A Week of Work and Procrastinating

This week has been filled with deadlines and mid-term exams. I’ve spent most of my time either poring over textbooks trying to understand everything I’ve been taught from the beginning of term or you know actually sitting my mid-terms.

Mid-terms are a new concept for me as we do not have them at Edinburgh. Everyone else in 3^rd year are old hands at this business of studying for exams while still attending classes, conducting lab reports and doing assignments. I am torn as to weather or not they are beneficial or not. On the one hand they are getting me to study earlier in the term and allowing me to see what I don’t understand well before my final exam in December. However since they come at a time when I still have classes I worry that I have not had enough time to study for an exam which can essentially be worth up to 25% of my final grade. 

This week while I perfected the art of procrastination I was sorting out my wallet and notices that the bank notes all had funny raised bumps on the right-hand corner and I occurred to me that this must be brail. On further research I found out it wasn’t brail because the Canadian government would not dare to assume that all blind people read brail, but a simple coding system. One set of bumps for C$5, two sets of bumps for C$10, three sets of bumps for C$20, ect. I realised that this is one of the many things that represents how wonderfully accepting, friendly and accommodating the Canadian people are and pretty much sums up why I love Canadians. No other country I have been to nor any I could find on a quick Google search do this and I think it is a geniuses idea which allows a simple task like hading over the correct amount of money and knowing your getting the right amount back to remain a simple task even to those who are blind.

Once I started thinking about it this is not the only adaptation I have noticed around campus and the city of Ottawa. The Carleton University campus itself is the most wheelchair accessible place I have ever been, there is literally nowhere on campus you couldn’t go on two wheels. Every building has ramps and elevators as well as automatic doors which allow you to role through with ease. On public transport across the city every vehicle can lower a ramp for easy access and each stop is announced by both the driver and by an LCD sign so that nobody can miss it. This is far superior to any public system that I have ever used before. This says one thing to me about the Canadian people they don’t just say they care about equality but they are actively trying to achieve it. This and this alone make me proud to live in Canada- even if it is only for a year!

Exploring Ottawa

Hello again from the beautiful city of Ottawa. Fall is closing in quickly and the trees are turning a dazzling array of reds, oranges, yellows and pinks. The temperature is falling fast and the Canada Geese are heading south to ovoid the approaching winter.

 

This weekend a friend who I worked with in the summer visited from her university about four hours south of Ottawa in central New York State. This gave me the opportunity to explore some of Ottawa’s more touristy spots as well as put school work on the backburner for a while.

 

Saturday we spent walking through the city and soaking up the atmosphere as well as the poring rain! We toured the majestic parliament buildings and explored the many monuments and statues that scatter across Parliament Hill. In doing so we stumbled across one of Ottawa’s most famous oddities, the Stray Cat Sanctuary. This is a small wooden structure which looks like a small castle with little doors allowing access sleeping spaces full of hay. There is also many small dishes and plates where local and tourists alike bring food to help these needy animals and ensure they survive the harsh Canadian climate.

 

We headed to Zack’s diner for lunch to avoid the worst of the rain and dry out in the cheesy novelty of the 50’s style diner and enjoy the so greasy but so good food. After lunch we explored the Byward market a fantastic market in the centre of the city with open air stalls selling everything from fresh produce to native crafts and original artwork.

 

Sunday brought better weather so of course we decided to visit a museum. The Natural History museum is a cheep but interesting place with four floors of exhibits including a lot of dinosaur skeletons which appeals to both the Geo-scientist and the ten year old in me. Encouraged by the sunny afternoon we walked back to campus along the cannel and took in the beautiful fall scenery and incredible number of birds which flock the waters.

 

On Monday we had intended to visit the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Musical Ride Centre to see the Mounties practice their musical parades. After working out how to get there and enduring a forty-five minuet bus rise across the city we discovered we had missed the last performance of the day. However the day was not a complete loss as we returned to the city centre to attend a poetry recital run by the Ottawa Writers Festival which is running all month. We ended the evening with Lebanese food and a visit to another one of the city’s great oddities, Zaphod Beeblebrox’s Bar. This is a fantastic bar themed on the Fantastic Sci-fi books- The hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. As well as having amazing live bands every single night they serve ‘the best dink in the universe’ named the ‘Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster’ which is like having your ‘brain smashed out with a slice of lemon’. So the night ended in the comfort of good music and good drinks.

Tuesday we both returned to the reality of school and the work we should have been doing all weekend.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

This weekend I celebrated my first ever thanksgiving holiday- it was an exciting in weekend of crazy travelling, over eating and long lost relatives. I spent the weekend with my mum’s cousin her son, husband, dog and five cats in the hot and sunny city of Toronto.

 

On Saturday we went to the birthday part of a random family member- I’m not exactly sure what her exact relationship was to me but it was nice to meet more of my family. We had lunch in the revolving restaurant on top of the CN tower. The view was amazing the whole city was spread out below us stretching off into the distance until the smoggy haze swallowed it up. As the humidity built up the haze moved closer ad a huge thunderstorm rolled in. For a while we could watch the lightning flashing between the clouds and hitting the lighting rods on the top of the buildings before the clouds got too dense to see anything. Fortunately by the time we went down to the glass floored area the clouds had cleared and we could see the dizzying five hundred odd meters to the ground.

 

Sunday was the day we celebrated thanksgiving and I got to meet more friendly smiling Canadians who are connected to me in some strange way or another. We had a traditional thanksgiving dinner- roasted vegetables, turkey, stuffing, potatoes and even pumpkin pie for desert! We all ate until be could eat no more!

 

Thanksgiving in Canada is interesting because it is not celebrated for the same reason that it is in the USA. In the USA it celebrated to recognise the help the first pilgrims got from the Native Americans. They thought then skills such as catching eel and growing corn which allow the first pilgrims to survive in the new world. In Canada however, it is celebrated earlier in October and marks the end of the harvest. It is to give thanks for a successful year’s crop which will allow then to survive the long harsh winter.

 

On Sunday evening we visited the Chinese lantern festival which was being held down by the lake and is one of the many annual festivals that celebrate diversity in the city. The colossal handmade lanterns were astoundingly beautiful and incredibly intricate with things like moving parts and individual facial features. The incredible colures and shapes sparkled out across the lake and up into the night sky.

 

My final visit in the city of Toronto was to the distillery district. This is a historical pat of town which boasts buildings from as long ago as 1832- recent in European standards but incredibly old buildings by Canadian. It was a lovely area with temperatures reaching the high around 28 ^oC we wandered around the area eating ice-cream and checking out the little boutiques, backers, chocolate stores and museums.

 Before I knew it, it was time to say good-buy to my family and get back on the bus to fight the holiday weekend traffic back to Ottawa.