Vancouver is beautiful and there are flowers, coffee
shops, and mountains everywhere. I miss home though. It is weird to
know nobody and miss everybody. I wish that there were some way to put
Vancouver into my pocket and bring it home. Anywhere that I walk, I can see mountains and ocean.
It is wonderful, except that I have to walk, bike, or run everywhere (no car,
which is no good in the rain). There are coffee shops, grocery stores,
restaurants, and other random stores all around the area of town where I live.
I bought a
bike, and so far, I have not killed myself. The coolest thing to do with
a bike here is to take it up a mountain on a ski lift and then ride
down. I have not gotten up the courage to do that yet. The
second coolest thing is to ride all over to the protected woodlands, which
separate my apartment and UBC. There are trails all through the woods,
and the trees and flowers all over are wonderful. I saw a beautiful tree
the other day, and this guy told me that it was a Red Cedar. I told him
that I thought it would make a beautiful table.
Everyone here is
environmentally friendly, and they recycle everything. The only
ingredient in the peanut butter is peanuts. The only thing in the jelly
is fruit. There are more sushi restaurants than places to get a hamburger.
The bakery, cheese shop, produce market, fish market, and grocery store
(shopping takes forever) all have huge natural foods sections.
Starbucks is more prevalent than Waffle House in Atlanta is.
I am finding stuff
to do. Mostly reading, biking, running, or going to the cold beach.
Every neighborhood has something called a Community Center. You
"join" the Community Center and then are eligible for all the
activities. They have everything from outdoors activities, team sports,
music lessons, art lessons, any anything else you can imagine wanting to
learn. Roommate and I are going on a kayaking/camping trip. I am
going to sleep outside for the first time in my entire life. I have also
gone to many random talks in the computer science department and at Regent
College (one of UBC's theological seminaries).
Yes, I saw a Mountie. I went over the to the local RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) post. I walked up to the receptionist and said, "Hi. My name is Danielle. I'm from Atlanta, GA and would like to meet a Mountie." The receptionist looked at me like I was crazy for wanting to meet a police officer. I then asked for a picture, and she connected that I was a stupid American. This second lady wearing jeans and a camping jacket walked up to the counter. The receptionist told the second lady that I wanted a picture with her. The second lady was a Mountie! The Mountie said, "You want a picture with the red coat, ay? How about just a head shot." After she left, I looked through the Mountie brochures and took a few. Then she came back with the red coat and Stetson (which is their dress uniform, the regular uniform looks like a Georgia state trooper's uniform). I got my picture with her, and she gave me stickers and stick-on Mountie tattoos. All the writing on the stickers is in English and in French, as is all the writing on everything. So that was my Mountie experience. See picture below. .
I am not
completely content here because I have not really made many friends.
This is because my work is all independent study research, and I live off
campus in an apartment. Since I have no friends and no car, I have not
had a huge chance to see all of Vancouver. I have looked around some.
In addition, all of British Columbia's transit is on strike, so I cannot use
their terrific bus system; however, I go and roam around Vancouver, but can
only get to about 4 miles away from home in any direction. There are
parks all around so I go and play basketball, run, or bike.
The project my professor has us working on is interesting.
However, there are a lot of hoops to jump through and a lot of background info
that we need to read through. We are extending an existing program that
folds one RNA strand to fold multiple RNA strands. We do not have his
permission yet, and our professor is out of town at a conference for 8 or 9
days. The hardest part right now is taking what I want to say and putting
it into a readable/math form. I use a lot of LaTeX. I can write
what I want to say in C, Java or Scheme, but not in math formulas. Once
we have the permissions and the math formulas, I will be a lot busier. All the
code for the single strand-folding program is in the C programming language and
my roommate does not know C, and has started her part in Java.The most recent
copy of my notes can be downloaded in PDF format here.