Nothing much

Well I have waited now for a few days longer than my usual (well eventually usual) sunday posting in hopes that something exciting may happen ... and well it didn't! So here's the boring stuff i did, in this beautiful fall weather while wearing my short sleeve shirts ;-)

Basically I've been studying (and actually studying in the library!) a fair bit, going to classes and hanging out with my friends for dinner. I have been a bit busier this week so far, since typically I do most of my studying on the weekend, but this coming weekend I'm going to a AOP (Association of Optometrist) student conference all weekend long in Skagness, UK ...and yes I am just that nerdy! cuz really where else would you like to spend your Halloween than surrounded by other optometry students at an optometry conference in Skegness of all places? But so anyways since I'm being a super nerd this weekend it's going to cut into my studying so I have to cram all my studying in to the rest of this week, which wouldn't have been too bad, except on top of the Optics society and Spanish society meetings I also signed up to be my class rep (so I have several responsibilities with that) and I had my first meeting with my personal tutor (a second year Optometry student who I can talk to about my courses, university life, the UK way, etc.). So far I have done everything, well except for studying ... that'll be tomorrow (hopefully :P)! The student rep stuff I am pretty much caught up with, as well I already had my Spanish society and Optics society meetings, and then yesterday I also met with my personal tutor. My personal tutor seems like they will work out quite well as they are from the UK and so they can easily tell me more about the UK system and they also already gave me some advice on the courses and exams, which was really nice and reassuring. Oh yeah, and this past weekend we sent the clocks back an hour so right now I'm only 4 hours behind Ontario :-D, which is pretty cool, well except that I'm not really going to have a chance to take advantage of it and talk to anyone. Plus it kinda sucks now that it's getting dark here around 4-430!

But so well that's about all i've done in the last week and a half. Very boring eh? (sorry it's been a while) Now I'm off to make my famous pork chops and coke for everyone, and then have some TIM HORTON's coffee that a friend who just came back from writting the Opticianry National exams was nice enough to bring us :-D

Anyways all for now, but tune back in Sunday night or monday to see how my nerdy halloween went ;-)

- UK word of the week: fizzy drink is what they call pop .. it's weird cuz i would have thought for sure they would have at least called it soda! .. and then they typically call concentrated drinks squash (or cordial when we don't understand what squash is). 

Banking Woes & Week in a Nutshell

Hey all,

This week has been basically the same as last week .. just class after class with some labs thrown in. Lets see we learned/reviewed molecular biology and biochemistry (so lots of DNA, transcription, RNA, proteins, etc.), there was also some thin and thick lens formulas, a bit of physical optics (more properties of light), and then the new fun part which was retinoscopy. As I believe I mentioned before in a previous post I was in the lab group that got to do it this week and so we did spot retinoscopy which I found was a bit harder than the streak retinoscopy (which their going to show us later in the term, but I was already shown at work and a bit at Georgian). Although we didn't do the ret on any of our classmates this week it was still fun and great practice, and I can't wait to do more...but it's going to be good that next week I get to do more Ophthalmoscopy, so that I can get more practice on that, and we're going to try and draw what we see this, which is going to be very interesting given by drawing abilities ;-).

Aside from classes this week I actually decided to start studying, so I've actually spent a few hours each day in the library! I know it was a shock to me too! In the evenings not too much happened this week...got free pizza at optics society meeting where Keeler (an ophthalmic instrument company) came and showed us many of there instruments. Then on Wednesday was more free pizza at an International Optometry student meet and greet where we got to meet some of the other international students from 2nd and 3rd year and chat with them over pizza and wine. I say it as International since really there were only maybe 3 students there who were not from Canada, the rest of us were all Canadian. It sounds like apparently there are like 13-15 Canadian students in each class (although this year with our about 28 Canadian 1st years we're the biggest so far!). It was nice talking to them and seeing what they're all up to and their backgrounds and I was surprised at the number that either went to Waterloo, or Georgian, or both! It was a good night execpt the pizza went really fast and it was too bad that only about half of the international students attended it, but it was still a lot of fun.

