Outpost 302, signing off.

Well, Montreal was fun. It tried its best to make itself hated, what with freezing rain and high winds, but I still enjoyed the city, and would like to visit again in summer. Due to incliment weather and a faulty Memory card, there aren't a lot of photos of it, but I'll try to get those up soon enough. It all looks like a very chilly version of southern France in old Quebec, and the rest looks like a nice, not overly large, French city. You immidiately notice you are in France-Canada, not Canada-France. Everything is written bilingually, but unlike in Ontario, where the English on top is the same size as the french on the bottom, the Quebecouis make no such pretense and make the French about size 12 and the English about size 5. I had Poutine, which is very good and very filling, if you don't mind getting fat very fast. I walked up Mount Royal, which is actually covered in snow, showing that Montreal is delicately balanced on the dew point between rain and snow at this time of year, the difference really is only about 50 meters. Visited a very nice hostel, and can only recommend "L'Auberge Alternative" for the price, the awesome common room and free tea. Can't recommend it for the crazy lady in her 70ies who was apparently a muslim-chaser and lived full-time at the hostel, but I guess you can't blame the hostel for that.

And boy is the 7.5 hour drive from Montreal (aka, Mun-Tree-awl, which is how the Ontario people pronounce it, I think they're trying to be funny) dull. Prairie, clumps of wood, Prairie, a farm...hey, check it out, this goes on for several hours. Ontario has a lot of room, but sadly not a lot of landscape to fill that room with, and what is there is, in winter, singularily ugly. Except for the lakes. Oh yes, the lakes, vast shimmering expanses of sky and water, they really pull the landscape together.

But, nothing saves the towns. One of the reasons the way back took so long (except for the prerequisite traffic jam in Toronto) was that we detoured through several towns for stops. And as much as I love cities, and love the open countryside, I really hate towns. And Ontario gave me ample material to hate. Among the wonderful places we visited were
Kirkland (notable for the worst roads I encountered in Canada thus far)
Cornwall (apparently notable for its XXL truckstop and not much else)
Iroquois (full of white trash, fittingly)
Brockville (home of the 1000 island park, and possibly the sauce as well)
Kingston (notable for containing many sensible people doing the only sensible thing, leaving Kingston via bus)
Scarborough (already part of Toronto, but still 1.5 hours from city center, full of appartment blocks and highways)

The towns just kind of drift into and out of each other in a never-ending urban trickle. The lesson here is probably that I hate sprawl. My ideal city has a neat edge, and beyond that only landscape that is vertically challenging, not vertically challenged. I guess this is what, in my eyes, reifies Vienna, as it doesn't have a lot of noticable sprawl (there might be a yet hiding in there). Some people might disagree with me (looking at you, George), but while Vienna can't compete with the size of the GTA, it can compete with the population numbers in the respective urban core, and it manages them more efficiently and densely, in my opinion. If Toronto were Vienna, Biedermannsdorf would have been swallowed by faceless strip malls and highway junctions long ago. In this, I agree with Margaret Atwood, Toronto is a VM, a vile Metropolis, but only because it mirrors the typical US city so much.

But in any case, it is now 11:20, and in a scant 7 hours and 20 minutes I'm leaving Canuckistan behind for a few weeks, leaving for mountains, good food, and properly priced beer that I can buy at a supermarket.

A nice vacation, in my opinion. See you there, I hope.

Heureka!

-Which is Greek and means "give me a towel, quickly!"

Well, I figured something out last night. I've been feeling rather morose and stressed out the last week, and there was a mounting feeling of discomfort I'd been dragging around with me for the whole last month. I boiled it down, and after a ridiculously small amount of honest soul-searching, it hit me.

My Thesis.

Yes, my thesis is what I am afraid of. The realization of that was so utter and so straightforward it kind of boggled my mind. But yes, I'm stressed out about it. Why? Well, I have a reading list, I have some preliminary work, I have a lot of notes, but I didn't know what exactly to write on. So I resolved to narrow down my choices, scrap my old research questions, and basically start a new page in and on the face of my writer's block. I had that slated for the next couple of weeks, maybe compare with the notes I left in Austria, but that apparently wasn't necessary.

Because I had an epiphany.

Epiphany: An epiphany (from the ancient Greek ἐπιφάνεια, epiphaneia, "manifestation, striking appearance") is the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something.

I was walking home from my last lecture for this semester, only today, and as I was just plodding along through Queen's park, with my thoughts on nothing in particular, suddenly, A THESIS APPEARS! I had a realization, a revelation, and I wrote it down immediately, ultimately expecting it to be bogus upon considering it again at home. But it works, somehow. I have a vague idea what book ties into what part, and I actually know what exactly I want to write now. Now all I have to do is write it!

