Pre-christmas time

Christmas time in Hamilton has started for me when the first real snow came – about two weeks ago. From that point, it got colder and colder, I even got out my winter boots and am wearing them until now. The Canadians say that the snow now won’t go away anymore! That’s how I like my winters :) I spotted beautiful icicles next to the second waterfalls I visited in Hamilton.

Pre-christmas time here is a little bit different from what I am used to. People here don’t celebrate the advent time as much. But then they do have Christmas parades and decorate their houses with lots of lights, air-blown snowmen, igloos, Santas and so on. Some houses have exaggeratedly many colourful lights and stuff in their gardens, and some also look very nice! My colleagues told me that most families with young children do the decorations, to make the kids happy ;) Moreover, Christmas markets are not a big thing here, although I visited that one in Toronto, which was nice, but extremely crowded. And they didn’t have Glühwein/Glöggi (or well, they did, but it was just too expensive!). So, the first and probably one time that I had real Glühwein was today. We had a Christmas carol singing gathering with lots and lots of musical people. Everyone brought some food, there were many kids around, old and young all mixed up, and we sang a lot of wonderful traditional Christmas songs from different cultures. A few German, French, and mostly of course English ones, some of which I didn’t know yet. So, it was also culturally a very nice afternoon. I met very kind people there, which again confirms that Canadians are very open and welcoming people.

As also at home we had Christmas parties with the colleagues, which are always nice to get to know your colleagues more, to talk about something else than work. This time, there was one department party and one party for the ‘smaller’ lab group only. The department party was organized at the university premises and they did have very good food! It was a good opportunity to meet some people from other groups, and chat nicely. The one for our lab group was held at Laurel’s house. Laurel is my supervising professor from McMaster University. She invites her group every year to her house. It is organized as a pot-luck party, which means everyone brings some food. With that concept, we had a great buffet! Many familial faces attended, and it was a lovely atmosphere, very homely with the Christmas tree already up and decorated, a piano, a cute dog… altogether those events made my pre-Christmas time memorable. I even got a few little gifts from some colleagues, who I only know for two months. I shall get them something nice from my Christmas vacation!

Christmas plans are as follows: As I cannot be with my family in Germany this year, Antonio decided to come over and spent the holidays with me :) We are going to go skiing in Quebec, Mont Tremblant (probably there are a few apostrophes missing here), and then see our American friend Ben in his hometown close to Chicago for New Year’s. When coming back, we will of course stop by the Niagara Falls! I shall tell you how it was after our trip!

I wish you all a Merry Christmas, my dear family and friends! This is the time to calm down, be with your loved ones and ponder on the wonderful things that happened during the year. Enjoy!

pictures to be uploaded later...

Weekend trips

After exploring the close-by area, I wanted to see a little bit more, explore the big cities!

First, Toronto: I have a friend in Toronto who did an exchange in Helsinki two years ago, and she was so kind to host me for a weekend. So, I went over to Toronto by bus on a Saturday morning to meet her. The first stop was the CN tower, which was once the highest standing building in the world, until Dubai topped it. It is 553 m tall and you can oversee the greater Toronto area from up there, which is pretty amazing! On one side there is the huge metropolitan area, on the other side the huge lake Ontario, which looks like an ocean. And they have a glass floor integrated in the tower, from where you can look straight down! Although expensive, it was worth to go up there, and I would say you should do it once in a lifetime :) Afterwards, I then met my friend Michelle and her boyfriend and we went out for lunch. I had my first very Canadian Poutine here, which is a portion of fries topped with cheese curds and gravy. It is super filling! And because simple Poutine is boring, we decided to go for an additional spectacular Poutine-duck-pizza! We shared those two dishes with three, couldn’t finish them and were filled up for the rest of the day! My review: yummy and filling, but super unhealthy :D After that we saw China town, the alternative and cute area of Kensington, museum of arts (from outside), the famous shopping center The Bay including the tallest Christmas tree in Canada, which is inside of that. I should mention that it was the Black Friday weekend, which means that everyone out was crazy about shopping! They indeed had some good offers there, but definitely not worth the trouble, at least in my opinion. Then we went on to the university, where Michelle and her boyfriend study. They have a similar college system to the universities in Oxford and Cambridge there, which was surprising for me. The university and college buildings were beautiful and old (old is not easy to find here in Canada). We walked a lot that day and also saw a lot! In the evening, Toronto lit up the Christmas tree on the market place and for that occasion they had fireworks. Of course, we wanted to see that and watched it, accompanied by some good music – wonderful! I spent the night at Michelle’s place, which was great! Met her dad, her sister and their hyperactive dog :) On the next day, I then went back to the city center and explored Toronto island, a piece of nature in front of Toronto in the Ontario lake. They even have an airport there! It was not at all crowded, because the winter season already started, and that was nice after the big-city feeling that I got the previous day. Honestly, there are so many skyscrapers that it was too much of a metropolitan feeling for me at some point. That change of scenery was a good decision and I had a panoramic view of Toronto’s skyline. The afternoon/evening programme was then still the Christmas market, which is organized in the Distillery District. On weekends, you have to pay to get entry to the market, but I still wanted to see it and get into the Christmas mood a little. It was a nice market, full of food and drinks, very crowded with people. The distillery district is lovely and I would like to see it some time with less people. I wanted to get a Glühwein/Glöggi, which is traditional in Germany when you go to a Christmas market, but they were very hard to find and when I found them, one glass was more expensive than 2 bottles that I could buy in Germany… so none for me that day. I got a delicious hot chocolate from a chocolate store instead. After walking so much during that weekend, I was very happy to be home again and had some hard time walking the next days at work. Toronto, this was certainly not the last time!

