Michael showed up last night a little after midnight with my passport. I was already asleep but woke up long enough to greet him, get my passport, and give him my dirty clothes to take home. I was the second happiest I have ever been to see my passport (the first was when I was leaving Saudi Arabia and I was so grateful to have a US passport so I could leave). I was also happy to see Michael. He had to leave early in the morning before me to catch his plane home, so we had a very short visit.
It was lovely to be staying somewhere that I could sleep a little later and just get up and walk to the airport. By now I was intimately familiar with the Minneapolis airport and knew all the secret back ways around it and could get around quickly. With a valid passport, I had no trouble getting on my flight and set off to see Lucy. I stopped in Montreal, went through customs, took my connecting flight to Halifax, and then caught the bus to town where Lucy was waiting for me. We were very happy to see each other.
I had only three hours in Halifax before we had to go back to the airport to catch our flight to Toronto, but I was glad I made it in time to see it. I had never been to Halifax, but the pictures were beautiful and it lived up to my expectations in real life. When Lucy got there last night, she said it was “aggressively misting” and she really liked Halifax. When I got there it was sunny. Lucy had spent the last two days exploring the city, so she was able to show me around. We went to the waterfront and had dinner outside overlooking the water, and then wandered around the waterfront and downtown. I loved how the waterfront was set up so you could walk along the water the whole length of downtown. In Seattle, restaurants and private businesses go right to the water so you can’t actually walk along the water for a lot of it, but here there is a pathway between the water and the businesses. I feel like this is an indicator of how Canada values public spaces more than the US. Halifax felt like a prettier, older, slightly smaller, and much more Canadian version of Seattle.
Lucy and I caught up on each other’s adventures, and she told me all about her visit this morning to University of King’s College, which she really liked. King’s is a tiny college (~1000 students) with a connection to the much larger Dalhousie University, which sounds very similar to Barnard and Columbia, and in my experience this kind of program provides the best of both worlds. It is known for its interdisciplinary Foundation Year Program, which is “an intensive, interdisciplinary introduction to philosophy and the history of Western thought and culture” where they read a bunch of great books in order from ancient to modern. Lucy was excited about this, and also the culture there felt nerdy and activist-y in all the right ways. They had a D&D club, and Halifax was filled with cool D&D shops that she discovered when she walked around town. She said the major downsides, aside from it not being in New York, were that most students lived off-campus (most first-year students do live on-campus, but move off after that) and they don’t guarantee housing, and they didn’t seem to have an ASL club or offer any ASL. (I checked later and it looks like Dalhousie just started an ASL club, so at least there’s that.) She also said they have lots of cool college traditions, something she is excited about that Barnard doesn’t have. She said if she didn’t get into Barnard she would probably be very happy going to King’s. She feels like it would be more reasonable to go to King’s because it costs 1/4 what Barnard costs, but she really wants to go to college in New York and it’s hard to let go of that. But King’s is definitely her favorite non-Barnard college so far, so I’m really glad that she managed to go without me.
Then we took the bus back to the airport, struggled a lot with getting our bags to fit in the tiny containers for Flair Airlines (a Canadian discount airlines that is even worse than US discount airlines), and flew to Toronto, where we arrived after midnight and took the shuttle to our airport hotel.
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