One other thing that I did this week was I also finally got my banking sorted out! Basically as an international student I can not open a bank account until I get a confirmation of enrollment/bank letter from the university, which I can't get until 24hrs after I enroll in my courses. My enrollment was 1.5wks after I arrived, so I got the bank letter on Oct 1st. I then went to the bank on October 2nd. There were two banks to choose from that sort of offered international students a no fee bank account: Natwest and Lloyds TBS... since I could never talk to anyone from Natwest, I ended up going with Lloyds. They were both the same, in order to get a free account as an international student I had to put x amount in the bank account within the first month and keep it there for at least 24hr (so no big deal there). I went to Lloyds and set up the account, put a few pounds in at the time I set it up and then wait for my card and internet banking stuff in the mail. I was also given all the codes that I needed to send money transfers, so on the 8th I got my mom to wire money from my Canadian account to my UK account. Then on the 9th I was able to view my UK account online and I was surprised to see a nil balance... not even the few pounds I put in while I was at the bank! But I figured I would wait till Monday and go to the bank and activate my card and also check about the money. Card was activated fine, the money transfer can apparently take up to 4 days...so with the time difference, holidays and nothing happening on the weekend they still had till Tuesday to receive and process it, so that was okay...but as for the few pounds they had no idea but would look into it and get back to me later in the day. They never got back to me...but then again I had my cell off when I was in class and don't have voice mail set up so no big deal. But I checked online on Tuesday and still no money .. so I went back to the bank with everything they had given me and asked where my money was. This time they decided to get the manager right away since no money was in the account. The manager was really nice and friendly and she quickly realized that the person who had opened my account had written down the wrong bank branch number which effected everything, and so all my money went into someone else’s account!!! but she assured me that they would of course correct the situation and make it all right by the end of the day on Tuesday, and she then gave me all of the correct numbers too. So I went home and at 3pm that afternoon I checked and it was all there which was nice that I finally had gotten it sorted out! It was a bit annoying...but I was happy with how they handled the situation, so I’m keeping my money with them...and hopefully no more bank problems :-P

Well now I just realized how late it is! Normally I can tell by the amount of noise outside .. as around midnight it usually starts getting loud with everyone heading to the clubs .. but tonight it has been eerily quiet .... actually now that I think about it the whole campus and even in town it has been quieter than normal for a Saturday! .... oh right it's probably because it's Diwali (the festival of lights).

Happy Diwali and Saal Mubarak everyone!


- UK word of the week "Hob" this seems to be used to describe the cooktop (or even just one of the burners) -

Thanksgiving Weekend

This Sunday one of my friends was running in the Birmingham 1/2 marathon (13.1km). So bright and early (9:30am!!!) on a typical British morning (overcast, bit of fog, around 10 degrees and a bit of a misty breeze in the air - which is actually the first real British day/morning that I've seen, because the weather has been fantasitc here) some of us got up and went downtown and watched the runners take off. I had never been to a marathon before and it was very interesting to watch how they stagger the starts a bit, so that no one gets really injured.

Then we had about 1 1/2 - 2hrs until the runners were coming to the finish line, so we went for coffee and then walked a bit of the route before finding a nice spot to hang out near the finish. Afterwards, aside from the actually running I was thinking it would be a great way to see a lot of different areas of the city.

After the race I went grocery shopping and I bought some potatoes, corn, broccoli, mushrooms, cheese, cranberry sauce, stuffing and gravy. Then on Monday I went to the meat market and got a fresh 6lb chicken (they only had a 20ish pound boneless turkey which would have been way too big - but at least the chicken i got I knew was good since it was "reared by Mr. J. Clark").

That night I ended up cooking a big thanksgiving feast for some of my friends. We had a perfectly seasoned chicken which was cooked to perfection (if I do say so), mashed potatoes, canned corn, cranberry sauce, stuffing, gravy, and a broccoli, mushroom and cheese bake for dinner and then dessert was apple pie (they didn't have any pumpkin pie :P), vanilla ice cream and we also had a bunch of chocolates.

It seems like everyone over here eats lots of chocolates (which I guess you can't really blame them since its ooh so good!). It was a huge success and everyone seemed to love it and took some of the leftovers back to there flats, although I’m sure I’ll still be eating leftovers all week now :-P. I did it because it was the first holiday we miss and being here 3 weeks now some of us are starting to miss home a little bit (but of course I’m talking about others and not myself ;-) ).

As if thanksgiving dinner wasn't enough to remind us of home, one of my Canadian friends found us a TIM HORTON's!!! and took us there this morning :D. Well it's not a full store more like a vending station in the corner of a convenience store, but they have the coffee, donuts and muffins and it's not too bad .. still not like a real Tim’s you'd get in Canada but it's definitely the next best thing!

I think I have now finally gotten caught up .. and hopefully I wont leave it soo long anymore :-P

First Week of Class

Last week (the week of Oct 4th) was amazing!

My class schedule I would give out to people but the labs change every week (some lab times switch every other week, while other labs have four different time slots it rotates on) and so I’m aware this kind of sounds confusing .. and I can assure you it IS very confusing ... I personally don't think they could have made it more confusing even if they tried ... but we're all managing to figure it out ... but for the most part i'm in class or lab or "studying" from roughly Monday 1-4, Tues 10-4, Wed 9-1, Thurs 9-1, and Fri 10-12...so not too bad at all! In total we have about 6 classes and about 16 in class hours a week, but the rest of the time we're suppose to be studying ;-) Also it's kinda different how it works because most of the classes go from October to June, and after we come back from our Christmas break we have a week or two of midtems and then the last month of school is the finals. So it's a bit of a different schedule than I'm use to ... but it will work out well.

