Day 3 - 01/09/2022 - Santa Clara University and Valley Fair

Today I woke up at 8am, which I take as a sign that I have officially beaten jet lag. I spent the morning at the library of Santa Clara University writing the first entries in this blog and ending up with 3,000 words when I had meant to write 1,000 at most. The last time I was here I was writing my proposal for a special issue of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, "Women and Property in the long Eighteenth Century," which was published just at the end of last year, but this time I promised myself I would do absolutely no work.

I was surprised to see that I still remembered my way to the library. The campus is very large and I haven’t so much as scratched the surface of it, but I still think this one path is always the most important one to learn on any campus, anyway. In the afternoon, I went down to the Valley Fair shopping centre and decided to pay homage to our lords and saviours BTS by having lunch at their favourite American restaurant, Panda Express.

The shopping centre looks just as enormous to me today as it did when we came here when we were 16, though there’s only one store here I really care about: Bath and Body Works. Every single one of their fragrances has that sickly sweet scent I absolutely love and that I always associate with the US. The body sprays may be of peach, sweet pea, cherry, but they all have that exact same scent to me. After a very long time of smelling what was almost literally every single item on that shop, I finally walked out with enough body spray and lotion for the next three years…

The beautiful campus of Santa Clara University