On the first Saturday of the semester, I awoke to the sun beating down through my blinds.  It was a perfect morning for a bike ride by the Pacific, so I set out on my red devil to the bike path, down  Jefferson Street with its little clapboard houses, past Alvarado, which is dubbed "downtown," the Italian festival in Portola Plaza and Fisherman’s Wharf.  The sun reigned over the cloudless sky, the water lapped up against the shore, and the sea lions barked and frolicked in the water.  I even saw one of them doing flips among the kayakers, and hordes of the creatures lay out baking on the concrete, taking over the part of the bike path that is temporarily closed to human traffic.  Some of the sea lions had light brown fuzzy hair, and others were slick black, having just emerged from the water to dry in the sun; all of them looked content sprawled out on the hot pavement.

The sight of the Pacific meeting the horizon, the kayaks' little points of yellow bobbing on the waves and the clumps of sea lions sleeping or barking at one another, all under a California sun beating down on my shoulders, made me feel giddy.  I was glad to be back on the West Coast, on this side of the country where there is so much to discover.

But there’s a small detail missing from this portrait, and it is this: sea lions stink.  I don’t remember ever smelling anything so foul in New York. Riding along the bike path I breathed with my mouth open and my nostrils blocked, but the stench still crept in.  Women walking their babies covered their noses with one hand and scowled.  And the smell and the coarse sea air made my throat hurt.

The odor of the sea lions could be a message, and I am inclined to say that it means that nothing is ever completely what is seems.  I didn’t want to come to Monterey, this little city of 30,000 inhabitants that to me bears no resemblance whatsoever to a real city, because I had been living in New York and Paris and could not bear the thought of returning to a small town the likes of which I spent three in years for university.

I wound up in a place that can be suffocatingly small but which is in some ways as cosmopolitan as a large capital.  In this school of 700 students, over two-thirds come from abroad, and a walk through the tiny campus will expose you to countless languages.  Last year I lived with a woman from Korea, which meant that our house smelled like kim-chee on some afternoons; that I got to eat a special dumpling soup on the Asian new year; and that when I cleaned out our freezer for my parents’ visit, a frozen sardine escaped its plastic bag and flew out at me, silver and rock hard and with guiltless little blank eyes.

I now have one more year in this place I gripe about frequently but that is, secretly, growing on me.  My roommate and I have many projects, which are easy to have before the semester gets going and the work starts piling up; but it is exciting to have projects even if most of them never actually happen.  My classmates and I will work at a free clinic on Wednesdays interpreting for migrant workers and there will be dozens of on-campus activities to organize.

And then of course there are the bike rides by the ocean and the cold nights with clam chowder in a bread bowl down on Fisherman’s Wharf.  And after May it’s the "real world," a world I’ve been waiting so long to discover, where I’ll surely be wistful sometimes for those boring Monterey weekends when I cursed California and the Sunday bike rides when the stench of the sea lions was too much to bear.

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