Departure and Arrival

So this was it. It's really happening. I was going to go to Canada. I packed the last of my stuff to my cabin luggage, backpack, and small fanny pack. Prior to this, I have spent upward of four months not being able to see my parents because I had to be in ITB to attend my semesters. So this wasn't really that different, except for the teeny tiny little fact that I am not a 3 hours drive away, I am a 28 hours flight away.

My parents drove me to the airport. We took off at around 13.00 from my father's house in Tangsel (which I've been living in for the past 3 months), stopping by on the way for lunch. We then arrived at the airport around 15.00.

CGK

While my father was parking his car, me and my mom immediately went to the luggage wrapping service counter to wrap the luggage that I'm going to check into baggage. The weight limit for each of the checked-in baggage is 23 kg. Fortunately, my two luggage only weigh 21 and 22 kilograms prior to being wrapped, and they still fell well below the limit after being wrapped. Right after that, we went to the baggage check-in counter to check those two luggages in. We were one of the first in the queue (the counter for my flight have not even opened yet when I started queuing). The process was pretty quick. I got asked by the employee at the counter about the purpose of me going abroad (which I don't think has anything to do with security, I think she was just curious). I then told her that I'm on an exchange program to UofT through the IISMA program, and handed her some of my paperworks when she asked for it. But there were no issues.

Afterwards, my father joined up with us. Then, I immediately remembered one crucial thing that I forgot, I have not converted any of my allowance money from IISMA to Canadian Dollars (CAD). The reason why I have not done this earlier is because it's actually pretty rare for a currency exchange place here in Indonesia to have CAD. Fortunately, there was a mandiri currency exchange right then and there in the airport who service exchanging IDR to CAD. Unfortunately, they have ran out of CAD. We then continue to walk through the airport to find another currency exchange place and fortunately there were one operated by BRI. It was easier to do the transaction by drawing the money from a BRI bank account. Luckily, during my internship in paper.id, I had to receive my wages through a BRI bank account, which I still hold onto until now.

On the Plane to KUL

Despite what it said on the ticket, the plane from Jakarta to Amsterdam is a flight in its own right, detached from our flight from Amsterdam to Toronto. And apparently it has its own layover in Kuala Lumpur. The flight to Kuala Lumpur is a 1.5 hours flight, similar in duration to a flight from Jakarta to Surabaya that I have frequently taken. What is different here from those flights are the fact that I am flying in a bigger plane, with multiple cabin classes and with 9 seats in a row instead of 6 (at least for the economy class that I am being put in). I also got to have in-flight meals as my dinner. It has been quite a long time since I had a flight long enough to warrant one of those, so that was pretty neat.

I spent most of the flight reading James Clear's Atomic Habits. A person who's pretty important to me gave me that book and I intend to finish reading it before I went back to Indonesia.

KUL

Due to Malaysian flight regulation, even though we weren't dropping off in Kuala Lumpur, the plane still has to be emptied, thus we still had to step out of the plane. It was pretty comical actually, we got out of the plane and then instantly went back to the gate for the plane. Queuing for security check took the bulk of our time in Kuala Lumpur and so once we got into the waiting room for the same plane that we just got out of, we only had to wait for 10-15 minutes before we are being boarded. While waiting, me, Azza, Michelle, and Vanya, completed filling the ArriveCAN declaration, which had to be filled for anybody entering Canada. Most of the questions in the ArriveCAN site inquired about the type of goods that we were about to bring to Canada.

On the Plane to AMS

I continued reading more of Atomic Habits, but I spent a substantial part of the flight sleeping, which is to be expected since this flight took place during night time back in the Indonesia. Unfortunately, I only got to sleep for 5, maybe 6 hours, out of the 12 or so hours of the flight. Apparently food was served during one of those hours where I slept, so I unfortunately missed out on one of the delicious meals that they have provided. Some of my time were spent watching the movie Crazy, Stupid, Love, which is pretty funny and heartwarming.

Another thing that I spent quite a while doing on the flight was looking at the route that the plane was taking throughout the flight using the tracker app that was available in the KLM in-flight entertainment system. It was really something to see the plane making its way through Thailand, the Andaman Sea, parts of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, the caucasus, eastern and central Europe, before finally landing in Amsterdam. The app also has a pretty cool feature of showing the notable landmarks, buildings, or cities that were currently in proximity to the airplane (though not that close, what was classified as near could be from several dozens to several hundreds kilometers away from the plane current position).

