My new home in San Francisco

I am completely in love with San Francisco. I knew it was a cool city, but I wasn't prepared for just how amazingly cool.

Check out this map of San Francisco to get you oriented. Downtown San Francisco is where are the crazy tall buildings are (the financial district, Union Square, etc). The Mission is an awesome neighborhood with a really high Latino population, lots of latinamerica feeling stores, markets, and restaurants, plus dollar stores and thrift shops. As you can see, my house is right by UCSF and Golden Gate Park is pretty much my backyard...

Photo from: http://www.bloggingsouls.com/archives/2007_03.html
This is a picture of Strawberry Island, which is in the middle of Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. I have been running to stow lake in the mornings, across the bridge to the island, around the island and back. It is absolutely gorgeous!

This zoomed in gives you a better idea of my neighborhood. I had no idea how much I lucked out on my room -- the rent is incredibly cheap because the room is very small, but the location cannot be beat.


Plus I have everything I need in my room -- a closet that fits all my stuff, a bed on a loft, and an amazing nook under the loft with a little table and pillows to sit on. You can see more pictures of my room (including my desk, which I now have in my room, unlike my last 3 years at MIT) in my picasa album.

And now, here is a list of some of the things I love so far about living here, in no particular order.

1. Living 3 miles from the ocean -- an easy bike ride through Golden Gate Park.
2. In case I don't feel like biking, living a block away from the MUNI streetcar stop on the line that goes to the ocean and also to downtown San Francisco.
3. My 'commute' to school that consists of walking a block to Irving street, getting in an elevator and going up 8 floors (yes eight) and I am in the student union. Cross the street and I am in the academic buildings.
4. My room, how small and fun it is, and how it won't let me accumulate stuff even if I want to.
5. My house. It is really spacious and full of character, and the other women who live with me are total kindred spirits -- environmentalist, socially conscious, spanish-speaking, etc.
6. The sheer number of ethnic restaurants within walking distance.
7. The friendly people in San Francisco. Multiple complete strangers have offered me coupons in stores -- combined they saved me $25
8. The random breathtaking views of the ocean, or the bay, or just down an insanely steep street I see while walking/biking through San Francisco
9. The street names carved into the sidewalk tiles at street corners, kind of like in Cuba.
10. The quantity of thrift stores and dollar stores within a few blocks of each other in the mission
11. No winter
12. The fact that San Francisco is, if anything, even more hippie and progressive than Boston. wow
13. Fresh produce from farmers markets YEAR ROUND : )

A month in madison; off to San Francisco

I've been home in Madison for just over a month now -- the longest time I've spent at home since I left for MIT four years ago. Free from work and school, I had a lot of time to process the past and add some definition to my vision for the future. It has been a month of deepening relationships with family, re-connecting with old friends, letting go of a three year relationship and learning to love again. I spent a week wilderness canoeing in Ontario's Quetico Provincial Park with my dad, visited my beloved grandmother in Duluth not once but twice, realized what a truly amazing person my sister is, and became inspired by the company my mother founded, which makes its own brand of hormone free and organic whey protein powder for shakes and drinks: 'teraswhey'.

The whey plant by a pond in Reedsburg WI, and a canister of the final product. Fair trade chocolate, yum...


People often ask me what it is like to come back to the US after a semester in Cuba, or a summer in the rain forest of Ecuador. The answer is that I now go back and forth between developing countries and the US so often that I no longer get culture shock when I go nor reverse culture shock when I return. Instead, I feel like my lives in each setting, once so completely distinct from one another, have been merging. Four years ago, when I went to MIT, I filled the trunk and back seat of my mothers car with my stuff and found it hard to imagine how international students simply arrived on planes with a couple of checked bags.

Off to medical school in San Francisco.

Tomorrow I move to San Francisco, and instead of taking a car full of stuff, I am taking the same amount that I always take to Cuba, or Mexico, or Ecuador -- my hiking backpack plus a school backpack. There is a pillow, blanket, and sheet in there this time since I'm not staying with a host family, but the rest is pretty much the same. Why? Because really, it is the same stuff I need to be comfortable and happy anywhere, with slight variations for climate.

a long overdue hello from wisconsin

Hi everyone,

Its been a long time since i've written you all... mostly because this semester was a whole lot of problem sets, ten page lab reports, and studying for days on end for organic-chemistry exams, intermixed with a whole lot of wishing I had more time to spend on the things that I really care about.

But now the semester is over, and I'm home with family, which is really nice. I did manage to get a few meaningful things into the semester that are exciting and inspiring for me. One is that our bicycle-powered laptop has been placed in the campus gym where more and more people are using it. There are a few videos online about the bike that you can check out if you want.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSX1Tf3wbQI

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=11673

The next is that on January 3rd I leave for Ecuador, to work with the same community on some lingering technical issues in the water system, as well as start a program (with the help of my mom) where we will purchase traditional ceramics and jewelry from the women in Santa Ana and sell them in the US as an income-generating program and to sustainably support the water system. We've almost got a website up and running for this project, so I'll send it out when we do!

