Maple syrup and Jello

This past week was I was fairly busy with school, especially since lately I've been finding myself up until all hours of the morning trying to watch the Olympics :P But it was a good, just did the normal class stuff. Had an assessment in my Ophthalmic Lenses Lab which was on hand neutralization where basically we were given a trial set of lenses and using them had to figure out the prescription in the glasses. I'm not really sure how or why this was really useful, but I guess i won't bother to question it, since I did well on the assessment. Aside from that it's really just been business as usual although I'm starting to get a bit more stressed, with these essays/assignments which are mainly due in about 3 weeks and I've barely started, but this week I'm cracking the whip by actually doing some work while I watch the Olympics.

On Tuesday as I hope many of you remembered it was pancake day (in North America and the UK, and pancake WEEK in Russia!) So for breakfast I made some North American pancakes with back bacon and maple syrup for myself and some friends. Then for lunch another batch of North American pancakes (although these were more US style hot cakes) along with more syrup for even more people! Unfortunately I had planned to go out for British pancakes for dessert, but the only place I knew of was closed ... so I had to settle for some left over pancakes from breakfast :(  Ultimately I think I got my fill of syrup to last me until the summer, but next year I'm going to see if I can do around the world in pancakes :o

Aside from school the only main thing that I did was I went out with some friends on Friday. We went out for dinner downtown and we found a relatively inexpensive Chinese buffet, which is easier said than done since downtown dinner is usually around 15pounds! So when we saw all you can eat for 8pounds, we figured we had to give it a shot, and it was okay. For the price it was good and there was a great selection of food, but just tasted okay (yet the Mandarin or Kings Buffet are still much better). With that said I'll probably go back again since you can't beat the amount of food for the price plus they have JELLO (it's the first place that I've found so far where I can actually get Jello). After dinner we then went down the road to the REP Theater where we watched Dancing at Laghnasa.

There were two shows currently playing at the theater and this one looked the most interesting. It was set in a rural area of Ireland (County Donegal) in the mid 30s and was about a family of five sisters, one brother and a 7yr old kid during one summer. I didn't really know anything about the play prior, and it turned out to be pretty decent after all (bit slow, but not too bad). It would probably be classed as more of a chick flick type of show, yet I found the cultural and historical parts interesting. My friends didn't seem to mind it too much but I know they didn't enjoy it quite as much as I did, since for both of the people I went with English is there second language, so it was a bit of work for them to understand the Irish accent.

The best part of the night though was the price. They have a special deal in the UK where through the Arts Council of England which in there mission to provide great art to everyone they have a set up a program where anyone under 26 is able to see a certain number of shows for free each year. It sounded too good to be true at first, but now I believe it, and it's even good at theaters all over the UK (although different restrictions apply at different theaters). Since the tickets were free we ended up getting seats in the middle but second row from the back, yet they REP theater is laid out so well, with such a great slope that even where we were we still had a great view! Needless to say I plan on taking advantage of this program while I can see several performances.

Now that was my week last week,

Jeff

Word of the Week: "knackered" means "exhuasted" or tired ... basically what I am in the morning lately after watching Canada's Olympic team.

A Busy First Few Weeks of February

It's been a fairly busy last couple of weeks.

My classes have been very interesting but there's a bunch of work to be done, since we have four essays/assignments on the go currently. One neat thing that we are learning about is a test called the “Fan and Block”, which is an older type of subjective refraction (getting the patient's prescription using their input). The weird thing about it is that I asked our professors when we would use this method and apparently we will rarely if ever, but they said that if we ever go on a mission trip to somewhere like Africa then we would come across this method, since it's a technique that is commonly taught to technicians in 3rd world countries because it's very easy to do and is relatively accurate.

Of course classes have been interesting but over the past few weeks my friends and I have had a great time taking in different experiences.

On the 5th it was my friend's birthday, but since they went home that day to see their family we all decided to go out on the Wednesday night for dinner. We ended up walking downtown and had no real idea what type of restaurant we were looking for, but just that we wanted to be somewhere near the canal. We ended up in a part of town called Brindley Place, which is a really nice fancy block downtown.

We are all very indecisive, so we ended up finding a map of the area which listed all of the restaurants and we had the birthday girl randomly point to one. We went the place she randomly choose, but it turned out to be probably the most expensive restaurant in Brindley Place, so we decided to go to a Thai restaurant across the court yard called Thai Edge.

