UofToronto

This belated post is about Toronto, and the University of!

As with San Francisco, it strikes me as to how much wealthier everything is. Maybe I'm just seeing everything through sugar coated vision and being unfair to Auckland. The campus is definitely impressive; considering UofT supposedly (only) has twice the number of students as UofA, it seems disproportionately big. The on-campus facilities include the necessary gym(s), pool(s), running track etc. all free to use for every happy student. Sport is a part of uni life here just like it was in NZ high school. There are both inter and intra-varsity leagues for heaps of sports. I haven't yet been to a football game, but I hear it's loud.

Most of the buildings on campus are (or just look) old and impressive, and there are many secluded quite grassy areas to hide away in... although I haven't yet done such a thing. I'm being superficial in my propaganda, what matters surely are the classes. I'm taking 3 Engineering Science:Aerospace papers and 2 Computer Science papers. I can't really compare the compsci subjects to back home, but the engineering papers seem, on the outset, that they will be going deeper into similar material that we do at home.

I have two standout papers so far: Dynamics and Computer Graphics. Dynamics is _finally_ a from-the-start-no-dicking-about-course-on-kinematics... yusss. So far we've derived the equation for the shadow of a sundial and (strange) relationship between the shafts of a universal joint w00t :P. Computer graphics looks like it's going to be a whole lotta fun, we're learning the background methods of and also using OpenGL for... graphics. If anyone has some cool ideas for a (relatively) simple 3D app/game/whatever tell me and maybe I can aim towards it during semester.

I haven't really talked about the city, and I haven't really visited enough to say a lot, and it's at this point that I change the title of the blog post. What I can say is that everything is bigger just like in San Fran. In other news, tomorrow 18 of us are renting 4 cars and driving to Algonquin park for 2 nights of camping, organised only in the last two days :D

I leave you with a picture of St. George St, in the middle of campus.

I saw Brad Pitt!

And a bird shat on my head.

Toronto is a proper big city, with proper big city goings on. In this case it's the Toronto film festival, and hopefully I'll go see a film later this week. Also on this weekend was the V-fest event on the Toronto islands (basically a 2-day Big Day Out) and some sort of protest that woke me up Saturday morning.

I've been here a week, and my excuse for not posting was that it has genuinely been hectic. There is also the reason of me delaying my Toronto post because I wanted it to be awesome, but it won't be, and now it's late.

I cbf being creative so I'm going to do the Day 1,2... thing :D

Day 1:
Arrived at residence at 8:30pm after only paying $1.50 to get there via subway. Spent night hanging out meeting fellow residents.

Day 2:
Can't remember morning, but went to Toronto Islands with international students on my floor. My floor is all one semester ppl and most of these are exchange students and most of these are Australian... This was also labour day and the unions actually bother to hold events/protest. Went to cool pub with random waiter who sang us the Canadian national anthem.

Day 3: Took care of getting multitude of cards and stuff from places at the uni I am meant to see. This took ages. Had dinner, hung out, done. Btw, the engineers here have a way better orientation: they divide up into groups, wear yellow t-shirts and march around campus chanting and taunting the other faculties, then they march around town. I also hear they go swimming in some fountain then all jump in giant vats of purple paint. They call this 'Frosh'

Day 4: I honestly can't account for many hours of many of these days, if I wasn't talking to someone then I was probably around or eating. Went to giant frosh dance party, it was friggin off the chain.

Day 5+6: Classes start, yay! Nothing new learned. Saw Brad Pitt.

Day 7: Lazy day, went to Chinatown (bird shat on head), then clubbing later.

Day 8: Another lazy day.

Day 9: Today, more class, murdered with the maths that I don't know :,(

Man, this post sounds pretty emo. I think it's just because it's late at night and I'm forcing myself to write. But seriously, this place is awesome, the floor is awesome, the people are awesome, the residence facilities are awesome, the classes are awesome and my roommate isn't too bad either. The next posts won't be stories but rather profiles of people (roommate) and places...!!!

And if you don't believe me:

Edit: Day Four

Scroll down for the full story!

Next post.... TORONTO!

Day Three

You didn't think I would miss out day three did you...

"But wtf happened to Toronto, isn't that where you were going?"

Don't worry, Toronto hasn't run off anywhere, in fact it's where I am. Unfortunately I have barely had enough time to turn around since Sunday.

I do hope I remember everything, I will consult my photos for evidence. Well the plan for this day was to go to Alcatraz in the morning, and in the afternoon head back to the wharf, or go west or more south or whatever. I had booked the Alcatraz tour online two days prior (the boats fill up fast). You would think that making it to the pier by like 12:15 for the 12:35 trip would be easy. I made it difficult for myself by rolling out of bed 5 minutes before breakfast ends, watching too much CNN coverage of that day's Democratic Convention and printing the boat ticket on a hotel printer that did not work. Initially was running to the pier, but gave up and caught the cab.

Anyway this story is 'bout Alcatraz not my morning. Alcatraz was originally a military defense post for the bay area, but slowly was converted into a prison as the defense aspect became unnecessary. It closed in 1963 because of high costs. Today it's a friendly national park that has been swarmed with birds and the consequent smell. For 18 months it was even occupied by Indians who claimed it as native land.

