Midwest / Eastern Canada college visits Friday April 25 London, Ontario

We woke up at 5:15am and groggily walked to the train station to catch our 6:50am train to London, Ontario, where we planned to visit Huron University College, a small college connected to the much lager Western University. The train was supposed to take a little over two hours, but was more than an hour late, too late to for us to get to our 10am tour on time. I emailed the admissions director from the train and explained our predicament, and she quickly arranged for a tour guide to meet us at 10:30 instead. We had planned to take a bus to the campus in Northern London, but since we were so late we took a Lyft instead. The drive was not pretty and I was worried that we were going into an ugly suburban area.

As soon as we got out the Lyft, I was bombarded with a smell of cows that made my eyes sting, a smell I remembered from a visit to Greeley, Colorado, where my eyes stung and I felt like I was going to suffocate the entire time I was there. It wasn’t quite as bad as Greeley, but also it was raining, and I was afraid that it was only the rain that was making it not that bad. Later I asked our tour guide if there were a lot of farms or cows nearby. She said no. I asked what the smell was and she said it was the geese, because there are a lot of Canadian geese here. I was skeptical because we also have a lot of geese in Seattle, and it does not smell like that. Also I only saw two geese the entire time we were on campus (and they looked exactly like the geese in Seattle). Lucy said I was overreacting and the smell didn’t bother her. But this is the child who can’t smell anything and once slept all night snuggled in a blanket soaked in cat pee and didn’t notice. So I guess she would be fine here. I looked it up later, and I was right, it was not the geese, it was the smell of farmers spreading manure on fields. But unlike Greeley, it sounds like it doesn't smell like that all year, just when they are spreading manure.

Aside from the smell, the campus was beautiful. The buildings were old and beautiful, and there was a huge green forest right next to campus that she said was filled with hiking trails, and lots of green spaces and parks where she said students often hung out. All of London was so green compared to Toronto that we wondered if it had a very different climate, but Lucy looked up the average temperatures and they were exactly the same as Toronto. I don't think it was just that Toronto is more urban so there are fewer trees, because there were a lot of trees on the U of T campus and none of them were green.

The tour guide did a great job of selling how it was a small close-knit community where everyone knew each other and your professors noticed if you didn't come to class.

She showed us two classrooms, a lecture room with tables in rows, and a discussion room with a big table for all the students to sit around and have discussions. Even the lecture hall had tables for each pair of students and lots of space between the rows for professors to walk between them. Both types of classrooms were very small and she said typical classes only had about 20 students. I asked her what fraction of the classes were lecture style and what fraction were discussion style. She said it was a good mix, but even the lecture classes included a lot of discussion, unless it was math, because that's so technical that there's nothing to discuss. I forgave her answer about math because she was a business major who clearly doesn't understand how much there is to discuss about math, and because overall I was satisfied with her answer that discussion was a important component of almost all classes. (This was a sharp contrast to Lewis and Clark in Portland, where I asked the same question and the tour guide, who was a junior, said she didn't think she'd ever had a class that was discussion style. I decided then and there that Lucy was not going to Lewis and Clark.)

The semester had just ended and most students had gone home so there weren't very many students out and about, but the tour guide pointed out all the places that were normally filled with students, and gave the impression that it was a very lively campus. There were many spaces throughout the college designed for students to sit together and collaborate, and all the spaces felt very inviting.

Our tour guide was a business major and kept trying to sell us on how great the business program was even after we said Lucy wasn't interested in business, but it does sound like they have a lot of other great programs.

Lucy said she liked it and she would happily go here if she didn't get into any of her other top choices, but it wasn't her favorite.

We had a little time after the tour before we needed to head to the airport to catch our plane to Chicago, so we asked the admissions director for advice about what to do in London and she suggested the Tea Lounge. We tried to take the bus to the tea lounge but could not figure out how to buy a bus ticket, so we took a Lyft. We had high tea for lunch and it was lovely.

Then we walked around a bit towards downtown, and tea and downtown and all the greenery convinced Lucy that London wasn't so bad and maybe she would really like it here.

We only had a few hours in London before we had to head to the airport to leave Canada for Chicago. We had a stopover in Toronto, and were surprised to find that we would be going through customs in Toronto rather than in Chicago. At first I thought this was great news because we would get it over with and not have to deal with it on the other side. Then I saw the line. We got to the customs line around 4:45, and there were hundreds and hundreds of people already in line, and it was clear that there was no way we would make our 5:30 flight to Chicago. I asked several customs agents what we were supposed to do about this problem, and they all just said the only thing we could do was to wait in line and if we missed our flight, we could go to the airline counter on the other side and arrange with them to reschedule our flight. At 5:15, there were still hundreds of people in front of us in line, as well as hundreds of people behind us, and I decided waiting till I got to the other side was stupid, so I called Air Canada to rebook our flight over the phone. They took a very long time to answer the phone and then transferred me to United and around 5:45 I finally got someone to help me. She initially said my flight was the last flight out tonight, and she'd have to put me on a flight tomorrow morning. I explained that we had an appointment in Chicago in the morning and no place to stay in Toronto, and begged her to put us on a flight on another airline so we could get out tonight. I started having visions of having to find another place to stay in Toronto and go through this line again in the morning and miss our college tour that was the whole point of going to Chicago in the first place. I had been so excited that tomorrow, which was Shabbat, was our one day with no travel where we got in at a reasonable hour the night before and left at a reasonable hour the next day and we could actually rest. Around 6:05 she finally finagled something and said she might be able to put me on an Air Canada flight at 6:35. We were getting close to the front of the line at that point, but it still seemed like there was a good chance we wouldn't make it, especially because we had no idea how far it was to the gate. She put me on hold again, then told me she was going to try to put me on a 9pmand  flight on United. I have no idea why she said our 5:30 flight was the last flight out when there was a 9pm flight on her own airline, but I was happy to take it. It seemed to require a lot of finagling to get us on that flight, and she figured out how to do it without any change fees just as we got to the customs agent. The customs agent said she wasn't sure if she could let us in since our flight had left so we didn't have valid boarding passes, and just as she was trying to figure it out, the United agent said she had booked our new flights, and then the customs agent was able to see them on her console, just in the nick of time, and let us through. I was so glad I had called when I did, rather than listening to the agent at the beginning of the line who told me I would just have to arrange things on the other side if I missed my flight, who apparently didn't know that I couldn't even get to the other side if I missed my flight. I was so grateful that we were actually going to make it to Chicago tonight, even if it was late. If I hadn't called when I did, there was no way we would have made it tonight.

Meanwhile, I had started catching up on news right before I got on the plane in London, and saw that the National Science Foundation director had resigned, DOGE was canceling more grants, and there were rumors that they might start deleting grants off research.gov and claim they didn't exist or that you hadn't filed your reports, so PIs should start downloading all their info immediately to use as documentation. So on my first flight I downloaded all the things and tried to catch up on the news and spread the news, and while I was waiting in the customs line and calling airlines, I started seeing more and more friends reporting that their grants had been cancelled. I saw that they had cancelled 600 grants today, and it seemed very likely that mine would be among them, and I kept checking email to see if there was a notification, but there was none for my grant before I turned off email for Shabbat.

We had planned to have dinner in Chicago after our 6:30 arrival, but since we now had several hours before our 9pm departure, I finished a few last things and then we had Shabbat dinner in the airport and I enjoyed a glass of wine. Our new flight really did seem to be the last flight out of Toronto, and we happily got on it. Lucy and I are both so exhausted. We are having a blast, but I think we are ready for this trip to end.