHOP yesterday cause I was so excited that there was an IHOP and I wanted to get some pancakes in before Pesach started (last night)
• We took the Emery Go Round which is this free bus service here in Emeryville, it is really awesome and picked us up from the grocery store with out 10 bags of groceries and dropped us directly in front of my apartment building!
• The EmeryBay Apartment is a palace, it came with a little gift basket on the table with a few cookies and stuff in it, nice touch.
• Kristen and I are going to Yosemite National Park next week, so we got our tickets at the Amtrak Station which is about a 5 min walk from my apartment.
• We went on a wild adventure walk last night, off through what I thought was northern Emeryville, and then I thought it was south Berkeley, I think it turned out to be a part of Oakland but it was ok, very industrial though and it looked like quite a poor area. Nice to see though that there was a park with a lot of homeless people and the city of Berkeley or some organization had put out lots of food for all the hungry people there, that was nice to see.
• The wild adventure walk took us to Haste St in Berkeley where Kristen and I went to the Berkeley Chabad to go to the first Seder for Pesach, it was pretty awesome and the Rabbi was nuts. It was a good time and as expected it was really crazy. There was some tradition where you had to eat a Shmurah Matzah with no water in less that 9 minutes or something like that, it was hard but we finally managed to do it! It was really nice to go and the food was just amazing.
• Today I am buying Dave Matthews Band tickets for later this term.
• This afternoon, Kristen and I are going to go to San Francisco I think, and check out some of the awesome sights and beaches there.
• Check out all the pics below and I will post more as I take more.

Cheers!
Mike :)