Canada

After last weekend’s crazy antics, this week got off to a good start with my HIST402 presentation on Monday evening. I presented on the South African Truth Commission and I think it went surprisingly well. There was a really good discussion afterwards, and although I couldn’t answer all of them, I felt like I did a good job. I don’t know when I’ll get my marks though, so who knows if I’ll ever find out exactly.

On Tuesday I attended the Volunteer Abroad info session put on by the Volunteer Connections department of the AMS (UBC’s student union). It turns out one of my neighbour’s works for that department and coordinated the session! Small world, eh? Anyway, it was really interesting to hear about all the programs available to UBC students. There definitely appear to be more grassroots programs to Africa or even other provinces in Canada than are offered to Sydneysiders. I was so excited by this seminar that I’ve decided to try and establish similar ones back home. Now I have another thing to look forward to back in Sydney – yay!

Wednesday night was one of those spontaneously awesome evenings. I had plans to stay in and just bum around at home, but instead Hanneke invited me to join some others for dinner downtown. It was raining, but I capitulated, and it was fantastic! About 15 of us came and we went to an excellent Greek restaurant called Stephos. There I met Ryan and had an awesome meal – lamb shanks and everything! Clearly as students we’re suffering here! We tried to get tickets to Bond afterwards, but everywhere was sold out. Seems you can’t have everything.

Thursday a HUGE group of us (40 at last count) went out to celebrate Katie’s birthday. It also served as a big farewell for the semester, and was held at the Cellar, which has a Britpop night on Thursdays. Everyone has been raving about it recently, so I thought I’d go and check out what all the fuss was about. It’s a dungeon essentially, but it was great fun – the music was wicked, and some PWC guy bought us all alcohol, mistaking us for Accounting grads! Usually I would be ashamed that someone made that presumption about me, but this time I was grateful!

I didn’t get home till 4am because I took up an offer from Maybelle and Lauren to have tea at their friends’ house. Thus I ended up at St Andrew’s Hall (behind Gage) at Aish’s place with Jen and the others. It’s an awesome apartment, and the same cost as Gage! She has a dishwasher! A dishwasher I tells you! In student accommodation! Grr!!

On Friday Sean headed east to Kelowna to look for work at the ski resorts. It was really sad to see him go, but I have his guitar so he’ll be back! That night Julian, Tamlyn, Zoe, Clare and I went to have dinner at the Noodle Box restaurant on 4th (SO good) and see Kate perform at the Annex in Gastown. It was a great little bar and Kate was excellent. This was the first time I’d see her perform and she was really impressive. Can’t wait to see her back in Sydney – she’s destined for big things.

The weekend meant one thing – SNOW! I can’t believe it, on Friday night when we were coming back from Kate’s it started to get really cold. Freezing cold actually. When I went to bed at 2am it looked like it was going to snow. And snow it did! We’ve had it for 2 days now and it doesn’t look like melting anytime soon. Vancouver usually gets a few inches of snow occasionally, but traditionally it melts almost immediately. This time, however, we received about a foot of snow and then the temperature dropped to -10, so all the snow froze. It’s made an awesome environment for making snow angels and snowmen and what not, but the roads and buses are screwed! Because the city is really not used to this level of snow, there are only a few snow ploughs and all the electricity wires are above ground and have a tendency to fall. So far, so good, but we’ll see!

And so 90% of conversations begin amongst us exchangies. It’s ridiculous to imagine that we came here 12 weeks ago for GALA not knowing anyone. We’ve had the best time, and now the business end of the term is upon us and everyone is stressing over finals and term papers. Which is why these blog posts aren’t as exciting as those before it. Even though I’m on pass/fail here at UBC, it feels odd to not put my best into my work so I haven’t really slacked off as much as I thought I might. I guess that’s a good thing, it’s just a shame that it will never be shown on my transcripts.

On Wednesday this week some of us saw the Vancouver Giants hockey again. This time against the Seattle Thunderbirds, which made for a much more even and exciting game. Not too mention violent – the only thing missing was blood on the ice. Ah well, there’s always next time!! The Giants are the Van youth team, and most of them are dying to get onto the A team – the Canucks, so they play hard, fast and rough. It’s awesome to watch and they are never complacent, which makes for great hockey. I’m even beginning to understand the rules and what not. I am Canadian!

Thursday we received the interesting news that Vancouver’s water supply has been contaminated by the soil erosion due to excessive rain. This means that we can’t drink the tap water until further notice. Hmmm… this is Van right? Not Bangkok!? Haha, I’m used to living in places where the water is contaminated, but I never expected it here! Everyone is a bit in shock, and has made a run for the bottled water at every possible place. The biggest shock is Starbucks has had to close, as their water isn’t filtered! What will us West-Coasters do without our daily Espressos!

The big event for me (and about 70 of my closest friends) was the Gage E13B 90s Party! Clayton, Rob, Craig, Isaac, Sebastian and I had been planning this since the day after our last one, way back in September, and it rocked out! I had SOO much fun planning it all (doesn’t that sound like me!?) – the music, costumes, decorations, etc. We emptied out the entire apartment, borrowed blacklights (UV lights) off Jess, set up the stereo system, created ice buckets – the whole deal! We’d invited about 50 people, but the word spread as people just kept on coming! Many of whom had never met us – one of the pro’s and con’s of living in Gage I guess – but everyone was fairly well behaved. There was just SO much crap to clean up on Saturday morning. I have photos of the aftermath on the web and it just doesn’t do it justice. We had to move the oven, the fridges and everything to clear up puddles of beer – great fun!

