Day 9 - Acadia, Dalhousie, St. Mary's

Hello friends, today we entered the beautiful province of Nova Scotia, and got to make plenty of "Barrett's Privateers" puns as the day went on. I also had a very unexpected appearance of royalty on my trip, but we'll get to that soon enough.

Today started by us making our way out of PEI and heading over to Nova Scotia. Did you know that getting onto PEI is free but getting off is a $47 toll? I guess they have to maintain the Confederation Bridge somehow. Anyways, we made our way to Wolfville, NS to go to Acadia University, which has a pretty large campus, but a tiny Engineering program. For those of you who may not know, in Nova Scotia there are a bunch of smaller schools with 2 year Engineering programs, and after those 2 years all the students would transfer to Dalhousie, which is quite a fascinating system. The Acadia campus had a tremendous amount of green space, a lot of sports pride, and a very vintage feeling to it. We then visited St. Mary's University, which was also quite small, but is actually one of the older universities in Canada (founded in 1802, even older than Dalhousie).One interesting thing about both St. Mary's and Acadia is that neither of them had random pieces of art, which broke the streak that I was on. Both of these schools were quite cool in their own way, and had some overall pretty cool facilities.

The big one for today was Dalhousie University. Anthony and I tried making our way through their campus, but it was huge. We learned that University of King's College basically overlaps with Dalhousie, and their buildings are actually quite nice. We met up with my friend Kirk Drabble, and a new friend that I met today Neha Nauman. They gave us a bunch of Dal swag, which I thought was very kind of them, and gave us a full tour of the Dalhousie main campus, including the Arts Centre, Student Union Building, and the Killam Memorial Library. Fun fact: that library was built and design to look like a fort so that it didn't get bombed during one of the wars, which I thought was pretty neat. The main piece of random art that Dalhousie has is a statue that (for the lack of a better term) looks like a severed penis, and the sad part is that the last time I was at Dal I had put a Waterloo sticker on it and it was no longer there. Oh well, at least the Dal campus is just as beautiful as I remembered it being. One of the most exciting parts of my trip to Dalhousie was that while I was taking pictures today, the President of Dalhousie University (who is an Engineer) was giving a tour to the Prince of Monaco, and they both commented on how nice they thought my covies were! Quite an honour to say the least.

Anthony and I then made our way to the Sexton campus, which is the campus that houses the Faculty of Engineering for Dalhousie. This campus used to be the Techincal University of Nova Scotia (TUNS) before is was purchased and made a part of Dalhousie University in 1997. When we got there we met up with Rami Nassif, the former Dalhousie Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) President who also just graduated. He showed us around the Engineering side of campus, and explained how the Sexton campus was building 4 new Engineering buildings. Rami explained the facilities that were going to be offered to students moving forward in these buildings, and I was quite blown away by how much progress Dal was making in improving student life and the experiential learning of their students. The EUS was also going to be getting a tremendous amount of space, which should help them grow as a Society and better serve the students, and help the incoming students from the smaller universities with their transition to Dalhousie.

After we finished up our visits for the day, we met up with Owen Macintosh, who goes to Carleton University but is a Nova Scotia native, and we went and got some quality donair. We made plans to go do trivia night at a pub called "The Old Triangle", but Anthony and I had to go drop some stuff off first. Laurie Vaughan (Hannah Gautreau's mom) was kind enough to give us a place to stay in Halifax for the next 2 days, so we met up with her for a bit before we made our way downtown. At the pub, we met some of Owen's friends, and after we completely bombed trivia we took a walk down by the waterfront, which honestly just felt magical. Halifax is just such a beautiful place and a great place to be in, so I had a lot of fun today. Tomorrow we will be doing some touring of the city itself (no universities to see tomorrow), and we're hoping to go see Peggy's Cove, so wait until tomorrow's post to hear all about that!

 Acadia + St. Mary's: www.instagram.com/p/BiixVy4FkPg
Dalhousie: www.instagram.com/p/BiizAqMlMi2

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