Walking on ice

Montreal has freakish weather. Since coming here, I have encountered 30 degree heat in the summer, 40cm of snow, -20 degree cold, and wind chill that brings that down to –30. It gets so cold that the moisture on your palms freezes the moment you touch any metal door handles when opening doors and your breath freezes on your collars. But the most intense weather phenomenon has got to be freezing rain.

Basically, freezing rain occurs when precipitation starts out as snow. The snow passes through warm air and melts completely. It then passes through a thin layer of cold air just before it hits the surface. While passing through, it cools to below freezing point, but doesn’t freeze. The super-cooled rain drops then freeze upon impact with the ground.

Freezing rain hit Montreal overnight on Tuesday, 9pm, turning into rain on Wednesday morning, 4am, wrecking havoc in downtown Montreal. If you want an idea of how slippery it was, go take an ice cube from your fridge and hold it with 2 fingers. Not too difficult right? Then wet the ice cube, and try to hold it with two fingers. The freezing rain laid down a layer of ice all over downtown that was an inch thick. When it turned into normal rain, it conveniently washed away all the grit laid on the pavements and roads.

Roads had to be closed, bus routes were disrupted and some schools were closed. McGill wasn’t one of them, but I’ll get back to that later. Cars struggled to find traction on the slick surface, even on level roads. All of Rue University above Sherbrooke was closed as there were cars that were just sliding back down that road, which slopes upwards On Sherbrooke and University, a car floundered in the middle of the intersection while making a left turn. The driver had to keep revving his engine to keep from sliding back into the cars behind him, and a police officer has to slide over to push the car from behind just so it could actually make the turn. Up on Peel and des Pins, firemen had to set up ropes so that pedestrians could cross the road without sliding down the sloping roads. Pedestrians were slipping and sliding all around, some (including me) getting on all fours just to avoid falling down.

For those of you who have not been to Montreal before, McGill’s campus is partially located on an incline, and the Residences are located on top of a hill. It was a wonder that people actually bothered to brave the slopes of University above des Pins to get to school. And this is where the ranting starts.

Given the treacherous conditions, I have no idea why the McGill administration did not cancel classes for the day on Wednesday. Of the 800 – 1000 or so students living in Upper Residence, I have no idea how many decided to actually go to class. My friends who did told me that once you started down that slope, you just slid right down, and the only way to stop yourself was to fall. So fall they did. Almost everyone fell on the way to school, and my Prof for my 8:30am Calculus class came in late, telling us that he had fallen 3 times on the way.

If Rue University had to be closed until 11am because cars couldn’t get up, surely, the school’s administration could not have expected people to actually walk down the slope to their classes. And if all the roads leading to upper campus were impassable to vehicles, how did they expect pedestrians to be able to make it to class? Granted, it could be done, but at great risk to the students. The Montreal Gazette reported on Thursday that there were 14 minor bus accidents all over Montreal, and by 11am, the ambulance service had logged over 400 calls, twice the number it normally receives in a day.

Given that McGill has this habit of sending belated E-mails about class cancellations and the like, the very least they could have done was to send out a similar E-mail warning students of the conditions in the morning if they didn’t cancel class. Or they could have at least informed students of the road closures. It might have been a little late, but some sort of response from the administration would have been better than nothing. But there was not even a mention of anything when I checked the University website at about 10 that morning. It was as if the weather outside was completely normal. It was not. And we should have been told. The lack of any response, however uncoordinated and however late, is a indicator of shoddy, sub-par administration.

On Ave des Pins and Rue Peel, firefighters set up ropes to help pedestrains cross the road.

Uncertain

Sometimes I wonder if I’m holding on to something that is no longer there anymore. Maybe I only saw what I wanted to see, and maybe now I see things for what they really are. Or maybe I’m just over-analysing things. Of late, I have become rather unsure of myself. Uncertain about where my place is, about where I stand, about what I see, and about what I know.

Which partially explains the recent lack of blog posts. I type something out halfway, and then I read it and think to myself, “Do I really want to say this?” or “Is that what I really want to say?” and the blog post is abandoned. Having talked about things with people curtails the urge for me to blog. Sometimes, the mere act of typing my thoughts out onto a screen is enough. I don’t feel the need or the urge to actually post what I write.