The restaurant was basically empty when we got there, which was good, since we weren't sure if we should have made a reservation ahead of time or not, especially since there was six of us. Although I know that some people might have wondered if it would be any good at all, but since it is open in a fancy area of town, then we figured it must be good (but it also helped that shortly after we sat down it started to fill up. The food was fantastic and we ended up having a great time.

Afterwards, we took a leisurely stroll back towards campus and ended up seeing a completely different part of the city than we had seen before.

After the outing on Wednesday, we decided we should go out more often and do something different, since usually after dinner we just sit around and watch DVDs. On Monday night we decided to take baby steps and start by going out to see a film, so after dinner we decided to go see the film Sherlock Holmes. We looked online and the theatre and show time that seemed like it would work best for us was about a 45min walk from campus. Normally we don’t finish dinner until around 8:30-9ish, but since we were going out we tried to have an earlier dinner, so that we would have plenty of time to get to the film. Yet as usual nothing usually goes to plan, so the dinner took a bit longer. We decided though to still see if we could make it, so we walked briskly all the way to the theatre and actually made it right on time. The nice thing was that the film had been out for awhile now, so there were plenty of seats and a bunch of previews, so it turned out to be the perfect time to arrive. The movie was really interesting and you never really knew what was going to happen next and it turned out to be a fun outing.

As many of you may know this past weekend was Chinese New Year. On Friday my school had a celebration for the New Year with various Asian societies on campus serving food and preformed a few traditional performances. I ended up staying and watching for a few hours over my lunch and tried some Chinese noodles and Malaysian BBQ chicken with a peanut sauce. The food was really good and it was neat to see some of the acts. While I was there I had realized that in my time at Waterloo they had some of these celebrations, but I had never gone to them.

Friday evening I ended up going back campus to watch a talent show which showcased people taking part in various cultural performances. The acts ranged from poetry, to belly dancing and to fashion shows. It was really neat to see some of the acts and get an idea of the various traditional outfits they wear and traditional dances and songs they sing.

Sunday I then went to Chinatown where they were holding a big Chinese new year celebration. It was held at a place called the Arcadia, which is an open air shopping centre in the heart of Birmingham’s Chinatown.

I had never been to this Chinatown before, even though it's literally just right behind the bullring. There were a bunch of really nice looking shops and restaurants and in there was like a central area where they had set up a stage and did some of the performances. Aside from the traditional dragon dance they also had some musical acts, acrobats, jugglers and magicians.

The best one was this one guy who was wearing a mask and he was dancing to some music. When he then moved the fan in front of the mask then it would change the colour and shape of the mask. Eventually he did it so that the mask disappeared and you saw his face and then the mask would reappear.

After an hour or so of watching the performances we ended up going to check out a bunch of stalls that were set up outside selling various things and we grabbed some lunch at one of the stalls. It was great food, but was kind of weird since in Canada it seems that most food tents/vendors at various festivals we have a line, but here in the UK they have official lines at bus stops but no lines at vendors during festivals. Instead of a line here it's just get into the mad pile of people and you have to squeeze your way to the front. But when I ended up getting my food I just good some noodles and a spring roll, since most of it was sold out, I actually ended up getting the last portion of noodles, but just missed out on getting a fork, so I had to use a wooden French fry stick, but it works. Now that I think about it, it was kind of odd that they didn't have any chop sticks.

Over the past weeks though it wasn’t all eating out stilled cooked as a group for dinner. We started with Reena cooking dinner on Monday. Then I ended up whipping up a few things. This past week I ended up cooking twice and both times I made stuff with chicken. I ended up making some smothered chicken and then the second time I did stuffed chicken wrapped in bacon and everyone said they really liked them, but we'll see if they ever let me cook again.

Now as if all that wasn’t enough, I have also been watching the 2010 Olympics which began on Friday.

I ended up watching the opening ceremonies and so far I've see a decent amount of the actual events, including Canada's golden performance on Sunday night. The hard part though is that most of the events take place starting around midnight my time, even the opening ceremonies started around 2am and went till 5, so I probably wont get to watch as much of the Olympics as I'd like. Plus CTV's website doesn't seem to be working in the UK, so I can't even watch it there, so I have to watch it on BBC, which just isn't the same, (but then again it could be worse). It is definitely kind of odd in this country how little attention people give to the Olympics, even if they have a chance of winning a metal. See I was in the pub the other night and they had the sports channel on, and it was showing a football (soccer) match, then when the football match was over it went to just sports news and all they had was rugby, cricket and like 3 different football leagues! I would have thought that as a country that England at least would get more into the Olympics, especially since in two years time they will be hosting the games.

