Saturday, February 10, 2007

I met Len and Sadiq at the Edward Ford Building this morning at 11:30am. When I left my rez to meet them, it was grey outside, but not raining or anything. Of course, as soon as I started walking, it started raining and I was soaked by the time I got there. I ended up taking off my flip flops and walking barefoot most of the way since my flip flops were so wet and slippery. We waited inside the building for about 5 minutes until the sun came out again. Bad timing, I guess.

Len and Sadiq showed me around the campus a bit since they both had been here longer than me. I saw the squash courts, the student union building, graffiti lane, the quadrangle, the fisher library (which is the largest library in the southern hemisphere), and Victoria park where there is an outdoor 50 m pool.

From there we walked towards downtown and met Brooke at Central station. We found her surprisingly easily and then headed towards china town and paddy’s market to try the cheap shopping first. There was tons of stuff there, but nothing very suitable for a hospital. Brooke bought a bathing suit and we tried on LOTS of wigs. There are wig stores everywhere here… so weird!

Brooke and I talked for a while today and I found out she has done some pretty interesting things. She graduated from McGill in 2005 as well and has been living in Africa (Uganda mostly) ever since. She was there traveling first and then ended up staying to do HIV/AIDS research. It sounds like she really enjoyed the work, but experienced a lot of bad things while she was there. Here are a few of them:

-She has had malaria.

-She was missing/lost for 4 days in rural Africa camping in a tent on her own.

-She was in a huge bus/car accident on some dangerous road where over 30 people on the same bus as her died. She was one of 3 people who survived because she was wearing her seatbelt. Her bus crashed head on with another vehicle, flipped over and she was left hanging upside down in the bus. When she got herself out, she saw the local villagers who she thought were coming to help, but they came, stole everyone’s stuff and left. I assume they eventually got rescued.

Brooke trying on some sunglasses.
-She was also robbed several times, but one time was particularly bad. When she was on the train in Zimbabwe, a group of men broke into her cabin, stabbed her friend, beat her up and stole all their stuff.

(Brooke’s family doesn’t know about all those bad things- so if you happen to be talking to her parents at our graduation or something- don’t mention it. )

Anyway, back to our day. We walked towards town hall to a store called David Jones and Len took us to an Oyster bar that he had been to a few weeks ago. We sat around a really nice bar and had a really good meal. It was the first time I tried raw oysters. They were so slimy, but I guess they were ok. I also had the best pad thai ever. We stayed there talking for a very long time.

After our late lunch Brooke and I went looking for some casual business clothes. We started in David Jones since we heard it was nice, but figured out quite quickly it wasn’t our kind of store. The first pair of shoes that I picked up were only $1050 taxes included. The rest of our shopping trip wasn’t particularly successful but we did pick up a few little things.
This is Sabiha (in dentistry).

I got back to my studio at about 8pm and talked to Brent for a while. At around 10pm Len and Sadiq came by the rez and Sabiha and I walked around Newtown with them. We got some really good gelato and then came back to the picnic tables by our rez to talk for a while.