Next weekend, Ottawa: Because it was the only suitable date for my German friend Felix and me before Christmas, right the next weekend I visited him in Ottawa, the capital city of Canada! Felix works there now since summer and invited me over. It took me 7 hours by car share to get there, after being stuck in Toronto traffic for 2 hours on Friday evening. Now I know what metropolitan traffic, especially the Toronto one, means: 6 lanes on the motorway and nothing moves! And there was not even an accident. After arrival, I was picked up by car from Felix’ girlfriend Elli and him. After some drinks, we got to sleep only a few hours and already got ready for the Saturday hiking. One of Felix’ friends had his birthday and his friends organized a surprise party in a national park for him. So, we went out for a hike and arrived at a little, or rather big, hut, and decorated everything nicely and spread out the food that everyone made. After acrobatics, taking some pictures, more acrobatics… the birthday boy arrived (he was taken out ‘for a jog’ by his friend) and had a big smile in his face when he saw all his friends there. They were easy-going and sporty people, and it was fun to get to know them! After a little nap in the afternoon we still went climbing in an indoor climbing hall. Felix has been doing that for a while and also showed me a few times in Finland (he was an exchange student there, that is how we met). I really liked the climbing part and thought that I might pick it up here in Hamilton! Sunday was then reserved to get to know a little bit of Ottawa, such as the parliament, the museum of arts (again, only from outside) and the ByWard Market. And I saw Felix’ workplace, which is amazing! I could probably write a whole chapter about it. Let’s just say that this is a place that really takes very good care of their employees! I had my first Beaver Tail at the market, which is another typical Canadian thing. It’s a very sweet, deep fried pastry topped with anything you want. As we are in Canada, I chose Maple butter, very good! Unfortunately, the weekend went so fast, and I went home again in the afternoon, this time only 5 h of drive. It was a fun weekend and I hope to visit them at least once more during my stay here. Maybe they will also come and visit me in Hamilton.

Two weekends, two trips, the rest of the time I now stayed in Hamilton during the weekends. We had some dinners with colleagues, a movie night, and the Christmas parties, see my next blog entry for that.

Pictures will follow here later:

See ya!

First weeks in Hamilton

Hello everyone!

After more than one month here, I shall finally tell you how I have been so far! It’s a good sign that I haven’t been keeping you up to date. That means there were a lot of things going on. Now I can tell you about them.

First things first. You will want to know about my very first impressions, right? Soooo, the first days I spent here, I was amazed about the following things:

• Wonderful autumn colours! The leaves just looked so beautiful! With all the maple trees, they had different shades of yellow and red.
• Everything (yes, I am exaggerating) is extra large here! They have huge cars, very wide roads, 6 lanes on the Toronto highway, 4 l milk bags, 10 kg flour bags, big houses… there probably is more
•  My house, which is a student house that I share with 7 other girls, has very nice kitchen counters and marble in the bathroom, wow!
• The toilets work differently here (yes, this is important :D). They have a lot of water in the toilet bowl in the beginning, which is sucked away after you are done.
• Also, the showers work differently: There is only a control handle for warm and cold water, but the intensity is always the same. (At least this is true for the houses that I have seen up to now.)
• People like to go everywhere by car here. It’s a very car-based region and sometimes, it can be hard to get to places without a car. Nevertheless, the public transportation system works very well!
•  Planned city-design. The cities all look like a grid, and everyone is talking about street names and crossings when they describe a location, not about landmarks. The bus stops are, e.g., called Main St. West @ Hollywood, which means the street crossing of Main street with Hollywood street.
• The McMaster university campus is surrounded by a very nice natural area, Coote’s Paradise. The concept reminds me a little bit about Aalto University and Otaniemi.
•  People talk to you! Yes, this is indeed something noteworthy, when you come from Finland. The taxi driver told me his life story when I arrived in Hamilton for the first time, the post man made a comment about the icy wind once, people at the traffic light or in the bus randomly start talking about something, the person in the supermarket asks you how you are doing… It’s amazing! I am not used to this anymore, which could mean that I might have become slightly Finnish already ;)