AMS

If you're an observant person, you should have noticed that this flight to Toronto is heading against "the flow of time". It should be obvious why the plane that took off at around 23.00 Kuala Lumpur time from said city arrived in Amsterdam at 6.00 Amsterdam time, despite the flight taking 12 hours. What should've been midday is now just the start of the morning, which affected my body's biological clock in a negative way later on during the flight to Toronto.

Once we have arrived in the Amsterdam Schiphol airport, we walked to the gate of our connecting flight to Toronto. But before that, we had to go through a security check first. The baggage check thingie that Schiphol have was so cool and well-thought in terms of engineering. Once we have gone through security, we continued walking towards our gate, which took a while. Once we were there, we rest for some time before making our itinerary for day 1 and day 2. We wanted to utilize those two days to the fullest to set us up with the crucial things that we will need in Canada.

The following are what we would like to complete within those two days:

• Get the TCard (the student card for UofT students).

• Get a SIM card.

• Get a bank account at a local bank (because we can only pay for our housing and meal plan through a local bank).

• Report our stay to the Indonesian consulate.

At first, we had this super complex plan to get all four of those before Wednesday because each of the above items weren't that straightforward to do. One particular issue that we encountered when doing said planning was the fact that the consulate only opens from 9.30 to 12.30. Due to our schedule, one or more of us must sacrifice their first day of class for us to be able to be there in the narrow time window. We assumed that getting a TCard may not be that simple as well considering that we'll be arriving on Canada's labor day, which may means the TCard office is closed on the day that we arrive. This was another issue in our plan since we also assumed that we would need our TCard to make a local bank account.

Other than planning our itinerary, we also took a a look around the Schiphol airport and took some photos while were waiting for our flight (we cannot get out of the arrival and departure part of the airport since we didn't have a Schengen visa).

On the Plane to YYZ

I spent my time pondering about my life choices, eating the on-board meals, watching a couple of movies, and dying of boredom. This flight was "only" 7.5 hours, considerably shorter than the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Amsterdam. But I still got bored because, unlike the previous flight, I didn't sleep at all this time since I simply didn't feel sleepy for most of the flight. It was only when I was about to land that the I started feeling lethargic.

YYZ

I think I forgot to mention that the previous two flight had free on-board wi-fi that could be used for instant messaging (sending multimedia files and streaming is only possible with the paid tier of the on-board wi-fi). Using this, I asked the SR of awardees from IISMA Western University and IISMAVO Georgian College (who have been on the same flight as us from the get go since Jakarta, sorry for not mentioning that earlier too) to have us walk together up until the baggage pick-up so that we can have a photo taken of all the awardees together.

So all of us walked down together through the airport. The immigration process was almost non-existent. We just had to do some scans of our passport and visa. Then, those who had declared in ArriveCAN that some goods that they're bringing in are of a certain type got asked about those kind of goods and had their documents checked ("those" here includes me). But that was about it. We then got right into the baggage pick-up section of the airport. Before picking up our baggage, the three of the awardee groups took photos together. The four of us was the first to be done picking up all of our luggagge, and we promptly got separated from them.

Stepping out to the airport's "common" area, we instantly recognized Aleena, the person from the university's International Education Centre who was supposed to pick us up. She brought us Timbits, a donut hole-shaped snack from Tim Hortons which will be a recurring theme in these journal entries. After meeting her and introducing ourselves, she was about to take us out right to the Uber's waiting place. But we wanted to buy a SIM card from chatr first, whose booth was right there beside us. After we all got our SIM card (there were no hassle at all, we just had to show our passports and paid them), we walked outside to the place where Uber pick riders up. The reason we specifically got chatr was because of recommendation from a BIM friend of ours at University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) who has been really helpful. Her name is Ceka, she has been a user of Fido, but recommended against using that because of chatr's cheaper cost (34 vs 50 dollars a month for 50GB).

Once we got out, we immediately felt the cool temperature and the chilly breeze that was blowing. The way that I would describe the weather is by likening it to Bandung at dawn. The sun was clearly visible and it was shining down on us, but the air was still cold (mind you we arrived at midday, 2 PM and by the time we got out it was 3 PM or so). Because we carried a lot of luggage, we split into two Ubers.

By the way, if you're curious why Toronto's airport (and other airports in Canada) has this peculiar airport code that isn't representative at all of the city's name, there is a CGP Grey video talking about airport codes that touched upon that topic.