That's all for now,

Jeff

*Word of the week: the word "NICK" here means to "STEAL" something. For example I would say "the US skiier stole the gold from the Canadian" but in britian they would say "the US skiier nicked the gold away from the Canadian"...but well then again they would only say that if they were actually watching the olympics, but most are too busy watching football :P

First week of Term #2

Classes started up once again this week. Almost all of the classes continue on after our midterms, except for Clinical Visual Optics (CVO). CVO we had during our first term, but this term we don't have any lectures in this subject, instead we just have a group project to do, yet the odd thing is hat we still have a final exam in this course. It was going to be nice having one less lecture/course each week, but of course school is never that nice; instead we have started a new course Vision and Visual Perception (VVP). On Monday we had our very first VVP lecture and it was quite interesting, as it seems to be like a philosophy course which is entirely related to optometry. The topics we'll be covering appears to be mainly vision (colour, spatial, dynamic, in infants, etc), how we perceive the world and how our mind interprets and understands the information it receives from our eyes. We will even have a whole lecture devoted entirely to visual illusions, which looks like it will be an extremely interesting.

I know that I just finished midterms and really I should probably take a bit of a longer break, but I've already started to lightly review what we had been taught this past week. I basically did it since if I stop studying now it just is so hard to start again. I've been good each day this week by studying a bit, but now the real trick is going to be to see if I can keep it up :P

On Thursday we just had two lab classes, so after those a few of my friends and I all decided to go to see the movie Avatar. We had been talking about going to see it for awhile now, but we finally went. We had heard that the film is best in IMAX 3-D, so we looked and found that there is one not too far away. We walked over and watched a matinee showing. The theatre was in the Millennium Point Think Tank here in Birmingham, and it is a really neat building. Birmingham City University seems to have a bunch of its arts courses housed here in this relatively new building. Also the "Think Tank" is in this building, which looks like it's probably some sort of neat science museum/planetarium. It looked really neat so we might go back another day and check it out. We ended up getting tickets for the show and then went and lined up to get into the theatre (we were about 30min early and so we managed to be at the front of the line). We got our choice of seats, so of course picked middle seat near the top. The screen wasn't as large as I had expected for an IMAX, but it was still bigger than the average theatre screen. We were also given some one size fits all 3-D goggles which even fit over glasses (if you wear them). The movie turned out to be quite interesting and very entertaining. It was a bit disappointing though as I thought that the 3-D effects might have been a bit better, but there were a few moments that made good use of the 3-D effect. The 3-D goggles after a bit started to irritate my nose near the end of the film, but it was still a good movie and a great experience. The crazy part of the whole adventure was finding out how close the theatre is! It turned out that the theatre is literally across the road so it took us all of about 2 minutes to walk there (since traffic was a bit busy :-P), so I'm sure we'll be going back at least to see another movie, or at least to go to the Think Tank.

This week I also figured out what I will be doing for accommodations next year. Here at Aston, all international students are guaranteed a place in residence for every year, but home/UK students are only really able to stay in residence during there first and last years. Two of my friends are UK/home students who needed to find a place to live next year. It seemed to be to be really early to start looking, but apparently it's actually a bit late, as many places get completely booked up for by January (for the start of the 2010/2011 academic year). I went looking with them and it turns out that basically all of the places in Birmingham for students are essentially within a five minute walk to campus, and all of them have a similar floor plan to that of the new residences on campus (and even cost the same amount). It's kind of odd that way actually. But all of the residences consists of a room with an en-suit bathroom and a group of 3-8 people all sharing the kitchen (which is the same as most of those on campus next year since Aston is tearing down all of the old residences as they are currently completing a huge brand new residence complex). Ultimately my friends liked the look of one place called "The Heights" which is an off campus privately run residence that is across the street from Aston's main building. I liked the look of it and also that I would know who I would be living with (since in on campus accommodations you can't really specify who you would like to live with). We ended up taking a unit at The Heights; so there will be myself, another Canadian friend and our other two UK/home friends. The place we got is one of the better 4 bedroom units as it is on the top (6th) floor of one of the buildings with a view of Birmingham (instead of a view of the road and Aston University). I am definitely looking forward to having my own room with my own bathroom (as I’m starting to get tired of sharing by bathroom with 5 other guys), but even though we will be sharing the kitchen, I’m sure it’ll work out well since we all cook and eat together right now anyways.

