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Skating in the City

So Winter Break is sort of half over and so far, all you’ve done is vegetate at home or at your friend’s house. Toronto is a bit quiet during the Winter but this is Canada and apparently skating is in our blood, so there are tons of places to skate! It’s fun and it’s exercise! So rather than grumble about it, take advantage of the cold weather and skate! All of the venues listed here are free, though not all of them will have skate rentals. If you plan on going skating several times a year in your undergrad years, I highly recommend that you make a long-term investment (your feet probably won’t grow anymore anyways) in a pair of skates. Canadian Tire tends to sell skates for a fair price.

City Hall

The experience of living in Toronto is not complete until you’ve skated at least once at Nathan Phillips Square. The lights at City Hall turn on at 6:00PM and it’s absolutely beautiful. I suggest going during a weekday and non-peak hours because the rink can get pretty crowded. As in really, really crowded. Skates can be rented for $10 for 2 hours. You will need a piece of government issued I.D. (such as a driver’s license) so that the skate rentals can ensure that you will return their skates.

Harbourfront Centre

The Natrel Pond at Harbourfront turns into an ice skating rink in the winter. There are skate rentals and adult rentals are $7. A driver’s licence, credit card, passport, birth certificate or citizenship card is required to rent skates and/or helmets.

Toronto Parks

If there’s a park nearby with an outdoor rink, you can skate there for most of the winter! The downside is that there probably aren’t any skate rentals and they’re open for specific hours for free skating (other time is set aside for hockey) but these rinks tend to be less crowded. For their hours of operation, search for your local park at the Toronto Parks, Forestry & Recreation site.

Evergreen Brick Works

The final renovations for Evergreen Brickworks have been completed and the winter has come, so they have opened their skating trail. This is probably one of the newest outdoor rinks in the city and it sounds absolutely fantastic. There are no skate rentals but the rink is extremely environmentally friendly: heat from the refrigeration system warms the Café building next door! Isn’t that cool!? Click here for hours of operation and more information.

Varsity Arena

Varsity Arena on campus (you might have written an exam here before) is an Olympic-sized rink that will be open to the public once term restarts on January 3rd and it will remain open until April 8th. The rink is open for recreational skating in the times listed here.

Happy skating!

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Tuesdays with Professor Collins

A hundred or so frosh line the seats of the well-known “Blue (now beige) Room” in the Sandford Fleming Building. It’s our first day as Engineering Science students, and CIV102 is the one course that will teach us what most of us always envisioned engineering to be – designing buildings and infrastructure.

Professor Michael P. Collins takes his post up at the front of the classroom, and starts off on a story about the legacy and ingenuity of Roman engineers. He continues with yet another tangent about the anthropological significance of using a metre stick as a lecturer, one of his trademark tools. He finally lists the three fundamental principles of engineering, being:

  1. You can’t push on a rope.
  2. F = ma
  3. To get the answer, you must know the answer.

It is this kind of casual storytelling, mixed with amusing proverbs and calmly-delivered jokes, that has allowed him to win the hearts of many an EngSci. And from the bridge-designing projects (one of which is actually built and tested in a class competition), to the admittedly cute Clairefontaine notebooks each student is required to take notes in, to the standard ultra-confusing problem sets, CIV102 is as memorable a course as they come.

One need not look very far to see students’ respect for Collins. Be it rave reviews on professor-rating websites, or a Facebook page entirely devoted to the worship of the professor (complete with a long list of quotations), everyone has something to say about his quirks and entertaining lectures. Ask any EngSci whom their favourite professor has been, and many will cite Collins.

Fast-forward to the last day of lectures in the fall semester. Once again, sitting in the “Blue Room”, a group of upper-year students accompanies the usual first-year crowd to hear Collins’ final lecture. He discusses the legacy that all engineers have brought forth on us, and the power to create but also destroy that is within our hands. It’s a solemn conclusion, but it leaves his pupils with the same kind of lasting impression as the structures past engineers have left our civilization with.

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And you thought Robarts couldn’t get any worse…

It’s a sore thumb on campus. We have a love/hate relationship with the grumpy, unhelpful staff. The stacks are always messy and when you look at the library catalogue and see that the only copy of a book left on campus is at Robarts, you get a sinking feeling that the book is missing. Robarts library is just one of the things at U of T that we all love to hate. In fact, you probably aren’t a real U of T student until you get frustrated at it for some reason or another. It’s just one of those experiences that every U of T student goes through.

Unhelpful staff and messy shelves aside, we love to complain about the fact that the turkey “peacock-shaped” building is hideous. And it is, when you compare it with some of the lovely structures we have on campus, like Trinity College, UC or the fascinating Pharmacy building (if we want to have a more modern building on the list).

