This week has been quite compared to the last and has slipped past surprisingly quickly in a blur of exams and studying and work. It worries me that there have been many weeks when I have felt this happening and I start to wonder if I have wasted my time here in Canada. In light of this disconcerting feeling I have tried to sum up my feelings and experiences of the country (so far) in my blog this week.
So I have eventually returned from my whirlwind tour of the USA that we crammed into our ten day spring break. The original plan included two twelve hour bus journeys, two plane flights, three cities and two different coasts.
Note this should have been posted arround 13/02/08
This week Ottawa is in the middle of the Winterlude festival. This tradition is a tradition celebrated in many Canadian cities and is the Canadian winter festival. In Ottawa these festivities are centred on the Rideau Canal as it freezes in the winter to become the longest skate way in the world.
For me this week has been dominated by sports, more specifically my confused and muddled attempt to understand the scary new lands of North American sports.
The most exciting sporting event of the weekend was the near miraculous win of the Toronto Maple Leafs over the Ottawa Senators for what must have been only the third time this season. Continue reading this entry »
Quebec City is truly amazing, a beautiful winter wonderland. The heart of the city known as ‘Old Town’ sits perched on the highest point overlooking the river. In this area the streets winds randomly up and down the hilly landscape. These narrow streets are further closed in by the brick buildings each with an individual character then and this whole shambles in enclosed by the city’s defensive walls. From the battlements the whole of the surrounding landscape can be surveyed. Bellow this defensive boundary is ‘New Town’ built after the risk of attack from first the British and later the Americans had passed. This area squeezed under the cliff and linked by a number of seemingly endless stairways is traditionally is area of merchants and the streets are filled with shops and cafes squeezed into tiny units selling everything for clothes and shoes to pastries to glassware blown on site.
Now of course I am not suffering from culture shock, I have been in Canada since September so any differences in culture I long since got over. However the start of the new semester has seen a few exchange students leave and a few new ones arrive and I started thinking about when I first arrived in Canada.
This week I feel I am finally settling back to the routine and the rhythm of living in Ottawa. Classes are running full force and I’m already starting to plan for midterms and start researching term papers. I’m spending more time than I would like in the library but a least the reading gets done when I’m there. All my flatmates have returned from all over Canada and the globe this weekend so our first chocolate night is planned for tonight. I can’t wait for a night of girly movies, chocolate, ice cream and gossip, oh and did I mention the chocolate.
Well my first week of the new semester is almost over and I have been thrown full force back into the crazy mayhem that is university life. Classes have started up and I have been almost immediately drowned in all the assignments and reports that are due only a worrying few weeks away. However all the classes look interesting and enjoyable, well at least as much as can be expected from these things. All except from my Structural Geology labs where my non-Carleton background is screamingly obvious in the huge chunk of background knowledge which is missing. So I have spent most of my free time this week perfecting the art of Steronets. Allot of this has been by myself, just staring confused at my textbook but also with the helpful and ever patient Teaching Assistants. Who have explained and re-explained as I failed to grasp the concept again and again. However the light has finally dawned and things can only get easier from that, at least I certainly hope so.
After my whirlwind two weeks at home I have returned to the relative calm of Ottawa. The Christmas break has been hectic to say the least. In the past two weeks I have celebrated three different this Christmas, New Year and my 20th birthday. For New Year I celebrated at the Glasgow Street Party with my boyfriend, we got to see some great new Scottish bands and fireworks when the clock struck midnight. My birthday was a somewhat less extravagant affair where I just spent the day hanging out with my family before we all had dinner together and I got cake and presents!
Yes it’s hard to believe Christmas is here, not only because time had raced by since September and I’m having trouble believing my time in Canada is half over but also because a few evens have occurred in the past week which made me think that it would never get here.