*pic from google street view

On Friday after two lectures in the morning, a bunch of my friends (and even a few of our lecturers) all went over to a pub for lunch and a drink. It was a great way to wind down the week, but the main reason we did it was because in about an hour we were all going to have to go back to talk to our personal tutors (during our orientation week groups of about 10 students were assigned to a faculty member/lecturer who would be our personal tutor) to get our midterm marks, so many of us were a little nervous. It ended up being a great way to lessen our anxiety, and I'm not sure if it was because of the alcohol, or just the stories/conversations we were having, but whatever the reason it worked well. I wasn't too worried about my marks, but I was a bit nervous, since it was my first set of real tests since I had arrived. Ultimately I ended up being very pleased with my midterm marks as I was fairly consistent with my marks, over all six exams, I ended up with an average of about 77%. The weirdest thing was the class averages for the midterms as they varied greatly (one course had a class average of 73% while another had an average of 47% - which here anything over 40% is still considered a pass). The best part was that I had made a bet with one of my friends concerning our marks, which I ended up winning, so Friday night I got a free desert AND a drink :D.

And so that was my week...

Jeff


* Word of the Week: On Friday when I went to order a sticky toffee pudding for desert I asked for a "pudding" so they asked me which one. This confused me a bit since the pub's only pudding was this sticky toffee pudding, so I asked what other ones they have. The server proceeded to read off the entire desert menu to me, and so I ended up pointing at the sticky toffee pudding. Afterwards I ended up asking one of my friends about it and it turns out that in England the word "pudding" refers to any "desert", so it could be cake, sundae, pie, etc.

Midsessional Exams

Right after Christmas on the Monday I had my first midterm/midsessional exam in the UK. It is a bit unusual for me how the midterms are structured here, as we have no classes during our two week exam period. As well the exams are written in large rooms where we are each randomly assigned a desk to sit at, we must have a clear pencil case and if calculators are needed they are provided. It is all very serious and seemed almost as intense as final exams that I have had back in Canada. It was good in a was since we had the whole two weeks to focus on our 6 midterms exams, but the down side is it really made the time drag on, as it seems like I have been back here for months, but it really was only two weeks! The midterms themselves actually didn't seem too bad (but of course some seemed to go a bit better than other). Now I just can't wait until I get my marks back, which rumour has it will be with in a week or so.

As well this was probably the first time that I have ever written exams and not had to work during the exam period, so what I decided to try and do was grow a beard. The last time I shaved was on Saturday the 9th and then I didn’t shave again until Saturday the 23rd

Yeah so my conclusion is well after two weeks I definitely cannot grow a noticeable amount of facial hair (well except for a slight porn stash :P), but on the upside I found that it probably would have kept me a bit warmer (provided it had been cold here) and also I normally rub my cheeks and stroke my chin when thinking and studying, but now with the facial hair I found it helped me think. Well so now that exams are over again I’ll probably continue with my normal clean shaven self, but I’m still toying with the idea of trying again after my last day of lectures and when I come for the summer (about 6weeks).

After half of my mid term exams were done with I had a few days off before my next midterm, so I spent a few hours and did a little shopping. My mother had given me a few pounds for Christmas, so I had decided to purchase some socks and underwear… (very lame I know, but it was easier than doing laundry, and well I was getting tired of doing laundry every week, yes I probably could have brought more back from Canada but due to weight restrictions I choose a few boxes of KD over socks and underwear)...anyways so I went into town and went to a few stores. I was amazed to find such a huge selection of socks everywhere I went. See I’m use to men’s socks basically being black or white, and occasionally getting the odd grey or blue one but nothing like this! Here they have every colour imaginable, as well as socks with Simpson’s, family guy, soccer/football, beer, basically anything and everything! It of course ended up taking much longer than expected for my shopping trip, but ultimately I am so very excited about the socks that I ended up getting. I found these great Day of the Week socks with cool happy faces...you have no idea how excited I am about these and I started wearing them on Monday :D

It also happened that the day of our third midterm (out of six) one of my friends had a Birthday (nothing better than having to write an exam on your birthday :P), so after the exam a group of us took him out to a local restaurant; Pizza Express. It made for a nice afternoon to let us unwind and forget about our exams for a bit.

