My First Day (in Canada)

After about 30 hours on my feet, I had finally slept. Quite well, actually. Just not for very long.

At 6:45 a.m., I was up again. A good five hours of sleep was all I had managed. My body would probably have appreciated a few more, but my first day at Simon Fraser University was already waiting for me. Graduate Orientation Day, an introduction for new master’s and doctoral students.

Yesterday, I had been running through Giessen with a suitcase. Today, I wanted to figure out how to take a bus up a Canadian mountain with a university on top.

Quite a quick change, I have to say.

Navigating by screenshot

Of course, I had not really settled in yet. I had only arrived during the night. I had neither anything for breakfast nor a Canadian SIM card for mobile data.

At least I had looked up a route to SFU the evening before. So there had been a little preparation. The part about having internet on the way had apparently not made it into the plan.

As I set off that morning and opened Google Maps again, the app loaded more and more slowly. Eventually, nothing happened at all.

Oh, right. No more Wi-Fi.

Back I went. To within about ten metres of the house, where my phone picked up a connection again. There, I looked up the bus routes and took screenshots. Stop, bus number, transfer. Just to be safe, I saved the return journey from SFU as well. I had no idea whether I would have eduroam or any internet there at all.

Armed with my freshly assembled collection of screenshots, I set off again and hoped for the best. And this was the view that greeted me:

My first morning in Canada. This welcome alone made getting up early worthwhile. My own photo.

A few clouds, the sun behind them, houses and all those wires above the street. Nothing particularly spectacular, really. And yet I stopped for a moment.

This was now the road where my new everyday life began.

Breakfast with a view of Wendy’s

One question remained, though: what was I actually going to have for breakfast?

Fortunately, I had noticed the night before that there was a Wendy’s on my way to the bus. I knew the name. I had never been inside one. That seemed quite easy to change that morning.

Even the sign got its own little moment in the morning light.

My first breakfast in Canada had an impressive sign, at least. My own photo.

Although, while we are talking about food, there is one little thing from the previous day I should add. My first snack on Canadian soil had actually happened back in Calgary. And, as you would expect from an entirely traditional introduction to Canada, it was a Harry Potter™ doughnut from Tim Hortons. (Not sponsored.)

With Hufflepuff on it, and lemon and meringue inside. I had not even made it to Vancouver yet, but apparently I had already enrolled at Hogwarts through my choice of snacks.

My first snack in Canada. Tim Hortons, Hufflepuff and a very yellow welcome. My own photo.

Back to breakfast. At Wendy’s, I picked up a sausage sandwich and a coffee. As a German, the word “sausage” might make you picture something rather different. Here, it was a flat, seasoned meat patty in a bun. Breakfast sausage in a form I was not quite used to yet.

With breakfast and coffee sorted, I could finally head for the bus.

“Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”

To cross the street, I pressed the button at the traffic lights. The pedestrian signal gave me the go-ahead. And suddenly, I heard it.

“Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”

Um … was this my five hours of sleep and jet lag talking, or had the crossing actually just made a synthetic cuckoo sound?

It had. It was the crossing.

The sounds help blind and visually impaired people find their way. At crossings like these in Vancouver, the cuckoo typically signals a north-south crossing, while an east-west crossing gets a chirping sound.

Germany has audible crossing signals too. But this little bird world at a street intersection was new to me.

So I had already learned something before my first bus ride. And heard a sound that briefly made me wonder whether I was properly awake.

At the bus, the next question was waiting:

“Hi, how do I pay?”

A perfectly reasonable question. Here, there is something called a Compass Card. A reloadable card for public transport in Metro Vancouver. Paying with stored credit costs less than a regular single fare. You can also load transit passes onto it.

As a student, I also get the U-Pass. It lets me use buses, SkyTrain and SeaBus without paying for each individual trip. It is not usually completely free, since the U-Pass is funded through student fees and has to be activated on the card each month.

That morning, though, I had neither the card nor a pass activated on it. So I tapped my credit card on the reader. Fortunately, that worked too.

And then I was on the bus.

I do not think I had ever been so happy about an ordinary bus ride. Houses passed by, tall buildings, cars and those big trucks I had mostly seen in films before. So many things looked just a little different. And there I was, right in the middle of it, looking out of the window as if the ride itself were the day’s main event.

At my transfer stop, I had to change buses.

One change of buses. Then it was uphill to the university. My own photo.

One more bus ride up Burnaby Mountain, with SFU’s Burnaby campus at the top. And then I was actually there.

First, figuring out where to go

The route had worked. Now I just had to find the right place on campus.

Together with another new graduate student, I tried to work out which direction we were supposed to walk in. He was from Ghana and studying in the natural sciences. Two people who had only just arrived, heading for the same place and with roughly the same sense of direction.

An excellent starting point for a first walk together.

The campus was huge. Luckily, our bus stop was fairly central. Still, it took us about ten minutes to walk to our meeting point. And that was just the way to one event, not from one end of the university to the other.

