Filed under: Travels
Or old news if you’ve been paying attention =P
I have four less teeth than I used to and Kat arrives tonight and on Wednesday I head to China. Yup. May I direct your attention this way for a little while.
Filed under: Current events, Travels | Tags: Farine Five Roses, High Speed Rail Canada, Monte Paulsen, Montreal, Off the Rails, Redpath Sugar, Seat 61, The Walrus, Toronto, Turbo, Union Station, VIA Rail
I pulled into Montreal by train this evening for the last time of my undergraduate residence in this city. For the last time of these four years, I passed the neon Farine Five Roses sign which you can see if you sit on the right-hand side of the train. It looks most brilliant at night.
It was one of the first markers I noticed in the Montreal skyline when I began to take VIA’s Montreal/Toronto trains. There was also Redpath Sugar at both destinations, connecting the two industrial cities of early 20th century (Upper and Lower) Canada, but I haven’t been able to spot it my last few trips (or maybe I just didn’t notice). I’m going to miss it. I’m going to miss the sites and sights in between Montreal and Toronto. I’m going to miss having coffee with my mom at Union Station where the baristas at Second Cup always scald the milk. I’m going to miss dozing and catching up on films without the distraction of the internet. I’m going to miss meeting random people like that woman who asked me what my menstrual cycle was like less than five minutes into conversation, or most recently that really cool YA writer (hi!) whose work I still have to check out. I’m going to miss train operators who depart late but manage to make it on time anyays (I have better experience than some friends who always complain, maybe they just like me better). I’m going to miss Redpath Sugar and Farine Five Roses.
♥ trains
There’s a great article in the Walrus this month by Monte Paulsen on rail progress (and subsequently, regression) in Canada, with particular interest in the Edmonton-Calgary and Toronto-Montreal (a.k.a. the Quebec-Windsor Corridor) routes. (more…)
Filed under: Attempts, Consumerism, Travels, Uni | Tags: Grown ups, Harbin, Materialism, Migration studies, Study abroad, Xi'an
Today was a pub night and I think there was supposed to be socialising between students of different area studies disciplines, but instead I spent most more than two hours chatting about China plans with Ben, Sarah, and Xue-Rong (we’re in council together). I’m so excited; there will be so many friends and semi-friends there next year, and even just really nice acquaintances who would be such friendly faces to see while abroad. I should probably start some of those applications. I think I want to go to Harbin for the fall semester, and then Xi’an in the spring semester. Hopefully, everyone will be in Beijing.
Also, I swore I’d stop doing this, but clearly I can’t help it. (more…)
Filed under: Fangirl, Travels, Uni | Tags: Bernard Shapiro, Orientalist representations of Muslims, Passenger ships, Philip Pullman, Sea-travel, Undergraduate theses
(I’m not just a silly girl who looks at dresses online all day, you know…)
Thesis-wise, the research goes well but the writing does not. I really need to put more Jess into it. I’m sure I’d made competent analyses of Orientalist representations of Muslims through the 2006-2008 academic years (a professor even nominated me for a prize – something related to the government of Pakistan, I’d find out a couple months later), but somehow my heart just isn’t in it now. Maybe I should go back to those essays. Was it Bernard Shapiro who opposed thesis-writing for undergrads? Thanks for trying, I guess.
If I get to live out my hypothetical dream summer in Europe, I think I’d like to come back by freighter. I didn’t think it was something that was very possible for ordinary passengers these days given the rise of commercial air travel, but apparently it can happen (though it’s rather expensive). I remember my Pullman talking about his voyages between Commonwealth nations as a child (both his father and stepfather were in the RAF) and really appreciating the vast expanse of the Earth, traveling by ship rather than by plane:
I was too young to remember much of our first sea voyages to and from Africa, but I remember a lot about the voyage to Australia. This was in the 1950s, when it was still more common to travel by sea than by air, and how grateful I am to have lived at a time when, if you made a long journey, you travelled on the surface of the earth. One thing we’ve lost with air travel is a sense of how large the world is, and how various. Five miles up in a jumbo jet, what can you see? The in-flight movie, that’s what you can see. But aboard ship the world was close, and all our senses knew it.
I’d like to know it some time.
