This weekend I had the lovely task of working on a programming project for a software engineering course. What's even more
fun is that it had to be done on campus because the course requires proprietary software that's only installed in a certain computer lab. For the record, this is one of my pet peeves when a course requires students to use a tool that's only available on campus, and the tool can't be accessed remotely by computer. It means I can't work on an assignment from home.
In either case, working on campus on the weekend is extra bad because nothing is open on campus. There's no decent places to get food on campus, and if you don't have a car, it's a greater pain to actually get food as you have to travel off campus. Bus service on the weekend is intermittent at best as well.
So Sunday 8pm, I finally get a chunk of my software to talk to a neighbouring computer properly using CORBA (don't ask). I'm extremely hungry at this point, and I have a craving for Tim Horton's, so I go to the nearest Tim Horton's.
Normally when I think of Tim Horton's, I think of your stereotypical Canadian wearing plaid sitting around sipping coffee, reading a newspaper, and perhaps debating politics with some old guy. This should be the case as Tim Horton's is one of our country's greatest institutions.
When I arrived at Tim Horton's, I looked around and thought, "My God, it's all Asians!" It's 8pm which is NOT the peak time to be getting food, and the place is full of Asian students hanging out and doing their homework. It's wierd because I've never seen anything quite like it. While I was eating, I was able to brush up a little bit of my Mandarin as I listened in on a number of conversations being carried out in that language. I think the best sentence I heard was from the table next to me, "Wo jue de zhe assembly code bu hao," which translates to, "I think this assembly code isn't good." It was a bunch of guys studying assembly programming (programming language used for microchips and microcontrollers) for CSC 230 probably.
Anyways, I didn't know that Tim Horton's had become the hip place to be if you're Asian. Clearly, I haven't been notified by the powers above, and I have adjusted my meeting places as appropriate j/k. I've been looking for Asians in all the wrong places

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