On the Uber to UTM

I was in the Uber with Azza and Aleena, while Michelle and Vanya were on the other Uber. Both me Azza ate the Timbits (it was mostly me) while chatting to Aleena about the campus life and whatnot. The Uber driver offered to take us to Tim Hortons (also commonly called Timmies) since this is the first time we arrive in Canada and thus we had never been to Timmies. Though we politely refused because we just wanted to arrive in campus and get settled.

The Toronto Pearson International airport is actually located not in Toronto itself, but in Mississauga (the same way Soetta is not located in Jakarta, but in Tangerang), the same city in which our campus is located. So on our way to the campus, we got to see around the city. The city (or at least the part that we had went through) still has a lot of vegetation around. The buildings and the houses were spaced out quite a bit with vegetation (be it a grass lawn or a collection of trees) separating them. The most interesting part was seeing how it's like to drive on the right side of the road, instead of on the left (Indonesia drives on the left). I knew from watching movies and other media that this means that the driver is on the left side of the car. What I was only able to really feel then was the bizarre feeling of being in a moving car that is driving on the right.

UTM

We quickly arrived at UTM with our many luggage. We dropped out right outside of the Oscar Peterson Hall, the building where we are supposed to go to pick up our TCard and pass through to Erindale, where our dorm is located. In the hall, we met Adit and Ceka, two of our BIM friends who were there to welcome us. After picking up our TCard and the keycard of our dorm, the four of us plus Aleena, Adit, and Ceka went to our dorm. Obviously, I got a different unit to Azza, Vanya, and Michelle, so I went to my unit and my room with Adit to put my bags and luggages before going out again to have a tour of the university. Before Adit and Ceka showed us around the place, we said goodbye to Aleena.

The UTM campus, discounting the handful of buildings for student residences, is pretty modest in size. There are only about half a dozen of buildings that we will be having a class in (Davis, MN, Deerfield, CCT, Kaneff) while the other buildings are residence buildings or buildings only meant for biology students. It's definitely not smaller than ITB in term of area even after discounting residence buildings which makes up for almost half of the campus, but because there were only a handful of building that we got to use, it certainly felt like so. This is not to say that the campus is bad or anything, to the contrary actually.

All of the buildings are modern and filled with amenities such as free water refill station, places to get food and beverages (this is where the money for our meal plan will be used at), sitting areas (there are a lot of this in each of the buildings in the campus). The campus is somewhat isolated, in the sense that a cafe or some kind of a place to eat is not really a walking distance away, unlike ITB for example who have those right on its doorstep. But I could see why that's not really problem here, because those are already available right there in the campus. During my time in Bandung, me and my friends (or even just me) would usually go to the Upnormal right in the Dago street or the one in Juanda street (that has been closed down late last year, RIP) or the many other places that are available within 1-2 kilometers or so around campus. But here in UTM, all of that can be found within the campus, including the comfortable and aesthetically pleasing areas in which we could sit down and do our work for hours.

We ended the day with eating at Colmans Commons, right in front of the first floor of the Oscar Peterson Hall, where we got our TCard. Among a handful of other menus, they have rice there, and that was one of the menu that we got for ourselves. After we filled our belly, we went back to each of our units and rooms to unpack and ultimately rest for tomorrow's class. It has to be noted that we arrived in Pearson at 14.00 EDT, arrived at UTM around 16.00, and went back to our room after having dinner around 19.00. We did not sleep at all during that time, even though it was nighttime back in Indonesia and thus our internal clock told us to sleep. Aside from the fact that the sun was still shining outside, which I guess fooled our internal clock to some extent, we didn't sleep because we wanted to immediately start sleeping in sync with the local nighttime.

I went back to my room, and after I finished unpacking all of my stuff (there were a lot of them) my roommate arrived. The first time I went to my room with Adit, I only saw his stuff that has been unpacked in his side of the room, so this was the first time I actually got to see him. We actually have been talking for a bit before my arrival. He contacted me via email shortly after the room assignment was sent for our unit back in July. Then we shared our IG and talked there for a bit. He is a cool dude from Saudi Arabia who often visits Indonesia. That's why he knows Bandung when I told him that I attend my university there, which surprised me quite a bit since most foreigners have only heard of Bali. He even showed off to me the fact that he could count up to the ten in Bahasa Indonesia.

All in all it has been a very tiring but exhilarating day (and a half). I am finally here and to me that still feels unreal.