Lectures are great because all my professors seem very down to earth and are all very easy to understand! My labs also have been great, the first one we just played with some single vision lenses, so it was very basic Opticianry stuff and then I had another two labs on Thursday which was an introductory lab and it looks like that will be very much like the physics labs I did at Waterloo, so should be fun, but a lot of work :P Then my other lab on Thursday was for Clinical Optometry was amazing because we actually started to use the ophthalmoscope to look at the retinas of some of our classmates. They taught us the basics of how to use the ophthalmoscope and what we're looking for and starting this Thursday part of the class will have to draw what they are seeing while my half is learning retinoscopy! I'm just amazed that the first week isn't even over and they already have us to Ophthalmoscopy and next week is Retinoscopy!

The only downside to all of my classes and labs is that most are in the vision science building, but two of the labs are in the main building and sometimes we only have 10minutes to get from our vision science building to our lab class. This doesn't really sound like an issue to most of you, especially since it's all of a 1-2min walk to get to the main building, but the problem lies in that there are roughly 3000 - 5000 students in the main building at anyone time, and all the classes end at the same time, as well our lab is on the 4th of 7 floors and there are only about 6 lifts (elevators :P) so we basically have to take the stairs since its impossible to do the elevator, but then it's 5 huge stories of jam packed stairs we have to climb to get to the 4th floor (yes 5 flights because they have the ground floor and then floor 1, 2, 3...) it's really shear madness, so it's always a bit tight getting to the labs on time. But I guess this way I won’t have to worry about joining the gym.

So that was basically enough of the school stuff for one week :P

Fresher's Week

Hey,

So I know it's almost been a week and a half since my last post .. so i'm going to try and catch up a bit ...

The last week of September was the 2nd and final week of Freshers (Orientation) week. Unlike the week before which was just international students, this week was for all first year students. It seemed was a fairly boring week as it was just the same onld same old orientation week stuff. Aside from the Monday when we learned about about how our program is going to be structured, which was fun, but then the rest of the week was just waiting for classes to begin. I hung out with a few friends that I had made during the week before, and also made friends with some other Optometry classmates. On the Tuesday all we had to do was got our retinal pictures taken, so afterwards we just wandered around the city (actually that's basically all we did all week). On one of our adventures we walked past the main city center (the bull ring) and went into this mall called the Mailbox.

This mall was similar to most that we have been too, where it is a nice mix of the outdoors and indoors, but we noticed that this mall seemed to have a bunch of different stores and it also has 3 or four art galleries/stores. We browsed a few of the galleries which all had lots of really nice artwork, but the pieces ranged from about 350 - 10,000 pounds! We then went into one clothing store had lots of stuff on sale like graphic t-shirts that were marked 70% off, but they were 20-30 pounds for just one t-shirt! After that store i looked around a bit more and realized that we were in a very ritzy/expensive mall.  We then kept walking through the mall and up to the top floor which was the food court and at the end of the food court you were outside on like a board walk that follows beside the Birmingham canal system (around Brindley Place). We walked on the canals for a bit and it was really quite beautiful ... although it definately isn't anything like the lakes and rivers at home ... but they at least have ducks and Canadian Geese :-)

One day on campus they had a fair where you can find out and join the different societies, clubs and sports teams. So I ended up joining the Optics society and the spanish society. The optics society meets basically every tuesday night and they have presenters talking about there equiptment, frames, lenses, etc. and then after the presentation we get pizza for dinner. Then the spanish society is on random nights throughout the week, and we'll be able to learn a bit of basic spanish, go to some spanish restaurants and also learn how to salsa, so it looks like it will be fun. I also was planning to join the lacrosse team, but i found out that this year there isn't one becuase there was "a lack of interest" so instead i'm going to try to find enough people so that next year we will be able to start the team back up. Also basically all week last week we made a point of all having dinner together and so far we're carrying on the tradition, since it's way cheeper that way, plus we all like to cook (or at least help chop stuff :P). With all our back grounds we've been trying some different types of food too ... we've done the typical Canadian dinners (throw everything you got all together and server with pasta and some KD), and we also done a bit authentic Italian pasta some Indian food too (although they're nice and make it "relatively" mild for me).

During Freshers week there were some evening events which were basically going to a pub and/or club each night, but myself I definately didn't want to go to too many of them, so we ended up just going to a school daze one at the guild (the student union building on campus) which was fun since everyone dressed in their school uniform (so I wear an orange dress shirt to stand out in the crowd of white), and they played some of the classic songs that I grew up listening too. Then the next night we went to a comedy night. The first comic I didn't really like since it was all humour about british people (like the british equivelent to newfie jokes, since he was from northern england) so I didn't really get too many of those jokes but then the other act was great and since he talked about some more genereal stuff.

So that was basically my last "relaxing" week before classes.