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Five weeks ago I thought up a great birthday surprise for Tree on 5th floor. She loves xkcd, and wanted to start a student society just to get funding for a playpen ball pit. Because university students are possibly grown-ups now (follow that link if you don’t understand).

Small plastic balls are quite expensive. Ballons aren’t that much cheaper, but they are bigger so can cover more area cheaply. I made several calculations using the ball pit calculator and randomly walking in to Max & avin’s room to measure a double room. The double room sadly requires more ballons, but gives us the possibility of a getting access to make it a surprise.

Three weeks before her birthday, messages and secret conversations started going around. I was worried that Beverly wouldn’t let us in because I always seem to be where people are making noise when she’s trying to sleep or study. But she was so nice then she helped way beyond just letting us in the room. I bought 225 ballons that said 14 inch size, and we blew them up around 7-10 inch diameter (the yellow ones popped easily). The room ended up about 3 times my calculations, so I think they have a packing efficiency much closer to 30-40% rather than 65%.

We blew lots up on Tuesday night, and then the 5th floor girls went to White Spot for a birthday dinner on Wednesday evening. Me and Steph sadly had to make excuses to to join them, but it added to the feeling that this was a low-key, not really bothered, birthday. The surprise was so great, and Tree has been similing ever since, that I had to upload lots of photos. The captions include some more of the story and the trouble we had moving them about lots of locations. They only miss the stage where my bedroom was filled with girls and ballons, because I was having to get work done in the computer lab.

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Happy Thanksgiving Weekend to you! Just to confuse you Canadian thanksgiving is a different date to America, it’s the 2nd Monday in October which is a public holiday. Thanksgiving is totally foreign to me so I had little idea what would take place. The 3 day weekend prompted most people to go home or to relatives, making my residence very quiet. Those that were left managed to make just as much noise on Friday/Saturday and drink lots to keep the can collection growing.

On Sunday morning I went to church. It was announced that someone couldn’t make it at the last moment so I don’t know if that spurred a change of plan or if the service was different due to thanksgiving. It started with worship and the lead pastor on guitar. Then we had communion together which is a weekly occurance in the Canadian churches I’ve been to (it’s not so frequent in the UK) by dipping the bread in the wine (rather than taking a sip of wine after eating the bread). Usually next would be a sermon but instead a few large rolls of paper had been pinned to the walls with the writing “I’m thankful to God for…“. We could write or draw our responses (the children had made some interesting drawings throughout the service). There was some more worship and then the service finished.

On Sunday evening my building, Haida House, had a semi-formal dinner in the ground floor study lounge. I dug out the one collared shirt I brought here and went down. It was an enjoyable time, actually sitting down and talking to the people I live with. A resonable turn out of roughly 25 (including some from our neighbours Salish House) from the 180 or so who should be living there. After the dinner everybody was to tired to have much of a party, well after a rest the party started up just after midnight.

Side-tracking as I do, along one of the main campus roads sits a large white cain (6ft tall) painted with a red E on all three sides, to quote wikipedia “exists not because it was installed in accordance with UBC’s planning and building process, but because the engineering students simply put it there.“. It is commonly the target of repainting by other faculty’s students to have their letter and colour. On Thanksgiving Sunday night the Haida pranksters were out and painted it fully in our colour of the night, then super glued on coloured featers and a beak to turn the cairn into a turkey.

I made full use of the Monday off and slept in to 1:30pm. In the evening (5pm because they eat so early here) I walked over to Acadia Park, the family houses on the other side of campus. A couple even newer to Point Grey Communtiy Church had invited me to dinner with them and their extended family. In so long I haven’t been in a family house where you can take a second helping without swiping your dinner card, and kids run around fighting and tickling each other.

It’s been a busy weekend and I’m sure to have missed out some blog-worthy stories, but now I need another sleep until my 12:30pm class Tuesday class.

On my second day, and first proper day, at UBC I went and had lunch outside the SUB (Student Union Building) and then took my camera for a walk around the campus. Later on in the day I had lunch downtown with Steven, an American student I shared a cab from the Airport with. The last ttask of the day was to go shopping. I arrived on Tuesday and the dinning hall didn’t open for term until Saturday, so I had to find food that could be cooked/prepared using my residences limited facilities. Clicking one of the images below will pop-up the photo over the page and the captions should allow you insight into how this day went. Click left and right to flick throught all of them.

33 images in slideshow