May can be an awesome month to be living in Toronto. Exams wrap up, the temperature rises, classes are (mostly) over, and you can sit outside on your favourite bar’s patio. But for many who live downtown during the school year, May means moving back home as soon as exams end to save some cash. It is a time of serious dread for us suburban refugees.

For those of you blissfully unaware of the outlying regions of the GTA, our fair city is buffered by suburban clone-towns in all directions. To the north are Thornhill, Richmond Hill, Markham, and Newmarket. To the west are Mississauga, Oakville, Milton, and Burlington. To the East is the Pickering-Oshawa corridor, famed around the world for its creative ability to put concrete where no one else would think of. Together, these suburbs accounted for just over three million people in 2006, according to Statistics Canada, and doubtless a fair amount of U of T students.

I myself have recently had to move uptown, from my independent and (reasonably) glamorous life downtown back to the only hell I’ve ever known-Thornhill, a poster-town for suburban excess.

There’s a great deal of culture shock when someone returns to suburban life from an urban existence. Gone is the familiar nightlife, cheap ethnic foods, and the ability to stumble the short way home from a debacherous night at a concert/house party/Dance Cave.

There is no more boho-chic, nor is there even the illusion that anyone is doing anything vaguely hip – and mocking hipsters can be a major source of amusement for anyone who’s never lived south of the 401. Life is replaced with concrete, strip malls and power centers.

All suburbs are essentially the same-carbon-copy houses, lots of streets, and about three things to do. A returning suburban exile has the choice of spending his or her nights in an incredibly thrilling 24-hour Tim Horton’s (where you’re bound to run into at least ten people you knew from high school, three of which you actually ever wanted to see again) or going to the gigantic local multiplex with a parking lot larger than St. George campus to see Spiderman 3-again.

The third option generally enhances the first two, and is typically the most frequently chosen. That is of course, doing incredibly illegal things with illicit substances in your friend’s basement or a nearby park. Nights like this typically culminate in awkward conversations with parents that either end in giggling, confusion or a request by the ‘rents to join in, in an attempt to seem “radical” to their kids.

Escaping to any suburban bar is barely even an option without a lot of planning. There are few, and they often have ridiculous hours – some aren’t even open Friday nights. If you just want to go out with a few friends, suburban bars will almost certainly only have about ten other people in them – the requisite strange older folks, and the occasional very-late twenties people who never actually left the suburbs. You’re certain to be served by a varcicose-veined woman named Flo, Edna, or Christmas who refers to you as “hon” and dresses in a way that reveals to you things that should have been forgotten a long time ago. Unless you invite enough people to fill the bar and make sure that about half of them are designated drivers, it’s not going to be pretty sight.

But the worst shock of returning to the suburbs from downtown has to be the recent light-speed proliferation of Smart!Centres. This development company is responsible for “unenclosed shopping centres”-which is to say, concrete-laden collections of big-box retailers, anchored around a Wal-Mart and ugly-as-sin architecture. These are the sort of places where customers drive between one store and another.

Smart!Centres are popping up in every suburb, ensuring that nothing new or fun will make its way to suburban clone-towns any time soon. But who needs public space, creativity, or parks when you can get shaving cream at half price? This is what I tell myself as I count down the days on my U of T planner, waiting to be drinking on Future’s patio sometime soon.