I just finished reading “My freshman year”, an ethnographic book about a professor enrolling as a student at her own university, and spending a year living in the dormitory, to try to understand why she feels so disconnected from the contemporary student culture. The book was published under the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan, but a journalist [...]

I spent a year studying in Sweden, and really enjoyed getting to know better our neighbour, that Norwegians always make fun of (they tell us the same jokes back, with Norwegians in the stupid roles, so it works both ways). I love the Swedish language, and often read Swedish novels, or download audiobooks (my latest [...]

CC BY sillygwailo @ flickr

I must be completely out of the loop. Not only has Toronto finally gotten a decent TTC (public transit) route planner, of the kind where you can type in two different intersections or addresses, and it will tell you what different buses, streetcars and subways you have to take, but it [...]

Image by Taekwonweirdo via Flickr

I am an international student in Canada, and although Canada is very welcoming to many permanent and temporary immigrants from around the world, there are many details to be navigated, much bureaucracy to be dealt with, and often hard to find good advice or guidance. The last few summers I have [...]

I’ve always loved reading literature or watching TV-series/movies about cities and places where I have been/are. When attending high school in Italia, it was a special treat reading a novel in Italian where the protagonist would explain that his mother was from Trieste, and his father from Milano… I lived close to Trieste, and I [...]

I have only visited New York once before, a few days in the summer a few years ago. Both then and now my time was spent trying to meet up with a few friends living here, and pounding the sidewalk in Manhattan to get an idea of the city. This time I was hoping to [...]

During the making of a little homevideo project, I did some shots of the University of Toronto, both downtown and Scarborough. While the movie isn’t meant for public consumption (email me if you are my friend, and I might send you a link), I chopped out the UofT part and put it on Youtube. My [...]

I really should be studying, but I made my first bookmarklet. The problem I tried to solve: When students of University of Toronto sit at home using Google Scholar to search for, say, information on the text book publishing industry in Swaziland, they often arrive at articles that are subscription only. However, usually they do [...]

I came across an interesting collection of photos of high-density housing in Hong Kong (thank you, Spacing Toronto), some very aesthetic pictures. I haven’t spend much time in Hong Kong, and don’t understand the city as I wish I did, but these pictures made me think of something. When discussing the past, present and future [...]

While researching what would end up being a poorly written essay on modernization theory and Laos (don’t ask), I came across the Journal of Higher Education, a topic that interests me verily, and I read a few articles. One that stood out was a comparison between the US and Canadian university systems in terms of [...]