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.