What's up in the Dalhousie?

Hello everyone,

Now that Darcy has given you a sample of daily life over here in Dartmouth, I thought I'd take you all across the harbour into Halifax, and talk about what my days at Dalhousie are like.

First, some context:  here is a map of Halifax, with the relevant bits marked (we are the blue star; Dalhousie is the red arrow):

(Click for full size)
Image taken from http://mappery.com/map-of/Halifax-Dartmouth-Map

So, you see it is a ways to school in the morning.  I walk to the bus stop (through Dartmouth Commons, which is a lovely walk) every morning, which is about 700 m away.  Then I take the bus over the bridge, which is one heck of a view (as long as you like iron bars):

Did you think we were done with the ocean?

There are only two bridges into Halifax, and they are both toll bridges, so traffic moves pretty slowly.  I have found this to be an excellent time to do exactly nothing.

Once across the bridge, we drive through historic downtown Halifax, which I really know nothing about, aside from the fact that it looks real nice:

Did you notice you can still see the ocean?

Then, after between half an hour and forty five minutes, depending on traffic, I get to the university:

It's blurry, but it says it was founded in 1850, which for those of you who are playing the home game, is AFTER the ferry started.

Dalhousie is on University Avenue, which you might think is obvious, but Halifax has about thirteen hozillion universities all in its downtown core, so that's actually potentially confusing if you DON'T go to Dalhousie.  Anyways, with the trees all leafy and such, it looks pretty awesome:

Just to the left, you can see the Computer Science building, captured in all of its glory right here:

It's a pretty nice building.  On the inside, it's got classrooms and offices and computer labs like you would expect, but grad students are organized into "playgrounds."  Here is my playground:

You might notice that a "playground" is actually just a kind of wacky cubicle farm.  But so far, none of the people near me have ever shown up, so I don't mind at all.  Here is my desk as it was before I got a computer:

Perhaps you notice al that Lego on my desk.  This brings me to what I actually do while I am at the school, which I was not able to explain to anyone before I arrived, because I had no idea what I would be doing.

It turns out that what I do is a bunch of random stuff.  The Lego was actually part of my TA work.  My supervisor (who I do not have a picture of) wants to use it as a demonstration for one of his classes.  I didn't complain because I got to build lego for the first few days I was in school.

I also do stuff like go to classes and teach labs and things, but mostly I just seem to do stuff.  Just today, I've finally got an actual project to work on, but up until now, I was just doing miscellaneous odd jobs that needed doing, both for myself and my supervisor.  I have spent far more time than I should have getting administrative stuff sorted out, mainly because it seems like no one is very good at communicating things.  Some of you might know how I like to know exactly what all the rules are (so I can feel confident in breaking them), and despite my best efforts, I have twice broken rules that could have resulted in me losing my registration if I didn't fix them.  Luckily, everything seems to be fine now, but you never know.

My supervisor (Dr. Jamie Blustein) and I are getting along very well.  He's a big geek, I'm a big geek, it works out.  I'll likely have more to say about what I am actually DOING once I start doing it, but suffice it to say that I seem to have ended up in an area of Computer Science that I have literally never studied before.  Luckily, it's about things I care a whole lot about, so it all works out nicely.

Dalhousie has a LOT of options for food, and I am still wandering around trying to find them all, in addition to all the places that are just off the grounds that I can walk to.  The only issue is that I have to eat with the common masses.  I usually eat outside, but the wasps seem to have discovered that sitting near where the food is sold is a great way to get food bits that people drop, so it's a bit unpleasant sometimes.

So, that's a sort of overview of my academic life so far (confused?  So are we all).  I'll leave you with these two pictures of quaint old houses:

JUST KIDDING!!  These are actually Dalhousie offices.  I guess they didn't want to tear down the cute houses, so they stuck offices in them instead.  I think it's awesome.

Title Goes Here

Darcy here, (Daniel is making me blog at gun point)

Here is what I've been up to.

We got our stuff on Wednesday morning, finally at long last, and we've been working on unpacking that.  We're stuck at an impasse at the moment though, because we have a complete lack of shelving, and the majority of our stuff is books.  Also, the places where we want to put things have boxes in them, which makes for a sad catch 22 of unpacking.

I was stuck at home a lot while Daniel was at school, and for several days, we didn't have the internet, or anything that we didn't bring with us in the car, so I had nothing to do but wander around Dartmouth. (Now that we have the internet I just spend all day on it looking at cat pictures so clearly my life is better with the internet)

I took a walk around all the places that I had been, and took a camera with me, because I didn't think to bring one with me the first time. So first I walked Daniel to the bus stop. On the way to the bus stop we have to pass through The Dartmouth Commons which we access by walking through a graveyard

 

You can't swing a dead cat in this town without hitting a grave yard. Which is pretty fortunate because you hit a good place to leave that cat.

This grave yard (and other's we've seen I assume) have some totally old gravestones. This is from the 1800s.

Here is The Commons. You can see the ocean from it. Also, it is dog friendly.

It has trees and stuff.

  And my final picture of The Commons is the gate to leave them.

Gate!!!

 Then in the afternoon I headed out to THE OCEAN!!!!!!! and some other things in that direction.







I have been trying to capture the steepness of the hill that our house is on, but I don't think you can capture with a camera how steep it is.

Another graveyard about ten feet from the first grave yard I showed you. Like I said, dead cat etc.

This grave yard is on a hill like all of Dartmouth.

Portland street. The main downtowny part of Dartmouth.

THE SEA!!!!!!!!!!!! Also, the bridge to Halifax that Daniel takes everyday. I have yet to go on this bridge.

Some large body of water.

I guess this water is majestic. If you like that sort of thing.

