The University of Ottawa has decided to ban all international university-related travel for the rest of 2020 cancelling all exchange student programs for the fall semester. Students who were set to participate in exchanges in the fall will be offered a number of different alternative options.
The University of Ottawa said on Wednesday that it has launched an international travel registry, mandatory for students and non-academic staff, and suspended operations in Iran amid the spread of COVID-19. University operations in China were suspended back in January.
The more time you spend in a place, the more that it feels like it’s a part of your identity and the harder it will be to break the connections and friendships that you’ve made.
It was the stagnancy, the lack of urgent work to do in addition to the lack of people around me to distract me from the lack of work to do. I was like an ant plucked from its well-oiled colony, placed in a virtually utopian habitat. And it completely and utterly stressed me out.
Distance makes the heart grow fonder, but what’s less known is how much more responsive the clitoris and/or penis can become.
When this Gee-Gee travels, only the finest greet him… and by finest I mean the finest cut out. While I may not have been greeted by the actual Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban ki-Moon while visiting Vienna a few weeks back, just a cardboard cut out, my colleagues and I did get the opportunity of a lifetime to visit and tour international institutions based out of Vienna.
So perhaps I did come to Paris to learn—however, what I have taken out of this experience is much more than what I possibly could have by solely sitting through three-hour lectures every week.
In an effort to reinforce our patriotism, and temporarily make our way back onto Canadian soil, a friend and I decided to purchase tickets from Paris to Arras, a city just eight kilometres east of the memorial. We arrived at Arras station at around 4 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 8 and waited for a taxi to arrive to take us to the memorial. Alas, hours later and after many calls, no taxi came.
Let me be clear—I was raised on chicken and beef kabobs. I’ve never faulted chicken for its ability to satisfy me, but prior to coming to France I never understood the French fascination with raw meats and animals that have no business out of picture books.
Considering my ideal night involves an entire bottle of wine and “Netflix and chilling” solo, I’m clearly no expert on the intricacies of wine drinking. As such, I spent my weekend touring the city of Bordeaux—renowned as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the wine capital of the world—in an attempt to learn a bit more about what exactly goes into my glass.
In search of the migrant reality, I decided to visit a nearby Syrian refugee camp in Paris. Located just outside tourist hotspots, the camp was a stark contrast to what I’d grown accustomed to in my first month. In the middle of the road an entire community was set up. About 60 families, from children to the elderly, were centred around a camp lined with tents and laden with garbage.
The people who drive the cars are just about as fancy as the cars themselves. Everyone here is thin and beautiful. It’s almost perplexing how skinny all of inhabitants manage to stay, despite how rich the food is. I say almost because there are stairs about every 100 metres, so it’s not really that perplexing. Come to France if you want to lose weight eating strictly butter.
“We’re happy to be able to add the field of health, an important focus of research for both our countries,” said U of O president Allan Rock. French President Francois Hollande was present for the announcement at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.
