Ontario Weekend #1

It's October – why not spend a lot of time in Canada? This past weekend, I traveled to attend the wedding of two friends from graduate school. The husband is from Saint Catharines, so they got married in a nature preserve near Niagara Falls (Canada side). Too bad Dave had to be at a conference in Chicago this weekend...

My visit kicked off with a stop at the University of Waterloo, to see my old friend Matt. We've been friends since freshman year of college, and we also overlapped at Michigan, where he was a post-doc when I was a grad student. Now he's a math professor! We got tea and caught up, and it sounds like everything is going really well.

I got to spend the night in Waterloo with my uncle John, aunt Virginia, and cousin Stephanie. It had been 8 years since I last visited them at their home, and it was fun to reunite with such objects as the FRIDGE:

We had the same exact one growing up, and it has the most amazing feature: a special drinks compartment, with a tray that flips down, where you can put your glass and pour your drink. Since "getting drinks" was one of my setting-the-table chores, I used this feature very often. I still wish I had a refrigerator like this.

We also ate Auntie Virginia's delicious homemade apple pie:

The next day, it was off to the wedding at Niagara Falls! My friends Evelyn and Mark are both classicists/archaeologists and met in Athens. They are a wonderful couple and perfectly suited for one another.

Post-ceremony joy

I liked their idea for table assignments: each table was associated with a place they've visited during their extensive travels, with a cute picture of them in each location.

Evelyn is a belly dancer on the side, so of course there was a performance by her former troupe...

...in which she also joined in!

Before I left, I stopped by the Falls themselves. That's a lot of water. It was too cold to ride the boat into the mist – while I was there, it began to SNOW.

Overall, it was almost a perfect weekend! But a final note on air travel: I arrived in Toronto on a Brazilian airline I had never heard of before, TAM. It was absurdly cheap, and I felt a little worried about entrusting my safety to this obscure company. However, flying with TAM was instead a throwback to the previous glories of late '90s air travel. I got to check a bag FOR FREE. We boarded according to ROW NUMBER, rather than customer status. They even gave us each THIS MUFFIN:

On the way home, I was flying Air Canada. Air Canada canceled my flight back to New York without explanation, and after rebooking me, refused to comp a hotel room for the evening. <shakes fist> I supposed I could have shelled out for the room, but I had to be back at the airport so early the next morning that I wouldn't have gotten a good night's rest anyway. So I spent the evening in these luxurious accommodations:

Yes, it's a slightly padded bench at the foot of a wifi-related statue, with a strange woman on the other side removing her shoes. Actually, I could've slept fairly well – I changed into pajamas and brushed my teeth, placed my head on my backpack, and had my coat covering me and my purse. It's just that there was construction, seemingly jackhammer-based, going on in the terminal all night. I am seriously disgruntled and will never fly Air Canada again! I urge you all to consider the same action.