So where am I now?

This is the question I asked myself several times today as I wandered through the SFU Burnaby campus. I think I went through several buildings, but the all looked the same. They WERE all the same. They were all the same 1960s, Cold War, we're expecting a nuclear bomb to explode overhead at any time now, concrete bomb-shelter bunkers.

Someone kindly pointed out a triangle on the wall inside one building that specified N. There are apparently also E, S, and W. Compass points! I thought it was a warning of some chemicals being stored, although I couldn't remember which chemical N was.

And all of the floor tiles were coming loose. And all the displayed art was monochromatic. And I only saw 2 places to get coffee, and they were from the same company (not Starbucks, oddly).

And the millions of stairs!! This campus is openly hostile to people with handicaps who can't do stairs.

Oh how I longed for my old UofA campus. Where you could give people directions by saying “It's the red brick building” or “It's the building with the ornate pillars” or “It's the building that looks like a turtle” or “It's the big yellow building”. You didn't get lost in a sea of gray concrete and stairs at the UofA, every building has it's own character and charm. (And it helps if you're stumbling home after a few drinks to know where you are by the different buildings. Yep, my place is just a few more steps, around the corner from the blue building... so much easier.)

The SFU Burnaby campus is used by a lot of science fiction TV and Movie shows. Those futuristic places where everyone wears gray, no one wears any colour, and even the most far flung places in the universe have millions of damned STAIRS!

I've heard people will either love or hate the SFU Burnaby campus, no neutral positions are taken. I will go with the latter position.

Wouldn't a map of coffee shops on the SFU campus make sense?

I'm studying a map of the SFU Burnaby map because I will be at a conference there next week – yep, on top of a mountain in the middle of... air, lots of air... we wouldn't want to be distracted by anything interesting now would we?

So I'm looking for a place on campus to sit and have some coffee.

I will be doing a trial run of the route tomorrow morning and, after a long bus ride, I'm going to want some coffee. So I'm looking at various maps from the SFU website – mostly pretty maps, not much useful detail here. I have one map up that has icons for all of the... phones... on campus. Uhuh, I can see students needing phones, those students who don't have cell phones anyway... all 2 of them.

So a useful place on all University campuses to sit and consume coffee while taking in the view is the Student's Union Building (SUB). From a quick search on “Students Union Building” on the SFU website... they don't have one.?!? They are debating whether they need one. Answer: Yes, you do, build one now, join all the other Universities, be normal! So I have to look elsewhere for coffee.

In – or near – a city like Vancouver, wouldn't it make sense to have a map of campus with all of the coffee shops on it? Yes, I am assuming there are such things on the SFU campus. I can't imagine getting a degree without coffee for fuel, I drank mountains of it when I was getting my degree at the UofA.

Instead of the little phone icons, couldn't they replace them with coffee bean icons for all the coffee shops? Wouldn't that be useful?

So I will cross my fingers and go up the mountain tomorrow to see if they have any coffee. Not an expedition I expected to make...