Piecing Together The City

So I’ve recently arrived in Canada for my year abroad and for me one of the most important things to get sorted (after all the admin stuff) is to start to piece the city where I’m going to be living together in my head.

By piecing together the city what I mean is the way that as you start to get more used to a new city it becomes pieced together in your mind. For example how the university is situated in location to the nearest grocery store and then how that’s located in relation to the main shopping area and the mall.

I’m not sure if I’m just misremembering but it seems as if it’s harder to piece together the layout of a Canadian city than the city I go to uni in back in the UK. It could partially be because I haven’t fully explored all of the city yet. I think there’s also a part of it that’s harder for me to piece the city together because it’s just different from the UK! Definitely the roads are wider than they are in the UK. Canadian cities – a lot like American cities – are laid out in a grid system, this makes it quite easy to navigate.

On Friday a couple of friends and me had decided we want to go to Wendy’s for dinner (we don’t have Wendy’s in the UK so this is exciting to us!). However we’d assumed that Wendy’s was quite far away and given we’d had a long day we weren’t sure about walking that far. But it turned out that the nearest Wendy’s was only a couple of minutes further a long from Walmart which we’d been going to a lot since we’d arrived!

I don’t know if this is a general thing with cities in Canada but here it seems as if the Downtown area is mainly full of independent stores. The chain stores are mainly in the mall and on the street surrounding the mall. This is an interesting change from UK cities where chain stores are increasingly pushing the independent stores out of business and away from the Downtown/City Centre areas.

Also, I have now located the comic store which I am obviously very pleased about!