Happy Holidays!

Wishing everyone a happy holiday season and another amazing year coming up!  Stay safe, stay amazing!

Exploring the university

Santa Cruz is definitely known for being a funky beach town with laidback vibes, but there is a huge part of the city that is also pretty famous.  UCSC is up in the hills overlooking the city and is going on 50 years of being a cutting edge, liberal college.  After a month of living in Santa Cruz, it was time to go up and explore the campus and see what it was all about.

Taking the bus up there, more and more 20 year olds boarded.  It was packed.  Normal city buses at 9:30 am are fairly empty, and yet this one was packed full of students drinking out of mason jars, wearing plaid, talking about professors and sporting fancy new piercings.  The bus left down and headed up the hill, entering what seemed to be a forest with a few buildings.  The campus is scattered around the hill, sometimes offering great ocean views, but normally surrounded by tall redwoods and ravines.  Bridges, side paths and nature all around.

With the famous mascot being the banana slug, I kept an eye out and was lucky enough to spot two students taking a picture of the ground.  Which meant a banana slug.  Here's my picture of the slug in all its glory:

I had a coffee and a tour from a friend who is an oceanographer researcher and then explored a bit on my own, randomly running into another person I knew.  Santa Cruz has small town feel and this definitely showed up on campus.  Good vibes all over the place in this city!