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! :)