Last days

My last Wednesday at the lab was fun. Alfred and I raced elevators to the 5th floor and I happened to choose the faster one. We made bets on the number of newborn mice and again I won! I was on a huge roll. Then we threw snowballs in the lab (because we were defrosting the freezer). Thursday we downloaded SuperMario Bros. and Tetris (which sucks!)onto the computer at work. The computer which was fast to begin with, seeing as the computer was less than a month old, then started to work much slower haha. Ok, I must admit that finishing a work term was incentive to go all wild and crazy at the lab because it was virtually consequence free. In addition to that, everybody was away! It was just Alfred, Caroline and me. Really no authority to worry about haha. However on Friday, my sup and manager came back to officially send me off to the next phase in my life. That really brought finality to what I was doing (working and undergrad) and welcomed me to start anew.

I went out for some "coffee" with Sue and Mez, my high school best buds. I miss my old friends already. We reminisced about the old days as we usually do. Life seems so much more complex compared to those times. We talked about Jamaica and it was such a good time to bring up the stories, especially the ones that I could hardly remember the details about....Alzheimer's. Haha, this one is really funny and I'd like to commit it to Blog memory: We went out of our hotel room (we were apparently hermits) probably to get some food at the midnight snack bar...lots of pastries and goodies to hold us over for the night. Mez managed to get back to the room before Sue and I and thought it would be funny to lock us out with the chain link. Mez thought that this was so hilarious and she had to rub it in by taunting us through the crack of the door. Normally this would have been a foolproof plan but alas, our room was on the 2nd floor and the balcony was accessible. Sue and I had this great plan where Sue distracted Mez, making her think that she was desperately trying to get in and she did a stellar job at it. Hahaha, half her body jammed through the door crack, making pleas to get in. She truly is a drama queen. This made Mez more smug and she was laughing her ass off on the bed. Meanwhile I ran around to the opposite side of the hotel which faced the middle grounds where the pool, eating area and entertainment stage were. I climbed up to our balcony and we happened to have the glass sliding door open, a bad habit if we didn't want our stuff to get stolen, but it was so perfect....while Sue was occupying Mez, I creeped in and wound up....for the biggest ass smack I've ever given. In the split second before I let my arm swing, I caught Sue's eye and Mez still had no clue. WHACK, I caught Mez in mid-laughter and she literally was so startled that she convulsed into the air and fell off the bed! I probably had never laughed so hard in my life. Then we forgot to let Sue in. Oh man, soooo funny. Wahh....I want to go back.

Anyhow, onto more relevant topics. Orientation was cool. I still haven't met a majority of the over 200 students in my class. It's strange group of people, us first years. Take the most over-achieving, neurotic and charismatic people (excluding me) and put them into one room. It makes for a nice sociological study I think. But seriously, everybody is in fact very different. The age range is large 19-38 and people come from all walks of life. We mostly share in common that we are all geeks in one form or another. Toronto is a whole different world, it's hustle and bustle, lots of things are open late. I had a lot of fun at Wonderland and will post a funny picture later on. There are many homeless people and I wondered how much change I needed to carry with me to walk back and forth to school. I didn't make it 2 days before I found myself helping out another person with money. Strangely enough, I gave a toonie to a lady who was supposed to meet some of her friends at a bar and they never showed up. She lived pretty far from where she was supposed to meet her friends and started walking home in her tall heels because she had no money for the subway. I sympathized with her mainly because she was ditched by her friends, but also because she was wearing heels and as a fellow female, I know the pain. All week I relied on others to take pictures for me because I didn't want to carry my camera everywhere. Unfortunately using other people's pictures is just not as sentimental. So I decided to bring my camera to one of the last events of the week, the Boat Cruise around Toronto Island. I waited to take a cab with my classmate and for fear that we would miss the boat, I was very anxious to get there on time. Boon and I waited for about half an hour for him to arrive and we were barely going to make it for 6pm. When we finally caught a cab, I could only think about what I was going to do when we saw the boat leaving. I was also pretty nervous because the cab driver had no idea where he was going. In the end, we made it there on time, but I left the camera on the back seat of the cab. Boon got out of the cab on the other side and didn't see the camera sitting there. The whole ride, I didn't look to see what the cab number was or the driver's name. I could only remember that the cab was red with a yellow top. So I realized it about 3 minutes after I left. Feeling that we were in a pretty secluded area, I didn't think I'd be able to flag another cab down to figure out what the name of the cab was. I also didn't want to miss the cruise. In retrospect though, I would have forfeited the $30 it cost to get my ticket to chase down that cab to get my $700 camera back. If only someone had suggested it to me because my brain was so congested at the time. Damn....I didn't even use the camera yet in Toronto. On the up side, I did win a $100 textbook that I intended to buy for my anatomy course. So I've had a few ups and downs since being here but it will hopefully make me stronger, or just an angry little asian girl like my sis.