After having one free day to experience some of the above-mentioned things and to get organized (get a mattress to sleep on, get to know the area a little bit), I started my first day at the university. I met my wonderful colleagues, who got me all set up and started. I met Laurel Trainor, who is my supervising professor here, and has done impressive work in her field of auditory developmental neuroscience, especially music. She and her team welcomed me so warmly to the lab that it was truly easy to integrate. All my colleagues are great, helpful, funny, and therefore it is a pleasure to go to the lab every morning! What I am doing here, why I am here, is to continue with my projects that I have started in Helsinki and start a collaboration, including a new project. I collected a lot of data in Helsinki, which I all took with me to continue with the analysis of those. And we are starting a new project about rhythm processing in infants here together with the people from McMaster. As I am working in the infant EEG lab (please ask me, if you don’t, but really want to know what that means), I could see and execute a few infant measurements, which is of course very cute! We had 4-month- and 6-month-old infants in the lab, and what we should do to have a successful measurement is to keep them entertained. That means, part of my PhD work was to play with the little ones, give them toys, play with hand puppets, make soap bubbles… :D A very fun job, but I tell you, also exhausting! You would never believe how long a 20-min recording can be… Furthermore, I am learning about the recording system they use here, the software and procedures they apply to infant data (which I am also working with for my own project – that’s one reason I chose this lab) and it’s very good and interesting to see how another lab functions with your own eyes.

On one of the first weekends I went out to explore one of the waterfalls in Hamilton area. Hamilton is the waterfall city in Canada, with more than 100 waterfalls in the area! It is part of the Niagara Escarpment – the Niagara Falls are only about an hour drive away from here. I was on a mission to explore the Webster Falls, and that was a mission that was not the easiest without a car. I went out as far as I could by bus (the bus driver asked where I want to go and wanted to tell me that I am in the wrong bus… after I said that I am planning to walk the rest, he probably decided that I am crazy, but really, it was not that far!). From there, I walked the rest to the falls, coming into the natural area from kind of a hidden path. I got a little bit off track, and ended up on a path that had been closed a few months ago, ups! As I didn’t know about that, I just went on and ended up on the bottom of the beautiful Webster Falls and I am so happy I did! They were so amazing to see from below! As at that moment nobody else was around and I saw the people all looking from above, I got the feeling that I shouldn’t have been down there, but after a while a few others came from the same path and my feeling disappeared. But those people also disappeared after a moment. I was so busy taking pictures that I didn’t notice where they went, until I followed a couple to see that they climbed up the steep path on the side of the falls. Well, as there was no other way out other than the one I came, I followed, and at the top noticed that this had been a path some time ago that was closed now. There was a fence now. Climbed over… and there I was in the official area ;) As I said, it was great to have been there, I wouldn’t have wanted to miss it! On the way there, I even discovered a hidden viewpoint and had a steep climb down (and the latter one up again) - some adventure for the day. The adventure shouldn’t be over by then though. I could see the Webster Falls also from the top (still beautiful, but not as much as from below), and then there was supposed to be a connecting path and roundtrip hike to other waterfalls, Tews Falls, if I recall correctly. With my luck of the day, that path was closed, too. Ok, I thought, I don’t have a car and don’t want to walk around, so I am going to check out, if I can get through here. After passing a tiny, tiny part of private property I got to the connecting bit of the path. Apparently, someone bought land and just closed the track at that point. From there on, the hike was easy, no more disturbances. The Tews Falls, the tallest falls in Hamilton area, didn’t carry so much water, so I would like to see them again in the spring time, when all the snow melts. From there, I continued to the Dundas Peak, where I arrived in perfect time for the sunset over Hamilton. The view from there is wonderful and oversees the whole park and Hamilton area. 

About Hamilton city itself, I have seen some ugly and some nice parts until now. I walked to the Bayfront park one day, which is located right at the Ontario lake. It was wonderful, definitely a nice part of the city! The city center close to the city hall is rather boring, grey, many cars, a few statues, nothing interesting really. But then my colleagues took me out to some nice areas as well. There are 2-3 nice streets (that I know until now) with cute little shops, cafes, restaurants and bars.

I think, this might be enough for the first blog post. I will tell about my two travel weekends in the next one! Greetings and hugs from Canada!

Check out my pictures here: https://www.flickr.com/gp/111709844@N02/p8jv2N

P.s. I am happy about questions or just a ‘hi’ in the comments, or in your preferred contact method! :)