The last thing is a three day symposium on climate change at MIT that Froy and I's environmental group have been organizing for february 2008... we're going to have about 15 events in all sorts of different departments with the goal of connecting and engaging students from all different disciplines to bring their energy and skills to bear on the challenge of mitigating and adapting to climate change.

I hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season with your families and friends.

With much love,

Kendra

P.S. As much as I think about the climate change issue, I couldn't resist including my latest thoughts on this for those who care to read them:

I have to say that is hard for me to remain optimistic about the future of our planet with climate change. The predicted consequences -- droughts, more tropical storms and hurricanes, flooding of coastal lowlands, etc sound like things we can adapt to, like we always have. And that may be true, at least for a while, for those of us who have enough money, insurance, status, etc to always ensure ourselves plenty of food to eat and a new place to live. But it is not true for billions of people in this world. These are the people who will be hit soonest and hardest, and ironically they have the least responsibility for the emissions that are causing the problem in the first place.

Here's an excerpt from an article from the Guardian http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/10/30/the-road-well-travelled/

He is quoting a UN report on the state of the planet:

“If present trends continue, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity by 2025, and two thirds of the world population could be subject to water stress.” Wastage and deforestation are partly to blame, but the biggest cause of the coming droughts is climate change. Rainfall will decline most in the places in greatest need of water. So how, unless we engineer a sudden decline in carbon emissions, is the world to be fed? How, in many countries, will we prevent the social collapse that failure will cause?

The stone drops into the pond and a second later it is smooth again. You will turn the page and carry on with your life. Last week we learnt that climate change could eliminate half the world’s species(9); that 25 primate species are already slipping into extinction(10); that biological repositories of carbon are beginning to release it, decades ahead of schedule(11). But everyone is watching and waiting for everyone else to move. The unspoken universal thought is this: “if it were really so serious, surely someone would do something?”

And that's really the problem... Hurricane Katrina, the droughts in the Southeast, Fires in the west... none of this things can be proven to have been caused by climate change, even though all the science says these sorts of events are going to come harder and faster as climate change progresses. So no one has the urgency to say "we need to do whatever it takes to reduce emissions 80% or 98%, and I need to do whatever it takes in my own life" (the number depends on whether you think all countries should reduce relative to the amount they are emitting now or relative to their population size). And no, I'm not a believer in climate change as a complete doomsday scenario. The world will go on, life will go on. The question is whose lives and what world?

Part of the paradox of environmentalism is that in the best case scenario we fix the problem and people should look back say "well what was the big fuss about?" We managed to do enough about CFC's that caused ozone depletion and Sulfur emissions from fossil fuels that caused acid rain to get those problems under control (to a certain extent, the problem is still around in other countries) such that looking back we might be tempted to say, what were all those environmentalists worried about? I hope that we manage to do enough about climate change that you all look back at this e-mail and think "why was she so worried?" But until the world and especially the united states really step up to the plate on this, I'll remain worried.

If anyone wants to contradict or debate, or talk more about this issue more, I'd love to talk with you -- just send me an e-mail!!

Term is ending

Hi all,

It's been a while; I never seem to get around to writing no matter how often I remind myself I should. Tonight, however, I have a term paper to procrastinate and therefore the perfect excuse!

I would definitely say that life is accelerating in all its facets: I seem to be spending more time on everything and less time on nothing... classes, research, friends, my radio show... and there is this crunch-time vibe rippling through campus as each of us realize that we'll be home for break in two weeks--and all the work we have to do before then :)

Some exciting tidbits to share....

Apparently the guys downstairs have a deal with some people who dispose of dry ice because it keeps showing up in various creative and sometime explosive experiments around here. The coolest part is that the young woman in the foreground of the picture, Jen (a junior on my floor), as she was playing with the vapor pouring out over the sides of the container, commented: "fluid mechanics are so cool. I used to understand them better: It's all about the Navier-Stokes equations that completely describe the motion--they just aren't solvable." It's mind-boggling to think about all the things people here know that I will never, ever know or understand.

I found out that I got into the 4 week class to become certified as an EMT - emergency medical technician - the first responders that arrive in an ambulance. That's what I'll be doing this january, and after that I'll be able to volunteer at the student-run MIT ambulance. It's going to be intense, but I'm really excited at this chance to learn how to give real patient care, and see whether medicine is the life for me.

I'm getting more involved with our radio show "Spherio: The Local Voice of Our Hemisphere" and actually co-hosted one of our recent shows on AIDS. It was not a little bit nerve racking, but awesome at the same time.

Perhaps the biggest life development is that I have mastered the art of procrastination. Up until college I did pretty well with the idea of putting aside schoolwork in favor of anything that was really worthwhile... the problem is that, here, in any given evening there are probably at least three things that meet that definition. There are so many events I'd rather go to, people I'd rather talk to, and ideas I'd rather explore than sit down and do my homework :) But such is life, and it is the best kind of problem to have.

That's all the news I can think of around here -- I try to pull out highlights but really, everything runs together into a mishmosh and what once seemed extraordinary becomes a mundane routine. I do my best to keep it fresh, and for the most part it seems to be working!

Hope you all are enjoying the beginning of winter. I'd love to hear what is going on with you, so please write if you get the urge.