Posts tagged ‘winter’
End of winter break
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.
The Year According To…
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.
Santa Clause Parade
I almost forgot to upload the photoos from Sunday 6th December when I went and watched the Santa Claus Parade downtown. I didn’t see any Santa Claus, but I did see some Father Christmas looking Russians.
Twice a guy quickly walked in front of us filming the whole parade with his compact digital camera. His t-shirt told me it was ButchNews of YouTube fame, but he was too fast for me to take a photo. I focused on still images so if you want to hear the music we had, watch Butch’s view of the parade.
I took 171 photos, but managed to cut it down to 66 for you. I’ve just spent two days fixing some of the problems people had viewing photos, please let me know if there are more issues.
Breaking News: Snow!
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.
Winter Plans
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.
Stanley Park
I had Thursday free and amazingly the rain had run out, so despite it being cold I took my bicycle on the bus to Stanley Park. This was my first trip to Stanley Park so I kept snapping away with my camera. At first I had forgotten it was the middle of a winter weekday but that explains why it was so quiet and peaceful.
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