December 2002

Hello friends,

I created this list of people with whom I would like to stay in touch while I am studying in Toronto. The idea is to send one email per month summarizing experiences and thoughts from the other side of the ellipsoid. You don’t have to reply in the same frequency. If you change your email address let me know.

The first month here was very intensive. I lived two weeks in a guesthouse, and rented an awesome room in a renovated Victorian house 15 minutes walk from my office. I spent two weeks shopping (computer, camera, household), and have just installed a computer network at the house (7 rooms sharing cable internet). This term I don’t teach or take courses so I had time for that.

My first feeling when I got to Canada was that it is a very unsafe country. Something is very wrong with the security here: you go on the train, and nobody opens your bag. You enter a bank, and nobody scans you with a metal detector. The university even has no fences around. It is just a collection of buildings in the middle of the city.

As a people, the Canadians are very kind and polite, in England style. An extreme case I witnessed is of people standing in a line (of width one) along the sidewalk nearby a bus station, and go on the bus in the same order they arrived to the bus station! The other thing I noticed is that they smile much more. When you walk on the sidewalk, and someone is walking towards you from the other direction, she (it is more evident with females) wouldn’t ignore you and move aside in the last second. Her reflex is to give you a big smile even if she doesn’t know you at all. That smile fades after one second, but it is a nice collective habit.

The University of Toronto has multicultural, cosmopolitan mixed population. There are many Chinese, a lot of people from South America (Argentina, Mexico, Brazil), Russians, Greeks, Indians (original, not native), Muslims (Iran, Pakistan, Egypt), Americans, and a dominant group of Canadians. Not only have the students come from all over the world, but also the professors. It is convenient because my English is not the worst around (the Chinese accent is very hard to understand), and many people are willing to help since they came here themselves.

However, three weeks ago the president of the university remarked in the council something like “our multicultural policy lowers the motivation of white people to attend the university”. He immediately apologized, even said it was colossal mistake, but that was too late. He was quoted in newspapers and TV and now the student union demands a program to increase diversity in the university…

I attach a picture of the Robart library, which is the second biggest library in North America that is in a single building (after the library in Yale). The architecture of this building with its 11 floors is very impressive – it has a shape of a peacock. The library has a wireless network so that people can bring their laptops (if they have wireless modems) and surf the internet from everywhere inside. I’ll tell you much more about the university and the CS department next month.

Hope to hear from you what is going there,


Ady.