(Extra)ordinary moments: UBC vignettes I’ll never forget

Chances are you have a photo of cherry blossoms in your camera roll during springtime at UBC. Even if you've watched them bloom for longer than the three seasons that I have, their magic feels renewed every year.

Growing up in both Karachi, Pakistan, and Dubai, UAE, I experienced two main seasons: a pleasant winter I always wished lasted longer, and a fiery summer that had us scrambling indoors—into the welcoming arms of air conditioning.

Most of the trees in our residential gardens in Dubai were evergreen. Only a few turned red and yellow when autumn arrived. I used to march on those fallen leaves to hear their crunch and crackle with every step.

While autumn in Dubai lingered for a little while, spring barely stopped by to say hello. 

This might be why, during my first year in Vancouver, when the trees along Lower Mall erupted into pink, I couldn’t help but pause under them. Why had no one ever told me the trees I passed almost every day were cherry blossoms?

I called my parents from the path outside Place Vanier, where I lived, and angled my phone toward the branches to show them bursts of pink and white—trees they had never seen in person.

“You have to come visit around this time someday,” I told them, with my eyes closed and nose turned up to catch the faint, flowery scent of cherry blossoms. I reached up and felt a petal’s velvety texture between my fingers. 

There are some experiences a video call can’t convey across time and space no matter how much I wish it could. 

Whenever it rains in Dubai, I whip my phone out to capture the misty skyline—because miracles like this don’t happen often.

Summer temperatures usually sit between 38 and 45 C, and even winter rarely dips below 15 C. So when the sky does open up, I step onto my balcony and hold out my hand to feel cool raindrops land on my palms.

Funnily enough, the thought "I wish it wasn't raining" never crossed my mind until I came to Vancouver—or "Raincouver," as the locals call it. 

Rain, it turns out, loses its magic somewhere around the third consecutive grey week.

But constant showers haven’t been the only difference in weather I’ve had to get used to.

One early morning during my first year at UBC, my floormate from Delhi, India—where year-round warm weather is also the norm—urgently knocked on my door and told me to look outside my window. 

A shimmering white blanket covered everything.

I slipped on my puffer jacket, pulled on my beanie, and ran down the hall. “It’s snowing!” I yelled. My friends from the eastern and northern parts of Canada gave me a bemused smile, then went back to folding their laundry and finishing up homework. Snow doesn’t pack the same novelty when you’ve seen it your whole life.

That day, I revelled in the soft, powdery ice shavings that blanketed campus, holding out my hands to catch snowflakes as they fell. I made my first snow angel in the middle of the Place Vanier field. Constructed a lopsided snowman. Threw snowballs at innocent bystanders. 

It only took 18 years and a trip across the globe for me to finally see snow in person, but tiny snowflakes leave large impressions.

Every year since the late 2000s, UBC's Alma Mater Society has closed out the academic year with Block Party, a massive music festival outside the AMS Nest. If you’re familiar with it, would you argue if I called it a rave?

The parties I'd grown up attending in Karachi were small and food-focused: a variety of mithai—rich, milky sweets—passed around on trays, the smell of charred BBQ in the air, and cans of sparkling green Pakola (Pakistan-Cola) waiting to be opened.

Fill up your plate, find someone interesting, start a conversation. That was the usual rhythm.

But Block Party? Food trucks. Loud electronic beats. Six thousand-plus people.

It was the end of my second year, and even after two years of Canadian weather, my body—accustomed to desert heat—still believed that 8 C was cold. The rain didn’t help, either. Everyone who wore short sleeves and summer skirts had my admiration.

I was comfortable in my thermal, hood-on-head, water-resistant jacket, thank you.

Light rain and cold wind don’t matter when you’re in the middle of the mosh pit, though. At some point, my position at the back of the crowd transitioned to one in the middle as more people started to arrive and fill the space up. The boys next to me were climbing on top of each other’s shoulders to get an unobstructed view of the stage. People pressed closer together, swaying back and forth, as the crowd swelled and tightened around me. 

At that point, I was ready to retreat.

So I carved a path through the crowd, squeezing my way forward. I looked back to see the wave of bodies I had been in the middle of just moments ago; I’d lost my friends somewhere in it.

Slightly dishevelled and very damp, I claimed a spot on the knoll, with the Nest behind me and a view of the stage in front. I watched the DJ hurl vanilla-frosted cakes into the audience from a distance.

A Pakola cream soda would have been refreshing at that moment. 

Sometime in 2015, when our blue-nosed propeller plane flew over the wall and into the backyard of an unoccupied house in Karachi, my dad climbed over to the other side to get it back. The wall was maybe seven feet high. I couldn’t touch the top even if I jumped.

Did I ever imagine—about a decade later—I’d be climbing over, not a seven, but a 12-foot-high wall?

Not for a second. But that’s the beauty of UBC’s Storm the Wall: you challenge yourself to do something you never thought you could.  

As the long-distance runner for my team, I ran toward the Sauder building, then looped back toward the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. I raced down the slope toward the Nest, my steps gaining in momentum as the music swelled and cheers rose from supporters along the wall. The earthy smell of mulch became stronger the closer I got. I barely caught my breath before my team and I started to climb.

One of the UBC Recreation staff members told us the best way to get over the wall is to trust your teammates to pull you up. Simply “let yourself be a noodle.”

So, I got as limp as I could and let two of my teammates hoist me up, boosted by two others on the ground. I swung my leg up, rolled over the ledge. Made it.

I was already thinking about pulling the next person up, already focused on the next “to do.” But I wish now that I had paused to savour the view—and the moment—a little longer. 

From my dorm room window, I see a sliver of the horizon over Wreck Beach, framed by trees so tall, they’d tower over the short, heat-resilient neem trees in Karachi and Dubai.

As I write these reflections at my desk, I also grapple with the mystery of time. One moment, I’m moving into my dorm as a new UBC student and the next, I’m at the end of my first year, packing my bag to fly home for the summer—to the warmth of sunlight seeping through our living room windows and onto the shaggy carpet, where my parents, brother, and I play rounds of Yahtzee after dinner. 

How do moments like these pass so quickly?

Outside, cherry blossom trees have traded their pink for green. Nature keeps on moving, changing.

With the end of ephemeral blooms comes the start of summer—it’s the first one that I’ll be spending in Vancouver. Biking along the seawall is one of the things on my to-do list. Slowing down to enjoy it is another.