snowy december holiday cheer

Three days from now I return to the land of no homework, home-cooked meals, and (hopefully) piles and piles of beautiful snow. Sadly, this means leaving Quest. Here are some reasons I'll be sad to leave:

The other day we had a Quest holiday extravaganza. It began with the Questival arts fair where students sold a variety of homemade arts and crafts ranging from honey to recycled journals to hugs. This was followed by the student showcase. Students gave presentations on the economics of Harry Potter, an art piece by Andy Goldsworthy, summer medical research, and more. The evening commenced with a holiday feast. The highlight was probably David Helfand, our president, in a Santa suit, engaging in an academic debate with another professor about the existence of himself (Santa). How could I not be sad about leaving a place where this kind of thing happens?

As if this were not enough holiday cheer, yesterday it snowed! After working all day on our final Global Perspectives project, we went out onto the field in the dark and wrote messages and drew pictures on the gigantic untouched canvas.

It will be almost three months before I return to Squamish. I've been so busy with schoolwork and thinking about christmas joy that I've barely had brain space left over to get stoked for Borneo! I'll be blogging for Ethical Expeditions and Rainforest Action Network while I'm over there - check those out if you're interested in what I'll be up to in January/February. Have a fabulous winter holiday! Hooray for Quest, winter, and adventures!

it's beginning to look a lot like christmas

Actually, it's not, because it rarely snows down at sea level here in Squamish. But it has been beautiful lately - we've had a string of frigid, windy, blue-sky days. Global Perspectives is fulfilling it's promise to illuminate all the dark and horrible corners of the world from child labor to pesticide poisoning. Furthermore, I firmly believe that it is impossible (for me) to get better than 86% in participation. I'm learning many important things, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't unbelievably stoked for December 17th.

However, it's not all doom and gloom. We've all got Secret Santas (I baked some bread for mine this weekend... although the truth is that I'm horrible at baking so I have no idea if it actually was baked or if it's just dough with a baked shell... yikes), Questival (Quest christmas festival?) is coming up, and there's only a week and a half until the glorious freedom of winter vacation. Not to mention, I'm getting pretty pumped for Borneo. I'll try to squeeze in one last post between frantic reading of scientific papers before I return to my homeland. Happy December!

community at quest

After a fairly unpleasant return from Seattle (all night bus rides with a 5 hour layover in Vancouver), I'm back at Quest and three days into my new class, Global Perspectives. My tutor, Mai, has a reputation for being brutally honest and a tough grader. She told us that to survive we had to remember that grades do not determine our value as a person, nor do they indicate how successful we'll be in later life. Then she showed us a graph of average happiness (in smiles/hour) of students over the course of the class. Yikes. I'll definitely be ready for Christmas Break when it comes. However, most students say that Global is the best class they've taken at Quest so far, so while I'm nervous, I'm also excited.

The theme of this week seems to be community. On Monday we had the traditional beginning-of-block community update, where everyone gathers in the Atrium and various student, staff, and faculty talk about opportunities and happenings at Quest. We've got so many fun holiday events coming up! I'm stoked because Christmas (or as I like to call it, the Season of Joy) is my absolute favorite time of year. Then yesterday we had community day. As class was wrapping up, a few members of the student body ran, screaming, banging pots and pans, and playing a PVC-pipe didgeridoo, all around the academic building, rounding people up for school-wide team building activities and discussions about how to improve Quest. I'm suck a sucker for that kind of thing.

adios, block three

It's the last day of the block, and in a few short hours I will be done with lenart spheres, armillary spheres... the sphere in general, really. It's been quite an experience, but I'm fairly burnt out on math at the moment, so now is a great time for a break. Still, todays class should be enjoyable. We caught Glen making 10 mathematical mistakes over the course of the block ("a" instead of "A", "+" instead of "-", that sort of thing), so he'll be buying us pizza for lunch, and a few of us baked a spherical trig themed cake last night. Cool (or nerdy... whatever)! However, there's also a "final assessment" and presentations. We'll see how that goes.

In other news, the snow line, after receding rather disgustingly over the past few days, is back in all it's glory. On the way up to class this morning, I noticed that it's brushing the top of the Chief! I'm sure there will be lots of skiers and snowboards stoked to shred Red Heather and Whistler this block break. I'm excited to go to Seattle to see friends and hopefully do some climbing with my Dad (who's in Seattle for a meeting) in central Washington. Hopefully it won't rain!

snow!

This weekend kicked off with a lip-synch competition put on by the SRC (Student Representative Council) Friday night. Songs included Get Down and Bad Touch... so you know it was good. This was followed by an entire Saturday of spherical trigonometry. As I said, it's hands-down the sickest math class I've ever taken. Our tutor, Glenn, is a mathematical genius. He's actually a math historian, and knows more about ancient Arabic mathematicians than anyone I've ever met. Or anyone in the world. I don't know. It's insane. Spherical Trig hasn't been taught in 50 years, but it's the basis for astronomy and navigation, and Glen is trying to bring it back; he's writing a textbook and using our class as guinea pigs. By the beginning of the second week, most of us were seeing Menalaus figures in our sleep. Anyway, as it turns out I spent the entire day working on a problem that I'd actually solved in the first 10 minuets, and just hadn't realized it. Awesome.

However, the weekend was salvaged by a beautiful hike to Lake Lovelywater, high in the Tantalus Mountains. We started at 7am, crossed the Squamish River on a giant cable with the help of pulleys, and headed up through beautiful (if soggy) old-growth forest. There was much excitement when we saw the first little patch of snow about halfway up, and as we continued on the rain turned to snow and the snow got so deep we were practically swimming through it! Everybody looks like a little kid in the snow, in hats and gloves and snow-pants, falling over and so so so stoked! When we finally got to the lake, we stopped for some lunch, became frigid, put on ALL our layers, and ran most of the way back down to warm up, reaching the cable at dusk. We got back to the Quest cafeteria 5 minutes before closing and snarfed the most delicious yam fries I've had so far here. Sweet!

a most exciting development

Hello Friends, Family, and (especially) Prospective Students! I'm in the middle of my third block here at Quest: Spherical Trigonometry. It is amazing (something that, believe me, I've NEVER said about math before), and my professor is incredible. But right now I've got something a little more interesting to tell you about. Not that math isn't interesting, because it is. But... read on.

As you probably know, the Vancouver/Whistler Winter Olympics are coming up. You may or may not know that Squamish is right between Vancouver and Whistler on the Sea to Sky Highway, and Quest has agreed to rent out our residence buildings. So we've got to leave campus for the months of January and February and go pursue adventures, education, and/or employment elsewhere.

Until yesterday morning, I was tentatively planning on heading down to southern Chile to play outside in February, and was trying to wrangle up something else crazy and amazing for January. These (rough) plans were completely obliterated in the best possible way, however, when one of the students who was on the Borneo trip decided not to go.

What is the Borneo trip? It is incredible. A group of 18 Quest students is flying to Borneo (an island in Indonesia) for two months with an organization called Ethical Expeditions (you can look them up online if you're interested). There we'll... well, I'm not quite sure what exactly we'll be doing, as I've only just signed on, but it involves conserving the rainforest and saving the orangutans. I believe this does involve actually hanging out with orangutans. Needless to say, I am ridiculously stoked. It was kind of a mad rush to book an international ticket within 24 hours of deciding I was going to go (I guess it's nice that Bank of America blocks my credit card when I try to buy a $1600 ticket on SingaporeAir.com ...), but definitely worth it when I opened my confirmation e-mail and realized: I'm going to Borneo in January!

More about spherical trig, and the rest of my life (although there's not much of it outside of math just now) later!