Familiar People

We parked in London for the weekend, and Friday I walked around downtown. I had to mail my receipts to the expenses department to get my money back, so I wrote down addresses of 2 post offices. I tried to find the first one, but the address was for a mall, and I couldn’t find it in the mall. It’s a lot more stressful when you are looking for a place where you haven’t been before, instead of just wandering around going in random directions like I usually do. After I mailed the envelope, I was free to wander around again, found a 3-floor library and read a bit of a book that the title caught my eye – ‘personal development for smart people’. haha. Found a cool farmer’s market and chilled there for a while. Was visited by Crystal on Saturday and my parents and simon, my youngest brother, on Sunday. And because they came to visit me, I was expected to tour them around and show them stuff, even though I had only been to London half a day longer than them. They had cars though, which are a lot faster than walking.

Traveled to buffalo, and then did contract testing on Tuesday, 350 miles of it to central Pennsylvania. They didn’t pay for joint bar pictures, so I helped out where I could with making the reports and hole-punching paper, but for the most part had free time. Wednesday was travelling back to Canada, which some was during the night and I’m not really sure when we arrived. Some of Thursday and all of Friday was testing around Niagara region and up to Hamilton, where we stopped for the weekend. We saw some deer crossing the tracks in front of us on Friday, as well as some other local wildlife…

Found out there was a CFL game, Hamilton vs Montreal on Friday night, so Anthony and I went and bought tickets. He’s from montreal, so he was cheering for them, only one in our section. We managed to make it through the game in one piece J.

I went home to waterloo saturday morning, and spent the rest of the weekend with family, which was very nice. Got a tour of the new Institute for Quantum Computing building on campus - it's pretty cool! Went to my church, Hawkesville, on Sunday morning and reconnected with the people there. It’s really nice going back to a church where everyone knows you and has been following how I’m doing (Thanks Hawkesville! Glad to see you all!).  It was kindof a weird feeling though, coming back to normal/things that I used to know. The train still isn't routine, there are new things/places/people all the time. It feels very different from other co-op terms, and doesn't feel like I’ve really started work yet, that I’m still on vacation or the inbetween co-op and school phase. It kindof felt like I was coming back after a trip, and that I would get up on Monday and go to a regular 9-5 job and back to normal life. But instead I'm going back to Hamilton tonight, and monday morning I'll be on the road...i mean rails.. again. 

Another weird feeling I had was the drive from Hamilton to Waterloo. Roads are really cluttered, there’s signs and lightposts and telephone poles and wires and houses and driveways and culverts and clear-cut areas. You get a bit of a view sometimes, but there’s often something in the way, or it’s only a partial view. On the train it’s pretty much just nature, coming right up beside the train. If you stick your head out the window then all you see is uninterrupted forest and scenery, any clearings are natural ponds or rivers. I like travelling by train better J