TO trip blog

I went to Toronto for the first time (excluding airport and Greyhound Bus station stopovers) in the end of February. It was a lot of fun! I took the train (first time in I’ve taken the train in North America) on Sunday Feb 12th. Fairly uneventful ride but I had a wretched pasta salad for lunch. When I arrived I decided to take the metro..ahem…subway to the station nearest the hotel where I was staying. I had a suitcase half-full of books as well as my computer (read: way too much crap) and couldn’t find my change at first but once I made it through the wicket it was fine. I arrived in Dundas square at the corner of Younge street and blinked in surprise at the big flashy animated ads. I found the hotel easily enough and checked in. My roomate wasn’t there yet, so I decided to unpack and go out for supper. I had some nice Thai food just down the street an then picked up a phone card at the nearby depanneur … oops convenience store. My roomate-to-be was still not there, so I went to sleep. Several hours later, I awoke to a flashing light and horrible noise … oh isn’t that funny, someone accidentally set off the fire alarm at 1:30 and we have to evacuate the building… and I met my roomate! Since we had to get out right away we both grabbed our laptops and went out the fire escape. I was surprised how young everyone else looked. We went and sat in the lobby of the hotel across the street until we were able to go back in. Fun way to meet your companion for the next two weeks!

The Bioinformatics workshop was held at the MaRS centre which was a 10 minute walk from the hotel. Interestingly, this walk took us right past the Greyhound bus station, yes the very one I waited at in 1997 during our very very long bus trip to Edmonton. The MaRS building was really cool and they have Dr. Banting’s desk in the lobby of the place where our classroom was. Each student got a massive binder and mouse pad (to take home) and a Linuxy Thinkpad (not to take home). The day started at 9 and officially ended at about 5:30, after which time there was an open lab until 9 PM so we could work on our assignments. Thankfully they interspersed this with lunch and coffee breaks, but I had to seriously cut back on my coffee consumption when my teeth started hurting. I learned a LOT of stuff and we had amazing instructors. I’m really fortunate to have taken this course.

So it turns out the hotel I stayed at is actually now a student residence, purchased the the U of T when the double cohort thing happened. They needed a booze-free residence for the young, tender, under-age 17-year-olds to live in. So that explains why almost everyone else there looked about half my age. The only problem with this res is that its still a hotel room you’re living in, which is way too dark and not at all suited for studying. I’m glad I only stayed there for two weeks! The restaurant was nor run economy cafeteria style and while I was very grateful for the cheap price and included breakfast, I was really glad to get back home and cook my own food again. The jam was just wrong and the yogurt was really sweet. The scrambled eggs were powdered too, and it was funny to watch people force themselves to eat them for protein. Because of the 17-year olds the residence was supposedly alcohol free, although in the lounge one night we noticed a brown paper bag from the LCBO propped up against a lamp which contained a bottle of gin, probably to be collected later at night! There were also 24-hour security personnel who requested to see our room cards every time we went to our rooms and a lady checking our breakfast cards at the restaurant. I’ve never lived in residence before so it was kind of interesting to experience it.

I met a some great people there and we had a lot of fun. My roomate was incredibly nice and we had a blast (and a BLAST) together. After a week of eating out we decided to go frugal and eat in a few nights the following week. We bought massive bowl-cup things for $1.29 and went grocery shopping to get tea, broccoli, Nice buiscuits, olives, cheese, and ramen noodles. There was a common room on our floor and it soon became our kitchen and the meeting place for the nefarious bioinformatics geeks. It was also the locale of the unforgettable Friday-night party, of which some photos are available on Will (the shutterbug’s) photoblog. On the last day we all went out to an Italian restaurant and instead of taking the streetcar we took the subway and walked through what we later found out was a not-so-nice area of town (from the sounds of it, half of metro TO is kind our rough) and saw ths really tacky department store with flashing lights. What is it with Toronto and flashing lights on buildlings?? On the way back we took the streetcar, which was really cool. We stopped outside the MaRS buildling to take some pictures and a car full of guys pulled up and a kid (about 10 years old) started to get out and shour “Get in the car!” to the over 6-foot tall black-belt fellow who was with us, which was both creepy and confusing at the same time. His companions pulled him back in the car they drove off, leaving us perplexed.

The aforementioned black-belt guy is from Newfoundland and his cousin was on the men’s curling team and won a gold while we were in TO. The gold medal match was on an open-lab day so we got the game up on the projector and watched it while doing our assignments. His cousin kicked some serious ass and made a few incredible shots to give Canada a huge lead. I did a bit of curling in high school PE so I appreciate how hard it is to get those kind of shots. Someone likened it to “bolwing on ice, with strategy” and that seems pretty accurate to me. When they won the gold, our classmate was so happy and ran out to call his family. It was great fun!

Oh yes, if you’re wondering what the picture is all about, we were having a “viewing 3D protein strucutres in sterovision” time which required getting embarassingly close to our computer screens…

My pics here.