The ferry to Halifax, which I have taken. The ferry has been running from Dartmouth to Halifax since like 1837. There is your fun historic fact of the blog post.

More ocean.

A wharf.

Also a Worf. Pretty Majestic. Look at all that majesty. 

Here I tried to capture the sunlight sparkling off the ocean.

A sweet park that over looks the ocean that I have waxed poetic about.

This is how it over looks it.

This is the creme de le creme of the park...(ellipses for tension!!) What is this strange pyramid???

It is the World Peace Pavilion. This is not a very good picture but there is like a rock from maybe almost all the countries in the world. Or at least the ones that matter ...I guess it made me not want to start a war. I guess. 

Unfortunately, this sweet ship I saw from the Peace Pavilion made me want to be a pirate so mission not accomplished.

I took this picture because there is a big big boat out there by Georges Island (like the mad king). Yup. That's a big boat all right.

Still trying to show you guys the hills. Also, I am on my way home from my secret love THE SEA!!!

On my way home I saw this vet office with animals all over it.

Also, on my way home I got lost and I ended up in this park. The water you see is Sullivan's Pond and it's a pretty nice little park.

Swans

The is this little island with a totem pole and house.

Ducks!!

More hill.

Hill!!!

And finally, here is what the outside of our house look like. We are the top two windows on the far side.

So, as soon as we get the house in some semblance of order we'll show you the insides.

That is all.

PS Click on the pictures to see them larger. It is worth it for the pictures of....THE SEA!!!!!!!

The Journey to Dartmouth

At long last, we have internet in our humble abode, so we have the time to blog about the final leg of our trip!


We left our beautiful campground in Maine, BEFORE the pancake breakfast (Darcy's idea) and began our last day of serious driving.  Google advised not following the interstate, and instead following a smaller regional highway to the border, so we foolishly believed that this was a good idea.

Back in Canada!  Hooray for French!

Unfortunately, Maine is not like British Columbia, where you can go for hours between towns.  Maine is the land of infinite town.  Essentially, from where we left the interstate to the border (about 200 km) we were never not in some kind of town.  Sometimes the speed limit was higher, but often it was 40 or 35 mph (55-65 km/h).

Also, we chose that day to revert to our getting lost ways, and we ended up taking a scenic route through a couple of Maine towns, trying to find where we were supposed to be.  Luckily, the towns are nice to look at; unluckily, they are challenging to navigate.

Anyways, we finally made it to the Canadian Border, and had no problems crossing over.  Calais, Maine and St Stephen, New Brunswick are right across the river from each other, with several bridges between them, and it is pretty clear that people who live there wander back and forth all the time.

New Brunswick was nice, and was also the first time we were able to take a good look at the ocean, which some of us may have been pretty excited about:

Look it's the ocean!

More ocean!

STILL the ocean!

The Ocean Part IV: The Gritty Reboot

Oh wait, is this a lake???? NOPE!  The OCEAN!

Also in New Brunswick were plenty of wind farms.  We thought we'd see a bunch of those in the prairies, but all they appear to farm there is corn (and oil).  But, since there is wind all over the maritimes, they've got wind farms every which place.

This is one of many photos of windfarms that Darcy took

Although not a windfarm, this is still some nice countryside

This is NEW BRUNSWICK

Darcy has never been east of Quebec (except for a trip to Europe) and Daniel has only been to the Maritimes once, about ten years ago, but that makes him an expert.  So, when we saw a sign for the "World Famous" magnetic hill, and Daniel said "It's not all that it's cracked up to be," we didn't even bother to stop.

HAHA just kidding.  The magnetic hill is an optical illusion where you put your car in neutral at the "bottom" and suddenly your car starts rolling backwards up the hill.  The trick isn't actually magnets, but rather an optical illusion where it looks like you're at the bottom of a hill, but you're not really there.  While we were there, we talked to some English ladies who were seriously unimpressed that there were no actual magnets.  I suspect they don't know how magnets work, possibly because they are Juggalettes*.

So, rolling backwards up a hill is pretty neat, but I guess New Brunswick (or at least Moncton) must be pretty strapped for cash, because it costs five dollars and takes about thirty seconds.  We both enjoyed it.  Turns out that Daniel's memory of it not being all that great was entirely fabricated, because the last time he was here, he wasn't able to go see it, despite really wanting to, so he invented a fake memory of it being stupid and boring.

Here we are rolling backwards up the hill (see it looks like we're going to roll forwards, but we don't).  The magnetic hill: probably not worth $5

So, after getting lost leaving the magnetic hill (because magnets were playing with our compass....yes let's go with that), we got back on the road and headed into Nova Scotia, our soon to be home Province.

Nova Scotia.  Home Sweet Home, we guess

The roads in Nova Scotia, at least in the north were quite curious:

I guess the road on the right is embarrassed?  Or angry?

We eventually made it to Dartmouth, which afforded us quite the view as we rolled in.  Note that everything in the city is on a hill.  This is not an exaggeration or anything, literally everything in this city is on a slant.  The hill our apartment is on is about twice as steep as any road in Prince George, although there are some similar roads in North Vancouver.

Dartmouth: it's a city.

The nice thing about the hill, though, is that everyone has an excellent view of the ocean, and we are no exception.  It is EXTREMELY awesome to have a view of the harbor directly off our back deck:

Those lights in the centre are on a ferry!

So, that was the last leg of our trip.  We have lots more to talk about, with all the things we've been doing in Dartmouth since we arrived, and what Daniel's been up to at school (spoilers: it involves LEGO).  We'll be updating again soon with pictures of our apartment, the town and Dalhousie (plus more ocean), so stay tuned!

*If you don't know what a Juggalette is, DO NOT GOOGLE IT.  Suffice it to say, it is someone who doesn't know how magnets work.