This, my friends, is seriously good news for me, and it verily did brighten my day considerably. I doesn't save me from another 300 pages of soul-destroying urban geography for the test on Monday, but it did give me something I can work on, finally. The new sense of direction is dizzying, and I hope it lasts, because I need it to last for, oh, 80+ A4 pages of rough draft.

It also means I'll have to freight myself down with a few extra books. Oh well, I'm still too amazed with how positively this influenced my general mood that I won't bother with cold realism right now.

Some observations...

Well, the finals are still rolling, but with only one test left next Monday, I do have some breathing room, so here a short little update so you know what I've been up to.

Over the weeks, I have narrowed down my lingering disdain for the house to my own room, and in that mostly the virtual lack and placement of windows. I have one, as you know, so all my activities necessarily are near that window, as my desk is there. What little light it provides is partially swallowed by the dark brick wall opposite the window, as the distance between our house and the next is only about 3 meters. in that narrow space is wrenched the fire exit, which is my second problem, as the smallness of the room forces me to have the window open most of the time, or die of heatstroke (yes, even now that the daily average is in the single digits, the room is still too hot) and since everyone on the top floors uses the fire exit as a convenient back door, I'm constantly having people walk by my window. That rattles me, and annoys me.

Soooooo, I asked Coop to tell me if any other rooms become vacant, and I might consider moving. The main argument against that is that I actually like the people I live with pretty much, and elsewhere might be worse. But it might also be better! So let's see how that pans out, maybe I'll stay here for the rest of my stay, maybe not.

What else has been happening? I tried to get some christmas shopping done, but seeing how I usually get my christmas ideas by close observation of my family from October to December, I'm in a bit of a bind this year, and I hope I think of SOMETHING because I only have about one week of uninterrupted shopping left. What happens then?

Oh, I'm going to Quebec for a week.

Yes, trip time! I'll be leaving for Montreal on the 13th, after my last test, and return the 19th, fly home on the 20th, arrive on Austria on the 21st. Kinda cramped, my schedule. And while I am sure that there will be opportunities for some shopping while I visit the crazy french-Canadians, I will also have other things to do, I hope. Well, I will, I'm not going alone, but with some people from the exchange who, like me, missed the original Quebec trip.

We're planning on going to Quebec city as well, and we were going via car. As far as I know my license is not valid in Canada, which is both good and bad. Bad because I was supposed to drive, good because I don't want to drive. Not in wintry conditions, not in a country where I have never driven a car before, not a rental car, not from Montreal to Quebec City. There will have to be another way, and if the others rent a car, I am taking the bus on my own. Yes, I do not trust them enough, and I've had enough highway hijinx during the Huron trip to last me for another 4 months.

Also, I figured out that instead of giving you another long article about what Toronto is, I'll end today's installment with one of the few things which it is not: Ein österreichisches Bundesland. It is, however, a province of China, a district of Singapore, a prefecture of Japan, a subdivision of Russia, a state of Germany and several other things. There really are a LOT of foreigners.

Canada vs. Austria, Round 1: FIGHT!

Okay, so there are a lot of stereotypes about Canada floating around in Europe, and I thought I'd comment on the ones I know. Please take note though that I am writing these answers from the perspective of somebody living in downtown Toronto. Also the list is incomplete, but if I wait until I finish this entire thing, it will both be too long and people will start complaining that I never update. Again, yes, I know.

1: There are maple trees everywhere.

True. The things are all over the place downtown. The city has at least a dozen of every common member of the Aceraceae family in every district, and at least one or two of the more obscure ones from Asia, heavily interspersed with Platanus trees. This leads to the parks currently being covered in every expected and some very unexpected (violet?) colour of the fall. This also leads me to comment that Toronto has no parks. They have green lots, true, and some nice public gardens, but no parks. Why? My personal definition of a proper park is “standing on one edge of the park, one cannot make out the other edge, be it for distance, terrain or vegetation.” Queen's Park is one of the biggest in the city, and even though it's north-south size is pretty impressive, it's so criss-crossed by major streets it's not really one park. But anyway, maple trees, lots of em, woo! Go Leafs! Oh, right, Leafs, this leads us to -

2: Everybody is all about Hockey.

This is true for Canada by far and large, but I feel the Torontonians have it hard. Their home team is one of the oldest, the best paid and one of the winningest (that is SO a word) teams in North American hockey...or at least it was. The Maple Leafs are currently suffering the longest victory drought of any major hockey team in Canada. The poor dears. But otherwise, yes, Canadians get worked up about hockey, far more than the average Austrian about football (yes, it is that impressive) which leads me to-

3: Canadians are really friendly.

