The Martlet

Remember those daydreams, between receiving your letter of acceptance and walking out the door of your parents’ house for the last time, when you would sigh as you imagined university life? Remember eating at the same restaurant for four years so often that you didn’t even need to order anymore but were just handed a plate with chicken fingers and waffle fries; or hanging out with the same people every day until “the guy who peed his pants on frosh week” becomes “your boyfriend/your roommate’s ex-boyfriend”; or walking the same paths with the same familiar gardens until you could name each crack in the sidewalk in the dark on the short stumble home from the same bar you’ve been drinking at for four years?

Neither do I. That’s because nobody dreams of the crushing monotony that eventually comes of living in the same 30.7 acres of centrally-planned self-contained ivory tower for four years.

That’s why students should live down- town. Not just because the rent on campus is extortionate, or because living in close quarters with 17 000 people in block housing is dangerous for your already fragile psyche, but because truly living on your own requires living somewhere that ex- poses you to the outside world.

University living is closed off to the outside enough as it is; with the constant need to keep your ever-smaller nose to the proverbial grindstone, it’s sometimes hard to come up for air and notice the world around you. Living downtown forces that upon you. Every day as you commute, you will see a whole city existing beyond Ring Road, where midterms and essays and toga parties lose a bit of their omnipresence in favour of some of the things that real people like to do.

You’ll find, for example, that outside Ring Road there is more than one food service provider, rather than the Stalinesque uniformity found on campus. There are cafés with art on the walls. Art! Not cell-phone company ads. You’ll discover whole communities that exist even during midterms, putting on concerts, hosting speakers, and hosting parties that don’t involve some variation on “hos” in the theme.

Plus, did you know Victoria is beside the ocean? That’s right! Victoria has beaches and boardwalks and piers and gorgeous views of the Olympic Peninsula across the ocean.

Moving off campus can be intimidating. There are so many areas to choose from, each with their own price points and ben- efits. Fernwood is expensive but extremely vibrant. Gordon Head is within spitting distance of campus but lacks the downtown cache of a more distinct community like James Bay. What they all have in common is something you can’t get on campus: inde- pendence. The very reason so many students leave home to begin with is taken away from them the moment they set down their bags in their residence room.

This semester, as you hike back and forth across campus, imagine life outside the ring. Not just on the other side of it where you have to go to smoke, but way beyond, where UVic is to most people just an institution across town, not the centre of the world.