Our New Home

University of Waterloo School of Pharmacy, by Thomas Dimson

In January, we left Vancouver and headed east to Kitchener-Waterloo. Here, I started a position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo's new School of Pharmacy. Though the University is in the sister city of Waterloo (Kitchener and Waterloo are, for all intents and purposes, the same city), the School of Pharmacy was built in the downtown area of Kitchener. An imposing structure housed within a warehouse district, the images you see on the outside of the building are from an old textbook of medicinal plants. I often hear it referred to as the 'flower building'.

In our personal lives, we're temporarily renting a century home from a lovely family on sabbatical in Toulouse, France near downtown Kitchener. We're alternatively frozen by the drafts and charmed by the character. When we first got here we swore we would never buy an old house, but now, as we're realizing that the best areas of the KW region are made up of old homes, it turns out that we may have to get used to those drafts. But hey, the upside is that we get to keep some of the charm as well.

Our first impressions are that life here is good. And sometimes it's not. The weather is snowy but it's sunny. The city is small but it's dynamic. The people seem conservative but they're friendly. Everything is close but you need a car. Essentially, KW is good but it's not Vancouver.

So, as we head into spring (please god, let us be heading into spring), we're hoping to find our earlier optimism. And who knows? Maybe this time next year I'll be saying that Vancouver is good, but it's not KW.