This is both true and false. Let me explain. Being used to the general low-level non-personal animosity the average Viennese has for the world at large and everyone in it, I was taken aback by how helpful and friendly everyone is here. At first I was deeply suspicious of people because of that until, after meeting the sixth or seventh Canadian outside of a service setting, I realized that they really are THAT friendly, which is almost creepy at times. It's not even that superficial “American Friendliness©” that makes some salespeople in the US seem like somebody laminated that smile onto their unblinking visages, it feels at least partially sincere. After living here for three months, I'm actually starting to genuinely like the lunatics I'm billeted with.
So Canadians are very friendly. Until they aren't anymore. I'm casually going to point over my shoulder at the Vancouver “hockey riots” for a second. Trust me, Toronto had a field day because of that. But now on to my point. Toronto Canadians, when angry, get incredibly verbally aggressive incredibly fast. It's like an American swear-word vocabulary, backed by a British temper. I've seen two immaculately dressed businessmen in the financial district getting in a face-to-face shouting match (apparently because they bumped into each other while busy texting on their Blackberries) that used words I would not even throw at my worst enemies. The F-word is only the start, accusations of deviant sexual behaviour in either parent a small stepping stone. The volume was pretty impressive too, because I overheard every word across a four-lane road, while wearing headphones.

But at the same time, random strangers jumped in and tried to calm them both down. Canada.

4: Canadians are paragons of political correctness.

Oh jeez, are they ever. Toronto is fiercly proud of being one of the most cosmopolitan cities on earth, and living downtown, I have to agree it is. In the first week of being here, I managed to extend my “list of countries whose citizens I have met personally” by Mexico, China (about a dozen times), Taiwan, Singapore (about a hundred times, seriously, are people left in Singapore?), Ghana, Colombia and Iran. And that was before going to the Student Exchange Orientation. This, paradoxically, does not lead to widespread stereotyping and suspicion, but it leads to everybody being very friendly, and when you want to label a street in Mandarin Chinese and English, the district council will pay for it, and maverick politicians who paint feverish conspiracies about foreigners taking over are ignored and overruled instead of deadlocking the debate for decades and making a mockery of the legal process by ignoring ruling from the supreme court. How odd is that?

Ahem. It also leads to all white people being very nervous about possibly being inadvertently racist. They have signs on the subways, buses and in major public places (usually worn, and covered in stickers, attesting to their age) that warn you about verbal racism being an infringement of humans rights, and so on. Canadians in general are pretty law-abiding, and coupling that with the utterly dazzling array of pro-civil and anti-racist campaigns going on at any time, I get the feeling they're hiding something...oh right, the First Nations. Hm. Asides from that, it feels like the big-brother vision of PC-enforcement sometimes. To give a crass example, if I walked up to a random person, kneed them in the genitals and called them an old word for a plantation worker from the American South, the fine for what I said would be a lot higher than for what I did. No joke. Speaking of crime -

5. There is virtually no crime.

In the last two months, there were about half a dozen murders, numerous muggings, break-ins, one kidnapping and several instances of random gang violence in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) and yes, there were many instances of gta in the GTA. Harhar. So no, Michael Moore's crime-free Canada, should it exist, is not here. And to hope that a urban region of nearly 4 million people would be crime-free would also have been a bit naive, no? Still, the crime rate is very, very low for a North American city, and the third-lowest in the area after Montreal and Ottawa, which are both a lot smaller. While the KIND of murder is different from the average in the United States, the number of murders per year makes Toronto an average Northern American city in that respect.

But seeing how the next two cities of comparable size are Detroit and Chicago, Toronto by comparison is a gated community. Of which there are a bunch too, in fact. There is one down the street from where I am, in the middle of the Annex, the second richest residential area in the downtown area. Some people don't feel safe unless their AC checks the fresh air for ID before letting it in, apparently.

6. The ancient “Canada and the US are the same” argument.

Well, in some respects, the situation of Canada vs. the US is a bit like Austria vs. Germany. Mostly in the respect that Canadians are far more concerned with differentiating themselves from the USA than people from the USA are giving a damn about the existence of Canada, unless they live near the border. And when they do, they see Canada as a place where they can buy cheap drugs, legal and otherwise. Other than that, Toronto feels a lot like New York and London had a child, and that child is going through a mid-teen identity crisis. On the one hand, everybody loves not being Americans, and generally likes Europe and the UK, but every diplomatic contact with the UK is seen as a possible avenue for covert political subversion. At the same time everyone loves being North American, and to hang out with the USA, but every attempt at closer ties to the US is seen as cultural hegemony in the making. Schizophrenic, but feels familiar somehow.

