Just another day in Toronto.

Active day. I woke up at 10:30am after about 6 hours sleep, and decided I should get up and finally do my errands in the department. Did them. Came home. HD came over to use the fax machine. I still don't understand that thing, but since my parents gave it to me for free---they bought it but used it once (or maybe not at all?) and then decided that the instruction booklet was too long for them to deal with. Nutty, but I got a free fax machine out of it!

In the afternoon I went to the airport to pick up friend EW. She was coming back from a research trip to England, and asked me if I'd meet her at Pearson to help her with her bags. Unfortunately, I didn't get more detailed information from her about her flight, other than that she was coming in at about 3pm. So I checked the flights from London online, and it looked like all the London flights landed at Terminal 1, so off I went. In addition to helping EW, I figured it would be good to make the trip out to the airport on public transport to see what it was like, considering I'll have to do that for real when I go on my own research trips.

At the subway station near my house, a man with a suitcase asked me for directions to another stop---the stop to which I was going as well. He came up to me again on the platform of the next station, where we both had gotten off to switch trains, because he was of course going to the airport. So I asked him where he was headed, and we took the subway to the end of the line together. He had just been at the AIDS conference, and was a doctor from Portugal. It was nice chatting with him about Canada, history, the conference, etc. (He was very impressed by Bill Clinton, but less impressed with how the conference had become more about socializing and less about science over the years.) We got to the end of the line---where we had to switch to the bus---and were still chatting when who should appear at the bus stop, but my friend from the department, AB! She and her brother were headed to the Prairies for a wedding and to visit family. I abandoned my new Portuguese friend, but AB and I had a great time on the bus together. (I did wish the doctor a safe flight when he got off the bus, though.) We both got off at Terminal 1, and I went off to investigate the whereabouts of EW.

Hmm. No sign of her, even though it was by this point 3:20, and from the looks of things, the last flight in from London had landed on time at 2:29. Problems. (By the way, this is not what the airport website had told me!) I waited, wandered, and wondered until 4pm, when I decided to call EW on her cell phone---thankfully I remembered her number---and she answered! Turns out she had landed at Terminal 3, and was then making her way to the bus station. Hold on, EW, I'm coming!

Getting from Terminal 1 to Terminal 3 was kinda fun, I must say. There's a newish "monorail" that took me there, like the one I took with DS at the Minneapolis airport back in June. Signage wasn't the greatest, but I found EW, and we and her ginormous bags made it back to my place without any more problems!

FN and I had a planned dinner for historian-turned-working-woman EC, and EW stayed over too, which was nice. We had a lovely dinner and yummy dessert. Newlywed friends of FN's came over for a bit later for pie, and by then I was just exhausted! So much so that I went to bed just after 11pm. Which is very unlike me. I had a sneaking suspicion that my body would think I just wanted a nap, and, well, I was right. Sigh. Hence this blog post in the wee hours. Hopefully I'll be able to fall asleep again soon, so I'm ready to run more errands tomorrow (er, today).

Welcome home, EW, and good luck moving into your new apartment!