Along the way, it looked like this:

On the way to my first event. I would probably be searching for the right building quite a few more times here. My own photo.

At the meeting point, we were welcomed with coffee, cake and other baked goods. There were T-shirts too. One in my actual size would have been nice, but there were still some in L. XL and XXL were options as well.

I took L. A little extra room in a T-shirt never hurts.

What always surprises me at these introductory events is how quickly you get talking to all sorts of people. Everyone is new. Everyone is trying to settle in somehow. And usually, asking what the other person studies is enough to get started.

One person, for example, was studying how pollutants in waterways affect the fish living there. Another wanted to move from studying music into developing virtual reality software. And later that day, I would meet people studying criminology who were interested in profiling.

Fish, virtual worlds and the question of how to understand criminal behaviour. I was here for Computing Science. Such different paths had brought us to the same place that morning.

We started with a speech from a dean. Then we were introduced to the university’s support services.

And wow, there were a lot of them.

There was International Services for Students, for example, which helps international students settle in and offers support with questions about immigration documents and health insurance. Then there was the Graduate Student Society, which represents master’s and doctoral students. It advocates for its members and offers support with problems during their studies.

Every service seemed to point us towards another one. I could probably have put together a whole collection, this time just to keep track of who was responsible for what.

At least I knew afterwards: if questions came up later, there would be plenty of people I could turn to.

A university with everything included

After a pizza lunch, we went on a campus tour. Although “lunch” almost sounds a little modest. The portions here are certainly not small.

Off we went. Through long corridors, up and down stairs, between buildings and into yet more corridors.

One of many routes through campus. My own photo.

Maaaan. I had already thought the place was big that morning. But it was only during the tour that I began to realise how much was actually tucked away on this mountain.

There was a food court with various takeout stalls. A games area with pool, air hockey and even basketball arcade machines where you could shoot hoops. And a hairdresser.

A hairdresser on campus.

Did I mention there was even a dentist?

So you could study, eat, play games, get a haircut and apparently have your teeth checked without having to go back down the mountain. I was beginning to understand why the campus felt so big.

Another staircase, another floor and something else I would never have found on my first lap. My own photo.

Between all the buildings, there were also open plazas, green spaces and ponds. Every so often, you would step out of a corridor and suddenly find yourself looking at a completely different view.

A little calm between the buildings. My new campus had much more to show me than I had expected. My own photo.

I had only been here for a few hours. But I could already imagine discovering something new again and again over the coming months.

The day was not over yet

By now, it was afternoon. The event was coming to an end, but a few of us headed to a nearby bar together afterwards.

After all that information and the campus tour, it was a pretty good opportunity to simply keep talking.

On the way to the next conversations. Surprisingly cheerful for five hours of sleep. My own photo.

This was where I met the criminology students. Some were interested in profiling, which means using behaviour and the circumstances of a crime to look for clues about possible offenders. I certainly had not expected to be talking about things like that on my very first day at university.

At some point, we also got onto the subject of artificial intelligence. They were particularly interested in how I saw the topic as a Computing Science student. Suddenly, my own field of study had found its way into the conversation too.

We shared different viewpoints, discussed opinions and tried to understand the reasons and experiences behind them. I talked about my perspective on AI and listened to theirs. Coming from different fields made the exchange especially interesting to me.

A genuinely thoughtful conversation. Open, curious and with room to ask questions. It is quite amazing what you can talk about with people you have only known for a few hours.

The hours passed. Between conversations, I picked up all sorts of practical tips. How the Compass Card worked. Where to shop and where things quickly got expensive. What I absolutely had to see in Vancouver. And which areas called for a little more awareness, especially as a newcomer.

These were exactly the questions I did not have proper answers to yet. Suddenly, I was sitting with people who already knew their way around and were sharing their experiences with me.

As the sun began to sink lower, we gradually said our goodbyes and headed home.

Heading home with a phone full of new contacts

On the way back, I looked at my phone again. I had connected with so many people on Instagram throughout the day that scrolling through their profiles brought the conversations straight back to mind.

That morning, I had set off with a few screenshots just so I could find my way. Now, alongside all those new impressions, I already had my first connections here.

Outside, the low sun cast orange light onto the tall buildings. I looked out of the window and let the day sink in for a while.

It was not quite finished, though. I quickly went grocery shopping and picked up a pizza through Too Good To Go. At least breakfast for the next morning was no longer a completely unsolved problem.

Later, back at home, I laid my name badge on a T-shirt and took one last photo. A little souvenir of a day that had begun without internet and somehow turned out to be quite full.

With a cuckoo at the crossing. With my first trip to SFU. With people working on completely different things. And with the feeling that, after just one day, I had already started to settle in a little.

If this is how life in Canada carries on, I certainly would not mind staying a while longer.

My name badge after the first day. A little piece of settling in to take home. My own photo.

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