British Student .ca

While Durham University have 5 weeks off (between term 2 and the final term), UBC has a 4-day weekend but will soon be in exam period and all finished at the end of April. I was considering making a trip to Salt Spring Island, camping with Bob (who would be going as part of a Forestry field trip) and seeing Roy’s house, both who live on my floor here. But the weather forcast of rain scared Bob into not going. It’s probably good as it’s been really windy here and I wouldn’t like our tent to fly off into the sea revealing me and Bob holding each other in fear.

I’m getting scared enough with all the noises around me, the elevator clanging more than ever and trees sweeping against the outside of my bedroom wall while the wind howls through any gap it can find. It took me a while to build up enough courage and run to the commons block (under a covered footpath) next door to get some dinner.

I had been thinking about going to Victoria, the most English place in Canada, by myself. It turns out some of the girls on 5th floor, plus Bob, are going for a day trip tomorrow. I might join them, or just go on my own and bump into them. It requires getting up early to make the most of it, as it’s a few busses to the ferry terminal, and then another bus once on Vancouver Island. If I go then I’m sure I’ll take lots of photos for you as usual.

So following my previous road trip update I went to an Irish pub in Banff (mmm how I miss bangers and mash) for my birthday. My two road companions surprised me by getting a slice of birthday cake and a cribbage board as a birthday present (ahh, that’s why they were being annoying by talking in French earlier).

On Tuesday we left Banff really early to go to Jasper. We made lots of stops on the way so the driving was’t too much for Pierre. One stop included some waterfalls that had frozen over. Near Jasper we walked down the middle of a canyon with an ice floor and lots and lots of ice everywhere.

We made it back to Vancouver on Wednesday evening, I slept at Pierre’s before place before he went snowboarding in Whistler and I moved downtown.

No free Wifi in my room, although there was a Fatport network which I should have been able to use with my UBC university login details (but I got an error). So for three nights I didn’t do much because I couldn’t research and plan anything the night before.

I moved back into my room on Sunday to find it looking rather messy (someone inspecting the rooms had knocked loads of stuff about). I waited for everyone on 6th and 5th floor to come back throughout the day, giving them a shouting welcome if I saw them arrive from my window.

Today term started again, full of fog and rain. The lectures are a bit boring to start with so I’ll probably soon be posting lots of photos of my holiday and if you want I could post some comments about the classes.

My road trip has now finished and I’m staying in a place Downtown for three nights before I can go back to Totem Park. I’m not to far from the public library, where I will be able to get wifi and send this post before 4pm which is midnight in the UK. My midnight will be at 8am UK time.

For the past three years or so my New Year’s celebration has been with a my group of friends in Sunbury. It would probably be at the Haywood’s house this year and most people’s parents would be at another house together. Since we all started going to different universities, a subset of about 6 of us started a traddition called “The Year According To… [insert name]“. In the hours before the countdown we sit together in the house and answer one thing that happened to us for each month of the last year. We take it in turns either to give our full answers or one month at a time, the later helps jog memories and get closer to finished before midnight, I don’t think we’ve ever made it to midnight.

Yes I am going to miss the time with my friends this year. I’m never good at remembering the key events of the year or on what month they took place. There is always an obvious theme with my memory and no guesses as to what big event happened this year and the months leading up to it. Here is the year according to Gregory Marler…

January Busy finishing my application, and deciding about a year abroad. Handed it in just before the 31st.
February Waited to hear about my application, Durham’s International Office delayed the result multiple times/weeks, but just after this month they said I had the place.
March I cycled from Durham, almost to York before getting the train home to London. It took most of the day and I want to retry now I’ll be better prepared, I might do another strentch, maybe York to a station near London.
April
May My plan to map Durham was going really well, with the city mapped out to Neville’s Cross and co-organising a weekend long event inviting people to help map Sunderland.
June Finished second year, at long last. I was quite pleased that my group won the prize for best in the year long Software Engineering project. We would have gone to represent Durham in a the IBM university challenge, but they cancelled it, I would have been in Canada anyway. I cycled across the width of England, including over mountains of the Lake District and Peak District, taking 3 days and leading approximatly 30 other people.
July Worked at a small company for just a few weeks doing small web development tasks that made a difference to their website.
August I was the oldest looking after Emmanuel Church youth camping at New Day in Norfolk for a week. I had great fun and I’ll be sad if I can make it this coming year.
September I flew out to Canada. Had to quickly settle in sorting out things going wrong like banks. Met many more people than I can remember, several I still see.
October Thanksgiving in Canada wasn’t as much as I expected it to be, and Halloween just seemed to be another drinking weekend (although I did “Trick or Eat” collecting for the Vancouver Food Bank).
November I blogged lots, so it seems like a busy month of working getting too much and partying to relieve it. I filled a double bedroom with balloons, ate too much at the winter formal, and saw a Christmas tree appear in the lounge.
December The final exams of my classes this semester, waiting for everyone to finish theirs, and my Alberta/Rockies road trip.

