British Student .ca

Last night I went out to a very nice French restaurant and learnt enough French to order Escargot à l’aïl as a starter, Canard confit for the main, and later Crème brulée as desert. That’s a bit daring with the starter, but the garlic sauce was just amazing, and I quite like escargot (snails) that was in it. Canard confit was duck with a sweet sauce and vegetables. French cooking is so amazing I think it could make me love any food, even beetroot which I previously hated. The quebecois waiter wasn’t so amazed at the effort I made to speak French well (for the benefit of the blog I don’t know how to spell ‘please’ in French, but I said it well).

This morning church was hilarious because it was the children’s Christmas Nativity Play, or Christmas Pageant as they call it here. Baby Jesus was played by a girl, the wise men/kings carried a younger king in a box, which broke by the time they made it to the front. I think there were a few angel sheep, and the computer froze for the video map. But we all went with the flow and it was brilliant, a lot of hard work must have gone into that.

After the service I left the building to see snow falling and a thin covering of the pavement. Wahoo! I was so excited and now I have a big burst of energy. I might be visitng Alberta over the Christmas break, so it will be good to climatise to the cold. My weather widget currently says 0°C as it has been for the last few days (without snow), 1°C in Newcastle/Durham, and 4°C in London. But here we have snow, so it’s better.

On Friday night I was strangely able to block out the noises in the building, and I was asleep before 1am, for the first time since September. I got briefly woken up around 1:30am with banging on my door to perform floor photographer duties. I ignored whatever was going on and continued to enjoy my sleep. In the night (with the elevator turnedd off) a Christmas miracle had happened, there was a 10-12 foot tree in our lounge!

Saturday night was Totem Park Winter Formal. Everybody who wasn’t away skiing dressed up smartly. Even the cafeteria was dressed up smartly and draped in white and black sheets for this free meal. Chatting away to the staff has paid off and they gave me large helppings of everything, “You love jello, it’s all you can eat and tomorrow you have to pay for it, so take lots“. Not quite the same feeling as a Durham formal, but good to see a change in eating pattern. After the formal we spent a couple of hours on 5th floor sharing a cheese and veg platter between the two floors.

The evening gave way to the “Totem Gets Classy” dance in the ballroom. I wasn’t planning to go to this, until I had a few beers from my “Winter Mingler” selection of Granville Island Brewing ales. I also found someone with spare tickets. It looked good inside, and the sweat and pushing reminded me of post-formal Klute nights. It finished at midnight, but then me, Steph, and Fridge Boy watched a movie in David’s bed.

I felt fine at church the following morning and the first advent candle was lit, but from the afternoon onwards my stomach couldn’t stop telling me it was unwell. There’s nowhere in residence that has good ventilation or doesn’t smell bad, where I can sit down and rest. I went to dinner with a Roy and David, but the serving area made me feel so hot that I just got orange juice. Something isn’t right if I’m not able to tuck into dinner, but I just sat and chatted with them for a while. I continued to be really hot at this point so I left the guys to get some fresh air, as I got to the end of the table I finally felt like I might puke something up. I ran to the washrooms, or maybe just the bins before the door out. Making it just to the bin area my running gave the effect of projectial vommiting, and I reinacted with another couple of loads.

One of the managers came round the corner “What’s the hold up here?” as I was stood waiting to say sorry once I had stopped throwing up. She didn’t talk to me, just around me, “Why does everyone throw up here” as she stopped everyone from leaving, despite space to walk round. Again ignoring me she said “Can’t you throw up in the washroom or garbage can“. Where does she think I was running to, and maybe it’s her food (which is all I eat) that makes people throw up.

I tried to just sleep it off, but it’s hard with all the noise taking place on the floor. The cafeteria food isn’t good if you’re feeling ill, most annoyingly they hardly seem to have potatoes to go with the roast meat. I went to the late night grill and shop that evening and just before my turn in line they announced last orders for the grill (5 mins early for last orders). Thankfully the staff are much nicer than the managers and I was able to get 2 slices of toast, even though it’s not on the late night grill menu. I already have marmite from Safeways (next to Vanilla extract, in the cooking section) to spread on it. That and sipping almost-flat Ginger Beer (called Ginger Ale here), is the food prescription when sick in my family. Still, it didn’t feel enough like home, it probably needed to be made by an unwilling sibling.

Last night the Christmas (actually a bad looking conifer) tree had to disappear, because it was apparently a fire hazzard. Something about it not being 3ft but taller than the room, and curved at the top to fit in. So I saw that go down in the elevator, and then went to bed. It was no biggy skipping my two classes this morning. A lecture for the class I’ve already done, and optional group lab time (I’ll have to make up the work to my group later). I’m feeling slightly better, I had noodles for dinner and part of the meat I got with it. I don’t want to feel bad, so I’ll try and got my body to fight the rest of the illness off.

Think of the poor students, in a new place without their mummys, missing home and not getting any nice treats. It’s a big thing to get post at university, especially packages. Some people have had several care packages (containing a letter, maybe photos, and sweets/candy), where others get nothing. Me and my parents had agreed that it was to expensive to send a package overseas, and I’m a big grown up 3rd year really. However I already told you how my mum didn’t understand how much home cooking is missed and she blogged a virtual care package to make me miss it even more.

Well it’s been suggested here that those who don’t get care packages should send their mean parents a package. Being a poor student I don’t have money to splash away doing that, but then up popped a twitter message from a mapping friend, Dan Karran containing a coupon code. It was for a free box from Graze.com who send healthy fruit and nut lunch packages using the UK postal service, Royal Mail. Although recently the UK (mainly London?) has had postal stikes, so Graze cleverly adapted and I think my mother got an extra helping of nuts and maybe dried fruit to replace the fresh stuff. This was good as the package arrived a day late because Royal Mail are clearing up the backlog since the strikes, usual service in my opinion.

Thanks for the coupon Dan. Sorry Graze for only using my account for your freebie, I’ll have to leave it to my mum to decide if it was nice. To the students who are lucky/spoilt enough to get care packages, what do they actually contain?

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.