We're a week into taking our classes at Brown University, and I'm already finding it hard to create new ways to state just how much of an amazing time I'm having here. From the academic challenges to the new atmosphere of the East Coast, every experience has been a learning one. I would say that every experience was awesome, but humidity and thunderstorms just aren't my thing. So, instead of using the thesaurus to find synonyms of 'amazing' and 'awesome', I decided that conveying some of these experiences visually would make this blog more interesting.
On the left is Providence on the night of Waterfire. Right before the sun goes down, it strikes the tallest buildings in a way that makes them sometimes seem golden. One of my favorite parts about the East Coast is it's history. California indubitably has a fascinating past, but it just doesn't have the depth that comes with the lengthy recorded history. Walking the streets or Providence, I can imagine someone, taking my exact same steps years and years ago.
On the right is one of the small study sessions on the Main Green. When it gets too hot and humid to be in an un-air-conditioned dorm, we venture outside to sit on the grass. Then when there are too many gnats, ants, and other USIs (unidentified scary insects) to handle, we go inside the Rockefeller library, which is air-conditioned, and bug-free.
Part of the reason I love being at Brown is because of the abundance of resources that are available to me, a mere summer student. These are the computers that are free for me to use in the Rock library. The computers at El Cerrito High, while very new, were only there if a teacher was willing to let me use them, or if the library was open, which it was very rarely towards the end of the school year. Obviously, I understand that there were financial issues that led to that, but it was still sometimes frustrating to not be able to print out what I needed to, when I needed to. "When I needed to" roughly translates to "When I forgot to print it out at home", but for students with no printers at their houses, not being able to use the library could have been very rough. 
These chairs are available in the library. Looking out of these windows from the comfy chairs means looking right into Providence. I really love the area that Brown is in. I was worried that the whole area would be similar to Stanford, for example, a pretty rich neighborhood; I found that this isn't the case. The blocks surrounding campus don't have the pretentious aura that I was feeling. They are a lot more similar to Berkeley than Palo Alto in that respect. I think it's pretty funny when the friends I've made, all from private school, don't know how to deal with a homeless man asking them for change. Though a very persuasive argument can be made for growing up extremely rich, I'm so grateful to my parents for not letting me grow up sheltered in a bubble of homogenous wealth.
Every day here at Brown is a day of enlightenment, both inside the classroom and out. In the class, I get to learn about a subject that I'm deeply interested in; outside of it, I get to try and look at the world from the view of someone who's never lived anywhere with a poverty rate above 0%.
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