About a week later it was our last midterm exam which happened to fall on a Saturday morning, so a group of us decided to have a celebratory brunch. We ended up making some Aunt Jamima Pancakes (so real North American style pancakes), Maple syrup (from Canada) and some bacon.

We also had some toast with some Kraft Peanut butter and Marmite.

Marmite was really the only non Canadian thing we had, but we had to try it. Marmite is this greasy, browny black paste made from brewers yeast (and honestly it looks like something scrapped out of a sewer) that some British people enjoy on toast (and with several other foods as well). Of course it looked fairly gross, but of course I had to try it and well it definitely didn't taste like it looked. It was actually very strange because it tasted like I had just dumped a jar of salt on my toast, if I had gotten past the saltiness I don't think it would have been too bad, but salt on toast unfortunately I just couldn't do. But it was an experience and well now at least if someone asks if I would like some Marmite with my toast I can say "no, but could you please spread some on our walk to melt the ice".

You would then think that after the Marmite I would hold off on trying different food for a bit, and well I didn't (instead I just decided to stay away from the British food) since that very night a bunch of us went over to a new friends place for a sort of dinner party and we had Indian food. It was different food from the Indian food that I had already tried, and well unfortunately I can't remember the names of these dishes, but just that they were phenomenally good, since I was a bit concerned as I wasn't sure how spicy it would be. Fortunately he has gotten very good at making the food with very little spice over the years. On Sunday I had some more friends cook and this time we had a lupper (late lunch/early dinner) consisting of mainly Iranian dishes as well as a Greek pasta dish. It was a really interesting mix of food and it turned out that the Greek dish was kind of like Italian lasagne but with different noodles. It was all really good and even the leftovers the next few days were amazing.

On Saturday night after dinner I ended up calling it a night around midnight and ended up going back to my flat and watched a Toronto Rock lacrosse game. As many of you probably know I use to play lacrosse for several years, and so lately I have found myself enjoying going to the Toronto Rock games, and last year I managed to make it to four or five games last season. This year I had originally planned on doing the same, but well it's a bit too far for me to travel, so instead I find myself running home Saturday nights to watch the games online. Luckily for me the NLL (National Lacrosse League) shows all of the games on their website, so I have managed to see all three of the Toronto Rock's wins. After the first weekend I was procrastinating a bit and decided to make some predictions as to how the NLL season will end up, and I've decided to mention how I think the teams will end up being ranked and it'll be interesting to see how I did (if I was even remotely close). I think I’m somewhat confident of these top four teams, but as for the rest we'll just have to see

1. Washington Stealth
2. Toronto Rock
3. Orlando Titans
4. Calgary Roughnecks
5. Rochester Knighthawks
6. Colorado Mammoth
7. Buffalo Bandits
8. Boston Blazers
9. Minnesota Swarm
10. Edmonton Rush
11. Philadelphia Wings

Well now I think that brings us up to date again :-)

Jeff

*Word of the Week: "invigilate" turns out to be a fancy British word for "proctor". As well I'm not sure if it's because of the high international student population at this school, or the large number of masters and PhD students or if it is a UK thing but it seems like many people use the word "paper" and "exam" synonymously.

Christmas in Canada

It was first thing Saturday morning that I left to go back to Canada. I flew directly out of Birmingham International and had a little layover in Zurich. I got to Birmingham airport just under 3hrs in advance for check-in, just in case there was a line or a long delay at security, but surprisingly Swissair didn’t open there counter until 2hrs before scheduled departure, so I managed to have a coffee and I watched the huge line of people trying to check into KLM. Once I checked in I went to security which initially looked like a short line, but turned out to be about half an hour to go through the line. It was kind of weird because during my whole trip to and from it ended up being this first security check at Birmingham’s little airport that I had to wait for more than 5minutes. I then just sat in the departure lounge and watched the sunrise and all the planes take off and land. My flight was scheduled to depart at about 9am, and so at 8 I watched the plane land, unload, and my luggage get loaded on.

It turned out that the plane was a few minutes late departing Zurich because of some snow and de-icing in the morning. Ultimately I boarded at 9am and got into Zurich about an hour before my flight was scheduled to depart. The funny thing about Zurich airport is that they never tell you in advance which terminal or gate your flight is going to leave from so as soon as I got off the plane I checked. There were three big screens and I had heard and seen that several flights were being delayed because of a snow storm working its way into Europe. It took me probably about 10minutes to finally find my flight on the screen (it was way further down than I had thought) but it was still on time. I went to the gate, and on the way went through another security check and then a passport check at the gate before boarding the air Canada flight.