But I digress. I see this never-ending flood of work that comes in every week, and wonder to myself why I even bother sometimes. Why is it that now, when I actually decide that doing my work is important, and when I do actually get down to doing it, I find it so much harder? It seemed so much easier before, when I just left work undone. Back then, even though I hardly touched my homework and didn’t know what was going on in half my classes, I actually felt somewhat intelligent. Now, I actually know what’s going on in all my classes, but I detect in my mental faculties a lack of sharpness.

It could be that now, I actually know what I don’t know. I used to satisfy myself that I could not expect myself to know anything since I didn’t do any work whatsoever. So maybe now that I actually am keeping up, I expect myself to know everything. I never used to be like that. It could be due to the demands of the school calendar; there is no time to catch up since exams start right after the last day of school.

Underlying all this is the nagging feeling that intellectually, I just don’t feel I’m at my best, and I struggle to find a way to rediscover the form that I once had. I even fear that might not even be possible anymore. To add to all this, I honestly have no clue how I should even go about trying to find that form again. My mind feels dull, and though the academic results seem to indicate otherwise (for now at least), I feel I am capable of better, and my inability to rediscover my best frustrates me.

Coherence escapes me, and my readings on liberalism beckon, so it’s back to work. Again.

Back to school

As I begin to slowly settle back into school, I'm both excited and apprehensive. Excited because there are lots of interesting courses that I'm doing, and yet apprehensive because all of the courses I'm enrolled in require lots of work. There are no public holidays this school term, not a single one, and so we have a one week "spring" "break" in February, "spring" because spring in Montreal isn't really spring - January and February are the coldest months in a year, and "break" because, well, there are no classes. But not having classes doesn't mean that you don't have loads of readings, assignments, papers due and midterms right after.

It is only the 2nd day of school, and I already have deadlines for 3 assignments, 3 papers, an oral presentation and a group project. Not to mention the labs, tutorials and reading for class. And most of the profs in my classes have decided that posting new assignments every week or so is the "in" thing, and have decided they want to be cool and funky too. And who could forget the final examinations. Whoo-hoo.

On the other hand, part of me is, for reasons not very apparent to me, quitely confident that I will manage all of this somehow. Maybe it's because with almost all my first sem grades in, I'm doing alright. Not fantastic, but not too shoddy either. So if I've done it once before, I probably could do it again. But just because I've done something before, doesn't necessarily mean that I'd like or want to do it again. Then again, I don't have all that much of a choice.

I'm probably just over thinking things, but that's what this place is for. Catharsis. I just need to vent.

I'm not all that coherent today, and if you're confused by me, well, that's the point. That's exactly how I feel. Confused.

2006

Happy New Year Everyone!

I haven't blogged in the last 3 weeks or so of December 2005 mainly because my brain just shut down after the madness that is McGill final exams. Anyway, just to update, I went to Quebec City and Ottawa to relax after exams. Quebec City was really pretty and really cold, pictures are up on the flickr account. Ottawa was boring, and had a rather British feel to it. Not many interesting photos from that trip, so I didn't post them on my account.

Christmas was spent in Montreal, went to St Patrick's Basilica for mass on Christmas Eve, and it was the nicest Christmas mass I've been to. Christmas dinner was beef rendang, grilled salmon and some nice rose wine. Not quite the traditional Christmas eve dinner with Grandma's cooking, but close enough. Snow on Christmas night made it really beautiful, and a white Christmas to remember.

Laksa for dinner on New Year's Eve, and went to Old Montreal to catch fireworks to usher in the new year. The fireworks display was really nice, and it was pretty cold too, so didn't hang around too long to indulge in the revelry.

So 2005 has come and gone and it has been a pretty good year. ORD'ed in May (ahhh, the smell of freedom is oh-so-sweet), went over to McGill at the end of August, and now have completed my first term of University. Not all my grades for the term are in yet, but I'm doing alright.

Hopefully, as school picks up again my brain will too, and I'll blog a little more frequently. But then again, my course load is a little heavier next sem, so I will have to see how things go. I will try. I promise. I know some of you come here quite frequently, so I'll try my best to keep this blog updated.