Saturday we left Louise (the rented car) at the hotel and spent the day walking around Calgary with the aid of the C-train. The Glenbow Museum was fantastic, had lunch in Chinatown and walked arouund some parks to play in the snow. We got some Big Rock beer (a brewery in Alberta) to take back to our room.

Leaving Calgary on Sunday we decided to go straight past Banff to Lake Louise and walk all over the lake because it was covered in deep snow (and ice below). We checked in at the Samesun Backpacker hostel, and tried to find a lively bar in town to eat and watch the Vancouver Canucks – Calgary Flames ice hockey game but ended up going pack to the small hostel bar. It turned out well, although we drank a lot. Met some nice people.

It’s not just Monday but my birthday, and I’m using the really bad internet connection at the hostel in Banff. Lots of mixed fun in the snow today, going out now to find somewhere to eat a good steak. I think I’ll only have one beer tonight, if I get a free birthday one from somewhere.

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 classes finished and the study period for final exams started. Yes, final exams, the end to the classes I’m currently taking. Unlike in England where you have to remember everything while the class continues untill May/June exams, in Canada most classes last just one term(called semester, as the term is September to May). I’ll hopefully get round to writing about the classes I did this semester. My exams are as follows.

• Thursday 10th, 8:30am – Software Enginering (to compare it to last year)
• Monday 14th, 3:30pm – Functional and Logical Programming (Haskell, Prolog, and a dash of Scheme)
• Tuesday 15th, 12pm – Human Computer Interaction

The exam period is untill the 23rd December and then the next set of classes starts on the 4th Janurary. As that’s such a short holiday (due to the Winter Olympic reading break) it originally didn’t seem worth a flight home for a few days of Christmas and someone’s 23rd birthday. Now I know that my exams finish early I’m still going to stick to the plan of enjoying my first Christmas away from home, on my own, and in a different contient.

I dreamt about the Trans-Canada 3-day train ride to Toronto or Montreal but left it too late to organise, so maybe I’ll do that in May before leaving Canada. I’m now excited about making a trip Salt Spring Island, where Roy (on my floor) is from, it’s near Vancouver Island. He tells me doesn’t think there are salt springs, but I say we we go looking for them to be a tourist attraction.

I get kicked out of residence for the winter break (and apparently they’ll find me if I hide). So I’ll probably stay in the Gage Towers residence where I can cook for myself, or the hostel on campus. Maybe I’ll burst the campus bubble and stay in a hostel downtown, there seems to be some nice ones looking around. If I find a friend or two then we could save a bit of money on a private room. I know some friends in Haida have said they’re here over the winter break, but of course I’ve forgotten who. Hopefully they’ll leave a comment and even if we don’t stay in the same place we can meet up and do some stuff together.

Last Friday, my morning lecture seemed normal. Except, was there a banana sitting a few spaces along from me, and was the grim reaper in the row in front? Is Software Engineering in Canada that boring that I’m half asleep in a dream lecture? The lecture finished and I went to my Human Computer Interaction (HCI) tutorial/lab. One of the project groups are dicussing their work around a table, but Louise really looks like a turtle. I can’t be dreaming in all my classes of the day.

Ah, it was Halloween Friday, and a few people go to their classes dressed up. In the UK Halloween has always been a poor excuse for teenagers to throw eggs at houses. Nobody has ‘candy’ or sweets ready for children, and you don’t see anyone dressed up as scary disney princesses wondering the streets. In the UK you could sit in a university bar most nights and see various theme-dressed groups pass by on a bar crawl and guess what the title of their social event is.

That hasn’t happened here so I was excited to see everyone dress up. I haven’t yet found good places to buy cheap clothes to mess up (although I made a trip to British Columbia’s biggest shopping mall, the contents not so impressive and size smaller than in Newcastle). On Friday I shaved my lack of facial hair, except my moustache, and put on my one smart (button and collar) shirt. I was a generic John Cleese character. At moments of the night I was either part of the Ministry of Silly Walks, flailing my legs everywhere, or I would yell for Manuel as Basil Fawlty.

On Saturday I went Trick or Eat-ing. A change from Trick or Treating, small groups of university students were assigned two blocks or so and at each door asked for non-perishable food (tins & cans) for the Vancouver Food Bank. Not only good for those who stuggle to afford food, it was great fun and I got to know some people of the other Haida House floors. Everybody was really friendly, especially the one person who said he didn’t want to, and we got quite a few chocolate bars for ourselves. It seemed like a big operation to cover Vancouver from this university, but 362 volunteers turned up and collected 9488 lbs of food, which is about 7590 meals.

I’m now told that it’s Movember, Moustache-November, and I’m not allowed to shave until December. This is the scary part the post title refers to, not Louise dressed up as a turtle. The girls in Haida think I’ll have a massive moustache, but I think they’re going to be greatly disapointed. Let’s see how it goes and I’ll try and get someone to take photos so we can all track progress, my attempts at mirror photography were terrible.

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.