In any case, U of T is trying to transform the building and according to an article in the Toronto Star, this is what Robarts could look like after all the construction that is currently going on: Continue reading “And you thought Robarts couldn’t get any worse…”

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Alkestis: a must-see this weekend

What: The UC Drama Program Director’s shows
Where: UC Helen Gardner Playhouse
When: Tonight at 9PM, Tomorrow (Sunday) at 4PM
Tickets: [email protected] or at the door (come early, it will be a full house), FREE

Lauren Gillis’s masterful directorial debut, Alkestis, an adaptation of Euripedes’s play, is at once hilarious, clever, very well acted, and an extremely cohesive piece of work: it’s one of the best directed plays I’ve seen in years, made even more amazing by its novice director. Alkestis is a strange combination of tragedy, comedy, and satire, and Gillis’s production hits each of these notes marvelously and perfectly. The cast is remarkably good and pulls off these myriad moods, perfectly switching seamlessly between them in an instant.

Alkestis is the strange story of how Alkestis, the wife of King Admetus, agrees to take his place in Hades so that he can still live, and how Admetus copes with the loss of his wife; somewhere in there Heracles shows up on his mission which provides an immense amount of comedy. But this is really just the McGuffin for a marvelous play that follows which, especially in Gillis’s production, satirizes the Greek tragedy. Her actors speak their lines with such conviction but everything is just slightly over the top, as in a melodrama, that tragic scenes become hilarious: it’s deadpan humour at its best.  There’s just enough seriousness to allow us to suspend our disbelief and the characters undercut the seriousness just enough to allow a general absurdist attitude. When Heracles shows up at the mourning Admetus’s door, Admetus does a complete 180, wears gaiety and only mild grief so that he can show Heracles hospitality. When Heracles leaves the stage, Admetus returns immediately to loud moaning with sorrow. When Heracles returns a few seconds later to collect his forgotten weapon, Admetus returns to cheeriness in an instant: it’s so perfectly timed that it’s hilarious without being crude.

Gillis’s production is very modern but not modernized: it doesn’t have the feel of a period piece but the original work isn’t corrupted either. Heracles plays like a laid back college kid on a mission – he even drinks wine out of red plastic cups to celebrate – and yet somehow he fits perfectly in the play that’s set hundreds of years ago. Admetus’s children show up in the form of a couple of puppets, voiced by the amazing Maarika Pinkney. When Alkestis dies, her son squeals and believably cries out in pain, yet the fact that he is a puppet undercuts this and amazingly makes it all quite hilarious without being distasteful: it is just so well acted and sincere. Gillis adds in these modern touches with just enough subtlety that they seem to fit into the world of these characters and the story. I’m used to seeing plays at Stratford where Shakespeare is artificially transported into the 1960s; Gillis uses no such artifice. Her modifications are carefully chosen and are done so cleverly. Continue reading “Alkestis: a must-see this weekend”

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Happy Studying!

For all of you (and that’s all of you!) getting ready for those late nights of studying for exams, this little refresher is just for you! Performed by GEAK, this music video pays tribute to our favourite hideaway at U of T…that cement block dungeon we like to call “Robarts Coinstar agent Library”. Good luck on exams all!

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Eat, Sleep, Study: Sage Advice from a First-Year Student

Where I come from, a little town called Ottawa, we have this novel concept called snow. It arrives with a few flurries in late November, followed by a massive downpour in early December which kindly provide your shivering street with a thick coat of snow. This snow, a common phenomenon throughout Canada, does not appear with such grandeur in Toronto. In fact, it is now December, and I have yet to have felt the need to break out my snow pants and go to class via my toboggan. Snow, in downtown Toronto, has thus far been little more than a mere spitting of snowflakes and a few piles of snow here and there.

In Ottawa, the first sign of snow sent a clear message that first semester was almost complete and exams were just around the corner. In Toronto, the indication that exams are coming is not seen in a change in the physical environment but rather in a noticeable shift in the collective mentality of the student body. Slowly but surely, as November crawled to an end, I noticed more and more students with a glazed look in their eyes. Everybody seemed to be walking a bit slower, wearing sweatpants a few more times a week, letting their hair be a little more dishevelled than usual. Even the hipsters seemed to put less care into their usually calculated looks, many opting to replace their styled coifs with slouchy chapeaus, and their skinny jeans with, well, slightly less skinny jeans.

Exams at University of Toronto are, indeed, not merely an event: they are a lifestyle change. Students who party frequently skip out on thirsty Thursdays at bars to study at libraries, and students who are mildly stressed year-round literally go insane before your eyes. I myself am mentally deteriorating in the midst of exam stress, but nonetheless, I hope this blog serves to provide some first-year students with a picture of exam time, and how to make it as least painful as it can possibly be. Continue reading “Eat, Sleep, Study: Sage Advice from a First-Year Student”