It was kind of cool because I noticed that it looked like the Swiss Junior hockey team was also on the flight with me (and for any of you who don’t know they ended up being huge under dogs in the world junior’s hockey tournament this year, but shocked everyone by knocking off some great teams and winding up 4th!). Once boarded on the flight we were told that there would be about an hour delay because some other flights were delayed due to the weather and Zurich airport has some weird regulations so they had to wait for these flights to come in before we could leave.

I was lucky as I was given a window seat over the wing, so lots of leg room and there was only one person next to me.

Compared to the Thomas Cook/Air Transit flight I took coming to the UK this was definitely way better, as they constantly gave us tones of food and we had the little TVs so we could watch TV, movies, etc. (I think I ended up watching 5 or 6 movies in total during the flight). It was a very smooth flight and we then landed in Toronto only about 30 min late.

I was fortunate to leave on the Saturday as the snow storm hit Europe on the Sunday morning and several of my friends had long delays at the airport and one even had to spend a night in Heathrow.

Actually during the whole Christmas holiday there was a tone of snow that fell in Europe which caused lots of train and plane delays and cancellations, but luckily for me even when I came back it was never an issue. Actually it’s kind of funny to think about it since a week after I got back all the snow had completely melted and it was around 8°C and felt like spring…actually it still feels kind of like spring.

Over the Christmas break I worked a fair bit, but also spent a lot of time with my family. Christmas Eve and day I spent down in Brantford with my dad, sister, brother in law and his family.

Oddly enough there was no snow in Brantford for Christmas (unlike England which had a very white Christmas). But on the 28th on my way home to Collingwood from work I was fortunate enough to drive through a blizzard/snow squall.

It seems that every year I get to drive through at least one snow squall where the visibility is almost zero, but unlike last year I actually enjoyed the drive as it was nice to see the snow again. On the 29th work was closed as the Olympic torch went through Collingwood, Alliston and the Barrie region. So in the morning I went out and saw the torch come through Collingwood. It was the perfect day for it as it was snowing a bit and was about -10°C plus a nice wind chill on top of that; I don’t think the weather could have been anymore Canadian. It was amazing to see the number of people who turned out first thing on a cool Tuesday morning to watch it, and even in many of the store fronts you could see employees at the windows watching it go by.

On January 2nd I then went back down to Brantford and we had a nice Clarke family get together with all of my uncles and most of my cousins and family. It was the second year in a row that we have managed to do it and it was a lot of fun.

On the Sunday I then drove back to Collingwood with my sister. On the way back we stopped off in Toronto and I visited an Optician friend of mine and he showed me his new optical store that he is opening up soon. He managed to get a great space and it sounds like it’s going to do really well, so I can’t wait to see it when it is done. It was great to catch up with him and see what he was up to. Afterwards we continued up to Collingwood. It was snowing a bit in Toronto when we left so I listened to the radio on our way back and it turned out to be a great idea as it was snowing fairly heavily and there were a lot of snow drifts along the roads. Also basically all of the main roads except for Airport road were closed to Collingwood; which is kind of odd as airport road usually closes before the others. We stopped in at a Tim Hortons in Stayner (about 15-30min away from Collingwood) and a police officer mentioned that even airport road would likely get closed down in the next hour or so, so we just made it back in time.

The rest of the time back in Canada the weather wasn’t really an issue, but I kept my eye on the snow in Europe, because my flight was scheduled to land in Birmingham Sunday afternoon, and then first thing Monday morning I had a midterm, so I didn’t want to miss it. Fortunately the trip back went very smoothly, as all my flights were essentially on time and there was never a wait at the security checks.

The only delay at security was for me to explain what my Ophthalmoscope and Retinoscope are (since in the case the battery handles looks kind of suspicious to them). The flight from Toronto to Zurich left basically on time, and so when I got into Zurich I had planned to go downtown and take some pictures for about an hour since I had a 4 hour lay over. I had intended to ask and make sure that I would have enough time, but by the time I had gotten off the flight it was about half an hour later than I expected, and most of the connecting were all showing that they were on time, so unfortunately I decided not to take the train ride to town. But I think next Christmas I might try to book a flight that has a layover in Zurich again but maybe with a bit of a longer layover, so this time I can definitely go and see some of the city. All in all I was actually very impressed with the flights especially since Europe was having a real bad snow storms during the whole Christmas break, especially since the only delays in flights leaving Zurich airport were very minor (an hour or two max)...I guess the Swiss are just much better at dealing with the snow.

