My plans to go to a friend’s for thanksgiving unfortunately fell through and so spent the weekend on campus. Luckily enough however, my friend Anna also stayed here and so one crisp, autumn, Sunday afternoon we went for a walk into Coots Paradise, the nature reserve adjacent to the campus. We followed a path behind one of the residences into the woods and down to the lake. Now I’d heard that autumn in Canada was amazing but to be honest it didn’t exactly sound that remarkable; I mean leaves change colour in England too. However, when you put thousands of these [View Full Entry]

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So as some of you have pointed out (in one case repeatedly; thanks), I haven’t actually written that much since welcome week. The reason for this is simple; not that much has happened. I am living in a country where students actually work. Where people will choose homework over going out. Where pretty much everyone goes home for the weekend. Coming from a country where procrastination is considered both a sport and an art form, and where getting out of your home is the main reason people go to university, this is a bit of a culture shock for me. It [View Full Entry]

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Before we got to Canada, some of the exchange students and I had decided to go and see a baseball game; the Toronto Blue Jays vs. the Boston Red Sox. In the end, because the stadium was in Toronto itself, we decided to make a weekend of it. Due to the fact I had a field trip and some others had lab classes on Friday afternoon, we split up. Alex, Natalie and I were to get a lift into Toronto later on and meet up with the others at the game. It takes about an hour and a half to get [View Full Entry]

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So Thursday came, and with it came classes. Somehow in all the madness of the first few days I’d managed to forget about the whole work side of Uni; the real reason why I was here. Every building at Mac has an acronym so asking for directions made me sound like some sort Bond girl. My Thursday timetable said I was in TSH, BSB, MDCL and PC. Not only that, but every building has a ridiculous number of rooms and apparently very little logic to them. (I’m still trying to work out how BSB340 isn’t the room immediately above BSB240.) Luckily [View Full Entry]

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Everyday on the wall by the main doors to the building, the reps put up a poster showing the day’s activities list. On Wednesday’s written besides 3pm-6pm (after the clubs fest and before the pj parade) were written the two magic words we’d been longing to hear all week: “Free Time”. So, after going around the campus and signing up for all the groups we wanted to, we had lunch and then tried to decide what to do with our free time. Funnily enough, because every minute of every day had been organised so rigidly for us over the first few [View Full Entry]

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Tuesday, faculty day, and because I was being a first year that week it meant I was in social science. Woo! We all arrived at the football field in our blue t-shirts and had to register. Here we were given a coloured headband and told our team name. You would have thought these would have been fairly simple like Team A, Team 4, or even Team Light Green. It wasn’t. For some reason the organisers like to confuse things a lot so when my coloured head band was called I was welcomed to team “Alpha Sigma Beta”. My thoughts exactly! We [View Full Entry]

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I’m not sure if I mentioned this before but Mac likes cheering. And the annual “Bed Race” is the focal point for this. An hour before the race we had a Pep Rally. Everyone from our halls met up outside and we literally covered ourselves in purple paint from head to toe, writing Bates on any skin available. Whilst doing this we practised our cheers, learnt even more, and generally got high on excitement and paint fumes. We then walked down to where the race was being held and queued up with the other Halls. This lead to more cheer-offs, including [View Full Entry]

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We were awoken at a ridiculous time Sunday morning, by the reps shouting and banging on our door. We all dressed in our purple Bates t-shirts and they took us all down to the student centre where I had my first Canadian pancakes. Having been told by far too many people that Canadian pancakes are the nicest in the world I was pretty excited. They were obviously nothing like “real” pancakes; they were too small and too fat, plus it wasn’t Shrove Tuesday, but after loading them up with fruit and cream and avoiding the maple syrup at all costs, I [View Full Entry]

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As the plane started to descend below the clouds we could see Canada properly for the first time. It was really, really, flat! Any height was given by buildings like the CN Tower, although, there was a whopping great lake. I knew Lake Ontario was huge but I'd never imagined it to be that big. At first I thought it was the horizon but as the plane tilted in to land I realised that I could see America faintly in the distance on the other shore. All the housing estates were built in identical, neat patterns and the roads were ridiculously [View Full Entry]

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Roughly two years ago I was sitting in a hot, crowded, and rather small lecture theatre. I was 17 and being told that I had the opportunity to go live and study in another country for 8 months. At that moment in time, this was the first university I'd ever been in, and this was just a visit on an open day. The prospects of living in another part of the country without my parents didn't yet seem real, and so to be honest I wasn't really paying that much attention. Yes it would be nice to live abroad, to find [View Full Entry]

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