Not the most exciting week ever known; in the absence of having a laptop at home I’ve been excelling in nap taking and reading story books. Of course I have made a number of trips to the library which, in theory, was so I could make progress with my projects which now have deadlines looming in the near future. In practise I have spend a number of hours trying to make decisions about term papers so far with a very low success rate. It’s great that the staff at UBC give us the opportunity to chose subjects that are of interest to us but in my case this opens far too many doors and it consequently takes me almost as much time to decide what to write about as it does to write the paper.
At the end of last week it was a fellow Edinburgh exchanger’s birthday which was a thoroughly entertaining evening during which we ventured to Chinatown for food then to quite possibly the most British pub I have come across in Vancouver. So much so that they even had Tennants on tap – a beer that I don’t think I’ve ever seen outside Scotland! This caused much amusement for the true and token Scots among us and needed a little explaining to the French, Kiwi, Norwegian, and Canadian members of the party. At the end of the evening we found ourselves in The Cambie; a bar where the drunk could dance - even if it did require them to create their own dance floor between pool tables. With the birthday boy suitably inebriated it was a longer walk than usual back to the bus which took us back to campus.
At the moment there are (I think!) a total of 11 Edinburgh University students at the University of British Columbia none of whom I knew before embarking on the international exchange adventure. Whilst this year has prompted me to meet many people from all corners of the world it’s also been good to meet a few folk from home I’d never met before. It means that every so often we can sit and chat about the quirks and student haunts of Scotland’s capital without having to explain what the likes of KB, Teviot and Potterrow are. Plus when we’re back in Edinburgh we can meet and chat about the SUB (student union building), Mahoneys (Irish pub on campus) and all things Vancouver.
The week was rounded off by Sunday’s rugby match in North Vancouver. Whilst it wasn’t a particularly fine display of athleticism and skill on my part it was a good to have run around and knock a few people over. Plus having played 70 minutes of rugby (we play shorter halves here) I felt that I was justified in having my beer and burger afterwards! All in all a relatively chilled week before life returns to its usual manic pace!