... That was my 3week Christmas Holiday
 
Jeff

*Word of the Week: "Grit" which is basically the British term for what they put on the roads and sidewalks when it gets icy. Its basically a mixture of sand, tiny rocks and some salt, and the grit they use here on campus when it's placed on the walks it is an orangy red colour that actually makes it looks like alot of people just had a bit too much alcohol :S 

Happy Holidays

This past week was my final week of classes, which normally means it would be relatively light and maybe just review for the midterms, but no such luck we were learning new stuff in each of the classes, some of it is even going to be on our midterm. But classes are now FINALLY over until the end of January (after our midterms). Our midterm schedule was finally released this past week, and it doesn't look too bad except we have an exam on the first day back at 9am and then one on a Saturday at 9am, but at least the Saturday one is our very last mid sessional exam.

Going into the mid sessionals it's hard to judge how we've been doing since we have only really had 3 practical assessments: 2 in ophthalmic lenses (the first one I did quite well on and the second was this week so wont get results for a few more weeks) and then the other was in clinical optometry where we had to do a drawing of someone’s retinal. We actually did the clinical optometry assessment at the end of November, but just got our marks for it this past week, and I ended up getting much better than I had thought.

I have actually surprised myself a fair bit this week as I managed to study for at least an hour or two each day! This is impressive for being so close to Christmas and such a busy week. See this week one thing I did was went with a group of my friends to an off campus housing place called the Heights which looks really nice since it's like an apartment of four rooms (which is good since there is four of us) and we each have a bedroom and our own bathroom/shower and so all we would share is the kitchen (which works since we all hang out in one persons kitchen all the time anyways). Plus this place also has a common area like a little living room right by the kitchen which is cool. I ended up looking at other places since some of my friends that are UK students aren't allowed to live in residence in their second year, also I found out that because they are almost done the new residence on campus then they will only be offering the suite style rooms next year (which is the basically same price as the place we looked at). But so over the Christmas break I will have to think about it and sort stuff out and figure out where I want to live next year.

Actually this week was basically filled with lasts and farewells, starting with last lectures of the term. Then on Wednesday one of my friends and I headed to the pub that evening and played a couple games of pool, as a nice end of term thing. Since at the start of the term it was basically a weekly thing that we would do, but lately with studying for exams and projects we hadn't done it in a while so we figured we would do one last one before the end of the term.

On Thursday a group of us ended up also going out for lunch to Pizza Express (a fancy pizza restaurant near campus) and had a nice relaxing last lunch all together before everyone went home. The place and food was actually so good and it was such a nice restaurant that we're planning to go back there every once in a while. While we were in the restaurant at one point we looked out and noticed that there was a blizzard outside! It was a cool day but I never thought I would really see any snow here, so it was quite a surprise. It lasted for about 30min or so and about a cm or two ultimately landed and stayed on the ground, which made it definitely makes it feel like Christmas time now!

 

Later that evening a smaller group of us who usually cook together ended up meeting at our one friends kitchen (as usual) and had a little bailies and biscuit party and a bunch of their flatmates (who we've gotten to know since we're always over there) also came and joined us, which was nice to see everyone again. Of course the bailies, chocolates and cookies were also a good way to finish off the last night of the term.

Friday was our final day of lectures for the term, and after class my five of us ended up getting together for lunch out our favourite hang out; Sac of Potatoes. Again at one point we had started meeting up there every Friday for lunch, so decided it would be a good way to end the term. One of my friends who is from the UK had his parents and grandmother was in town to pick him up so he brought them along and so it was a really great lunch and end to my first term.

I'll be heading back to Canada shortly for a few weeks so I can spend time with family and friends. While I’m in Canada, I don't know if I’ll end up writing much here, but when I get back I'll probably do a quick post, and then will be back mid-late January (well unless something big happens or I end up wanting to procrastinate my studying :P)

I hope everyone a very happy and safe holiday season and I'll see you in the New Year!

 

Cheers,
Jeff



*Word of the week: "liquid dish soap" back in Canada is called "wash up" (or more formally "washing up liquid" here) ... just something to think about when your washing the dishes this holiday season ;)