Alcatraz is better visited than described. It isn't often one gets to visit a prison, so it's neat. Naturally, a lot of the island is closed off to the public but there is a very good audio tour, narrated by ex-guards and cons that leads you around the main prison block and describes the famous escape attempts. I bought a replica food bowl/mug from the souvenir store.

I had plans to go back to Fisherman's wharf after Alcatraz, but the island takes ages, so I decided to go to Coit Tower. This tower is on quite a high hill and is quite high itself, I didn't know how to get there so I went to the bottom of the hill and circled around until I saw the first path up. Dinner this day was at a ritzy Italian restaurant where I ate pasta with rabbit sauce.

Day Five

Day Five is easy to write about.

I woke up late, with a sore stomach (the same sore stomach as the day before). Stayed in bed and watched TV till 1pm. Got off my sorry ass and out to eat, ate, walked around some parts of town that I hadn't seen (walked for far too long, and couldn't be frucked taking pictures), came back to hotel. More TV followed by barfing and writing this blog post. YAY!

I suppose this is compulsory for an overseas trip, even if you are in a 'western country', and especially because I have _never_ had this happen at home. I will label it Murphy's law.

I have noticed that I have not noticed a single McDonalds in San Francisco. I have also noticed many poorly made, cheesy ads on TV, the type you would see on Prime in NZ; much of these are ads for drugs...

Day Four

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Enough said, I'm going to bed.

Edit: It would only be right to give a proper run down of Day Four (Friday 29th).

So the big plan was to rent a bike and ride around the city, and I did. I hadn't rode a bike in years, and never on the road... meh. The plan was to go close to the entrance to the bridge, but continue on down the Pacific Coast and then eastward through golden gate park. As it happened I came right up to the bridge entrance and then went the wrong way to effectively reverse the direction of my journey, this would be a costly mistake...

The day was sunny and perfect and the ride along the shore offered great dramatic views of the bridge. The bridge entrance is at the top of a hill and it was painful to leave it behind knowing that I would have to make the uphill journey again. I rode a long way, under the impression I was going the right way, until it all looked completely bizarre and there was no Pacific Ocean to be seen. After asking for directions to Golden gate park I eventually made it, and as with everything in San Fran: it's not as flat as it looks on the map.

I stopped at the de Young Museum of Fine arts for lunch but couldn't help but buy tickets to the galleries and the Chihuly exhibit. Dale Chihuly is a 'glass blowing artist' (my terminology) and the exhibition was friggin amazing, so much intricacy and detail and colour... I took a million photos (the best of which will be up on picasa). After the glass work, the rest of the museum was pretty avg, but I still went around and there some cool things. Overall, I spent close to 3 hours at the de Young and so had to gaps it towards the sea. (Across the road was the Academy of Sciences, I was gutted that it was closed for renovation).

Along the (downhill, yay!) ride to the coast a cold breeze started to waft over the land, and by the time I got to the coast... there was no coast. The mist had come in and it was wet and cold. It did help the cruel bike up to the bridge, but the bridge was in mist and I was pissed. I forgot to mention that about the time I left the de Young, my stomach had started to hurt (you guys already know where this leads) and at the bridge I was hurting pretty bad. So I cycled across, not seeing the city nor the tops of the towers. On the other side I had dinner near the ferry terminal, and then waited over an hour for said ferry back to SF. I got there with 15min before the return deadline, and had to cycle like mad to make it back on time.

Day Two

The plan for this day was to go to 'Fisherman's Wharf', a much mentioned tourist destination. It was the perfect chance to catch the cable car. En route to the cable car turnaround, I noticed a gallery and stopped there. Initially I felt uneasy because of the large number of staff pacing around staring you down, and the comparatively small number of visitors. It turns out that this gallery is very rich, displaying paintings by the likes of Picasso and Renoir (to drop the two names that I had heard before entering). The staff are friendly though, and one described to me the artist whos every single piece I like (John D. Anderson : check it out and my other photos here (they are trickling in)).

Anyway, back to my mission, avoided the painfully long line for tickets by walking 40m to the information office, but was distracted again. I walked into what looked like a small mall but had like 9 floors (at least) and docked heaps of well-known stores (none that I can remember, apart from Abercrombie & Fitch: which I walked into to see what the jig was).

The cable car turnaround is manually operated: the car goes on a turn table and you push it. Fun times. Indeed, because holding on to the outside of the cable car is kinda fun. I stopped at Lombard St, the crookedest street in the world:



Finally to Fisherman's wharf... two piers and a whole lotta restaurants (bring money). It was ~3pm by this time and I was starving, so had lunch/dinner at a swish seafood restaurant. I walked around for ages, there are also many stores (bring money), lots of cool stuff but nothing cool enough. There is a random sea lion colony that hangs out at the pier as well.

The one thing I did decide to go into was the Ripley's: Believe it or not! museum. Some stuff made my smile, other stuff made me cringe, but overall it was pretty avg. A cable car ride back to the hotel was followed by several hours of sifting through photos and blog writing, so I hope someone is reading this (Antony seems to be (that's right he gets a mention for commenting)).

Travelling alone is ok, you don't have to plan anything and you can walk/run as slow/fast as you want; on the other hand having a buddy would be nice. I've been trying to find something to do in the evenings, but the oneness and the 21 drinking age makes it... fail.