Saturday: Oh My God

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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 straight and just went on and on forever into the horizon. Where the roads did cross each other it was done in a nice, neat, symmetrical pattern. If the rest of Canada was as organised as their road plans, I was in for a bit of a culture shock coming from a place 10miles from spaghetti junction.

We Definitely Ain't In England Anymore

As we got off the plane and joined the queue for immigration we spotted 2 other girls with a lot of hand luggage and a wad of paper in hand. "Study abroad-ers?" I asked, "How'd you guess?" I reached the front of the queue and handed over my passport and visa certificate to a guy who looked a bit too much like David Hasselhoff. Everything was done so slowly. In the U.K it would have taken all of 5 minutes to ask me 3 questions, type somat into the computer, press print, and yell "next!" Halfway through sorting out my visa, the boss rang and they organised a golf game for Thursday.

We found our luggage, and the taxi, and set off for McMaster. The roads were wide and very similar to those in Europe. As we travelled further and further Naomi, Lisa, and I began pointing all the differences, and there were a lot! Most of the buildings were really square; the cars were either black, white, grey, cream, or burgundy. And they were big. This is not a country in which the Vauxhall Corsa would sell. The housing estates were as nice and neat as they had appeared from the sky and most had pool. A good sign we thought.

Here Goes Nothing

We arrived at the university and stepped out of the taxi to be greeted by about 20 people in brightly coloured t-shirts and dungerees jumping around and singing to us at the top of their lungs. This was new. They took our bags up to our rooms whilst we went and picked up our keys. As we walked around the campus we saw it was the same at every residence, a load of 2nd and 3rd years clapping and singing whilst a bewildered 1st year stood there awkwardly waiting for them to finish and seriously considering getting back into the car. I reached my room to find my luggage hadn't so set off to find it. It eventually turned out to be 2 floors up, so I retrieved it and returned to say a proper hello to my new room mates. We'd already emailed each other and had been talking over facebook so I felt like I knew them already. Lorraine is French, an exchange student like myself, and going into engineering. Sheree and Sarah are both from Toronto and both going into the Social Science faculty with me. Periodically we were heard loud banging on the door to find that the welcome week Reps (the people who greeted us from the car), or people from other flats on our floor. We met the lads from next door Ming, Scott, and Kelvin and all headed off for dinner, and my first Canadian meal.

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