• It’s true, people are nicer in Vancouver than in Toronto: cars will stop for me when I attempt to jaywalk; this never fails to disconcert me and is substantially upping my chances of ending up in an ER.
  • Even the hipsters here are chill/er. My hatred for hipsterism has now become largely academic; in Toronto it was existential.
  • Vancouver is also, as a whole, a thinner city.
  • As a whole, however, Torontonians are sexier.
  • The combined population of all of the Greater Toronto Area boasts fewer white people with dreads than my 10-minute morning bus ride to school.
  • On any given day, I am liable to see more piercings than I am appendages.
  • On that note, there are more noserings here than there are brown people in Brampton.
  • My heart gives a little leap every time it sees a vintage VW van. I’m probably sporting a vehicular-induced arrhythmia right now.
  • My roommate and I made incredible first impressions on landlords. I’ve never in my life heard the words You look like such nice girls so often. We had our pick of basements. More enterprising souls (read: ones less lazy) would be able to make money off this.
    Then I cut my hair really short.
  • Vancouver Public Library’s central branch trumps every extant library in Toronto.
  • Nowhere else in Canada except on southside Main can you be confident that a bus driven by a middle-aged white guy will make a grudging halt between scheduled stops because the bus is full of irate elderly Sikh be-turbaned uncles who are about to incite a riot about a missed stop. Sat Sri Akal.
  • In Vancouver, in the Punjab Market, Cornershop feels aboriginal — and you can’t even say that about Scarborough, because this isn’t about quantifying brownness, but how it feels different to be brown here. I love/d Cornershop in Toronto, but it didn’t fit there the way it does in some places here.
  • They use the same currency here. That was seriously off-putting for the first three days.
  • Here mountains serve as landmarks.
  • And going to class involves sauntering by the Pacific.
    Or rushing, or trudging, or wading, as the case may be.
  • At least once a day I have to repeat my name five times, after which point I generally concede defeat and spell it out. Sometimes I’ll say Like the saint and then silently ask her forgiveness.
    (Check the Portugese pronunciation — except that no one except Muslims (and people I’ve browbeaten) seem to say it that way.)
    (Today I learned that Fatima derives from the word “to wean.” This is the benefit of living with an Arabic prof.)
  • In Vancouver, a confidence in straight lines will avail you of nothing.
  • Neither will a confidence in numbers: Vancouver public transit officials think nothing of naming divergent bus routes the same number.
  • This city was put on earth by god to try my non-existent navigational skills.