AND to top it off, Sean (from USyd) arrived to join us! It’s great to have him here, as it gives him time to sort out his plans for the next leg of the trip. Unfortunately he isn’t feeling too well, so I’m not sure how much he got out of the party, but we definitely enjoyed having him here!

After the crazy night that was Friday, you would have thought we would have slowed down, but it appeared as if we were on a roll. Saturday was set to be just as manic, with Carl’s House Party rumoured to include all four quads of South 17. As it turns out, the RAs heard the rumours too and the whole thing was shut down fairly soon, which sucked. We moved down to Rob’s place (to the complete surprise of his roommates!) and stayed there for a while. It was great fun, although I went to bed fairly early. After all, I had a Krafty Kuts gig on Sunday!

Krafty Kuts is one of the world’s best breaks DJs, and he definitely did not disappoint. He played at Bar None in Yaletown, which is an awesome bar, and quite small, so there were only about 150-200 people there. The music was great and his mixing is impressive, to say the least. By 1am though I was buggered so I headed home. SO worth it though!

Wow! I can’t believe it is Week 10 already! The term is nearly over … which means this trip is nearly over!! I spent so long planning this trip that this feeling is just strange. There’s no way I’m ready to leave! I do have an awesome final few weeks planned, and then the two months of travelling afterwards, thank goodness!

AND it looks like I’ll have an internship in DC after all! A friend of my father is looking to begin a tuition program with underprivileged children in DC and Baltimore, and he has asked me to help out! Definitely my kind of thing! And another friend has offered me accommodation which is fantastic! Can’t wait!!

On Tuesday this week I handed in another paper – this time for POLI365: Asian International Relations. It was on Chinese-Indian relations following the Cold War. Quite interesting, but I just don’t feel like I’m getting a huge amount out of this class. Most of the discussion is so descriptive, and none of us have any background knowledge of the region (South Asia) so whilst we are learning a lot, it’s just not at a university level.

Wednesday’s Pit Night was quite fun, but with Amanda on crutches (kudos to her for joining us!) and the music as bad as it was, it just didn’t live up to previous visits. On Thurs I attended the IRSA (International Relations Students Association) careers evening, with representatives from the US State Department, Canadian DFAIT and the volunteer organisation YouLead. It was really worthwhile going and even though I can’t (through virtue of citizenship) work for any of these places, hearing their stories was great. There’s no ‘set’ route to a job in IR or development, so the more alternatives I hear about, the better.

The rest of the week was spent doing mostly domestic things: laundry, study, cooking etc. I met with my ZOOM photography group on Friday, although so far no real decisions have been made because we’re all too busy. Shame actually, because it had such promise. Now it just looks like I won’t get anything done before I leave.

Sunday night (being part of a long weekend – Remembrance Day) meant one thing: Lotus Long Weekend. Everyone I had spoken to about this had rave reviews, and so a group of us went to see what all the fuss was about. I have to say it’s the closest I’ve come in Van to a ‘real’ club. Three floors, three separate music tastes (electro/mash-up; techno; hard house/breaks). The music was loud, the booze expensive and all was peachy until Amanda had her phone and purse stolen and Julian got into a fight with a wigga! On the plus (!) side Amanda called a sex line from my cell accidentally! Certainly topped off an interesting night. We’ll see how interesting it is when I get my bill!

Week 9 was a really interesting week. I did a whole lot of things with new groups of people and it went very well. To be honest I wasn’t too sure how it would all work out, but it was great – and the best part was they weren’t Aussie!! Yay!

The first part of the week was spent finishing off my POLI370 paper on Cluster Bombs and their legality. God it was hard work, but really quite rewarding to get done. Definitely the most work I’ve done for 2000 words, and a really interesting topic.

The second part of the week couldn’t have been more different – Thurs was Gladiator, Friday was Borat, Saturday was the Frat Graffiti party and Sunday was Roosters!

Gladiator was another UBC Rec event (our last one actually ). It was based on the American Gladiators TV show – so we had challenges involving horizontal bungee, jumping castle, mazes and the like. We competed in our Longboat team (minus Michele and with Amanda) and got t-shirts made for the occasion! It was awesome fun, and we lost BIG time (except in the one event that required brain power – the maze – there we came first by a huge margin). The big downer though was Amanda’s injury in the first event – Eliminator. She fell badly on the jumping castle and twister her ankle badly, so she had to go to the doctors and get crutches. Hope you get better Amanda!!

Seeing Borat on its opening night was something Chris and I had discussed for ages. There was even a Facebook group dedicated to it – now that’s official! There was a huge group of us that the movie was almost incidental. I’m still undecided on whether I like it, it’s very degrading and shocking at times (given that most of the interviews are real!), but it is such base humour. Overall though I think it’s unique enough to warrant all the rave reviews.

Saturday was my first real Frat party, and it didn’t really live up to my expectations. Granted it was the Jewish frat (Alpha Epsilon Phi), so things are always more low-key there, and the cops shut down the party before we even got there (supposedly for having more alcohol than they are allowed for the number of attendees). We moved to the Pit with our white t-shirts and marker pens and began to write on friends, strangers and basically anyone that wanted it. There was an 80s party going on at the Pit, but we had a far larger numbers and brought the fun! I met Chris A there and his sister, went to his office in the SUB, ate at the Pita Pit and climbed to the top of Buchanan Tower (BuTo) at 3am. Talk about an awesome night!!

Now, I don’t know how much you all know about me, but what’s the first thing that comes to mind when I saw I went to a Country music club (called Roosters)??! Not really my type of thing, you say? Well you’re wrong! It was AWESOME fun – although $1 Coronos and some token Justin Timberlake helped!! Now I just have to get the words to “Save a horse, Ride a cowboy” out of my head! (And yes, it is as bad as it sounds!)