Ruminations

Aaron Karo, eat your heart out.
So I've been here for a little over a day now (although most of it was spent at the airport and taking a shuttle to campus) and here are some things I've noticed:
- Not only do people drive on the left side, they walk on the left side. So when you walk through a doorway or something and are about to bump into someone you usually make a quick move to the right, but here people make the move to the left and so there have been a couple occasions where I've bumped into people or had to make another move right to avoid them. So now I make moves to the left and it's fine.
- There are so many accents here not just British. I notice this especially since I'm considered an international student and am meeting a lot of international students where English in not their first language (but many have it as their second very fluent language).
- If people wear a baseball cap it's a Yankees cap, I don't understand why. Also my building manager is a Yankees fan and I was wearing my Red Sox cap the first day. That was a rough start.
- You are allowed to drink in public here or at least on campus. At this campus party last night people would buy drinks at the bar and then proceed outside and people were sitting on the grass outside and on the sidewalks. Interesting experience for me. The furthest I've gone before is on a patio, which was allowed to have alcohol.

Grades/Marks

So in Canada, A's are 80-100 and B's are 70-79. This doesn't sit well. Was it just at all the schools I went to since elementary or did everyone at all schools in the US have A's as 90-100 and B's as 80-89?

There's a huge discrepancy here! Do colleges (universities as they call them in Canada) account for this? If not, my thesis is that this is a big reason why there are many Canadians in our Ivies (although I don't have any stats to back up my claim, at least not yet). Correct me if I'm wrong on any of this and feel free to debate.

And then of course at BU (Boston University) we had grade deflation, having the mean equal a "C-letter grade" and standard deviations being the grade differentials in a bunch of my classes. I am very jealous of those who went to school here.

Gas

So I got a tank of gas tonight at the lowest price since New Year's for my accord with the credit card I finally got and can use (that's another story), and it was $50. Man gas is really expensive here, it's partially because there's 24.7 cents in federal excise and provincial tax and 5% governmental (federal) tax added for each litre (yeah they use litres here).

It's 3.79 litres per gallon. So with gas prices floating around a dollar per litre, that's $3.79 per gallon. $1.08 of that is taxes. I guess taxes are pretty high here.

MLK Day!

Canada doesn't get MLK Day off! I didn't even realize it was this coming Monday because it's like any other day here and there's work to do. I will remember him while working on Monday.

New blog

In this blog, I'll probably just put a couple sentences each time about observations I make during my time here. It's like twitter but doesn't have a limit on the number of messages saved. I'll try to make them interesting vs. "brushing my teeth".