I had applied to Cal without ever visiting the campus. My father had selected it for me, telling me that it was the best deal in this country. “The place is filled with Nobel laureates!” he repeatedly told me. But there certainly appeared to be no Nobel laureates on Telegraph Avenue—at least on that day.

As we continued walking down Telegraph Avenue, my mother upped the ante: “We’ll buy you a car if you move back home.”

“I’m going to stay here,” I told her, trying to convince myself that I had made the right decision. But I couldn’t blame her for trying. I was the first daughter on either side of my family to go away for an undergraduate education. Iranian girls were supposed to stay at home. My own mother had never finished high school and had her first child at 17.

Never in her worst nightmares had she imagined that God would give her an independent daughter, someone who wanted “adventure,” although the definition of that word remained murky. And the farther we walked down Telegraph Avenue, the less adventure I wanted.

I had read descriptions of this famous street before my visit. The authors of these articles had used words like “bustling,” “great for shopping,” and “lively.” The only word that came to my mind was “scary.” Who were these people who were, literally, lying around? Were they students, my future classmates? Was bathing not “in” anymore?

Other than my mother’s continued muffled sobbing, we continued our expedition quietly, while considering places to eat lunch. “Don’t ever eat there,” she instructed. Soberly, we pushed on. “Or there!” she insisted.

I had spent the previous seven years living in a condominium complex in the suburbs of Southern California. The communal pool was cleaned every week, and the flowers on all the streets were replaced before they ever got old. I hated it. It was plastic and soulless. But was this—Telegraph Avenue—what people meant by a town having “character”? I didn’t like the smell of character.

To make my transition harder, I had missed the freshmen orientations and had managed to get an impossibly high dorm lottery number. This meant I had to find my own housing. Through my father’s cousin who knew a Greek gas station owner whose friend owned an apartment building, we managed to rent an apartment off campus, sight unseen. Everyone told us we were lucky. “It could be much worse,” we were told. “At least you’re not at the YMCA or commuting from Oakland.” It was hard for me to imagine anything worse than my decrepit apartment, with its light green formerly shag carpet, but the housing horror stories kept coming my way, which helped make my circumstance seem a bit more bearable. This was the 1980s, when there were simply not enough dorms.

Eventually, on my own, I discovered Moe’s and Cody’s. I learned to navigate my way along Telegraph. And, within the year, I had fallen in love with Berkeley. I ate at all the places where my mother had warned me not to set foot, or mouth. I discovered the pesto mushroom pizza at Fat Slice and the shrimp with broccoli at Jade Garden. I realized that was part of the “adventure” I had been seeking. I learned that the people lying around Telegraph Avenue, were, for the most part, harmless, although they could be rude. My roommate found this out when, while walking down Telegraph in a new miniskirt, a street inhabitant offered some fashion advice: “You’re too fat to be wearing that skirt.” He had spoken the harsh truth, in the manner of many street people, but their audience does not always appreciate the truth. She came home in tears.

A few years ago, I took my children to Berkeley for the first time. We walked down Telegraph. I swear the same people who had been there in 1983, when my parents and I experienced our first street encounters, were still there. There was the tarot reader who had told my roommate that she would meet her husband at Berkeley, although she did not. I thought of asking for a refund. There was the couple selling the chunky pottery, the various vendors of silver jewelry, and, of course, the guy with the political posters. But now the posters were against Bush, not Reagan.

My children loved Telegraph Avenue. They thought it was “lively” and full of character. And, of course, they loved the big slices of pizza. We bought a couple of books at Moe’s, grabbed some dessert at Yogurt Park, and strolled to campus to listen to the bongo drummers—the same drummers who had been there 20 years earlier.

Firoozeh Dumas ’88 moved with her parents to Southern California from Iran when she was seven years old. She is a radio commentator and author of Funny in Farsi (Random House, 2004).