This debate, of course, leaves out the Quebecois, who are close enough to Toronto to be noticable. They are, at least while in Toronto, the most and least french people in the world at the same time. From an Ontario perspective, the most widely felt step in their struggle for independence from the rest of Canada in general, and Ontario in particular, seems to have been allowing its citizens to buy beer in super markets instead of purpose-built cornerstores, which always sort of feel like a prohibition era bootlegging operation set up shop in an abandoned pharmacy. Ontario has one of the highest taxes on alcohol and tobacco, and one of the strictest law systems for the regulation of the same. I blame the proximity of Pennsylvania.

[To be continued once finals are over. Nasty finals.]

Happy happy? Go to hell.

I'm feeling under the weather today. I have no idea why, as there is nothing tangible affecting my health or my mood, least of which the weather, which has been (except for most of yesterday) been another two weeks of sunshine. Maybe the lack of bad weather is making me grumpy, you never know.

This is what it basically still looks like, though the photo is a week old, and the tree has lost considerable amounts of leaves since then.

More of that here.

Yes, still looking pretty, but at the moment, I couldn't care less. You ever have those days when you wish that everybody just left you the hell alone? I'm having that today. Normally that would mean me retreating into my room and being happy to ignore the world outside for a few hours. Somehow, I can't quite do that here. It just doesn't feel like home yet, I guess, still feels like I live in a hotel.

Oh well, tomorrow is a new day, and I just might feel like finishing the way-too-long post about Toronto and living here that I started yesterday. Do stay tuned.

Later.

It has been a while...

*blows dust off blog*
*coughing fit*

Oh-kay, I suck at blogging. Or at least I suck at uploading photos. A month after the trip, here is the Blue Mountain photodump, without commentary, because that would take even longer.

Tell me if this doesn't work, Google+ has emasculated my formerly working Picasa albums into drooling automatons. I know it may not occur to Google, but I just so happen to want to post a link to my album, not share it with one of over 600 different possible configurations of my "circles". Thank you social media for making me be old before I actually age. Anway...

Aha!

Well, there we are, photographical evidence of the bandit who keeps climbing the fire exit in the middle of the night! Caught red-handed (they don't have paws, they have these weird, furry people hands) the perp then...

...ignored me completely and just kept climbing around out there. Well, they do get kind of large, this one is about 1.5 times the size of a common house cat, though at this time of year they're eve fatter than usual. The reluctance of people to properly dispose of garbage because it's cold and the raccoons eating more because it's cold go well together. Almost symbiosis. And here is a little teaser of the Lake Huron Hike, just so you don't think I made the whole trip up. I've uploaded 300 photos I still had on my camera to the PC now, and will be sorting them out, uploading them to the net, and then commenting them, this takes time, and time is what you'll give me.

Or, well, no photos, which would suck.

Later!

Well lookit that

My cardreader is back. It cleverly hid itself under the packaging for my cellphone charger. I'll try and get some of the Blue Mountain photos online later today (tonight?) for your viewing pleasure. Before that, a photo, not by me, that is very dear to my heart for obvious reasons.

I call it "Man in Nature, Blue. #1"

Things that go jump in the night.

Sooo, we have ourselves a situation. The house is, according to what came out during the house meeting, infested with fleas. Bummer. Several people, including me, haven't noticed anything, thankfully, despite hanging out with the cat a lot, so what is becoming increasingly likely is that the fleas came in from elsewhere. We DO have a family of raccoons living under our balcony, and we do have a lot of squirrels that are so bold that we had to chase one out of the kitchen last week, so there are some possible infection vectors other than the poor cat.

There is, thankfully, consensus that we do not want to get rid of the cat. BUT if we report to Coop that there are fleas in the house, and that we would only do if the situation got so bad that we would need to fumigate, they would likely argue that the cat has to go regardless. That would cause some bad blood for sure.

As it stands, we got some flea spray and hosed down all the furniture in the common areas, closed those off for now and took everything we could outside before spraying it, and the cat got two flea-baths already and is wearing a collar. The only step we could still take would be to put collars on ourselves...hm...no. Nono, bad idea.

In any case, I hope that this works, otherwise we are looking at Operation: Overkill as the final scenario, which would mean flea bombs. Which would mean clearing all foodstuff out of the house, opening all doors, applying the bombs and then leaving the house for at least 48 hours. For half the house population that would mean moving to hotels for the time, because we're not exactly in a position to go to our parent's places.

Excitement and adventure in the not-so-high north. Oh, also, everybody is really paranoid all of a sudden. Like, staring at people when they scratch themselves paranoid. This does open up an all-out riot as a possible final scenario, which I shall now name as Operation: Lord of the Fleas, and thankfully that is about as likely as Operation: Flea King Takeover, but still, everyone is a little on edge right now.

Oh well, keep calm and carry on. I have an itch. Oh my god.

To set our house in order pt. 2

Well, don't I feel accomplished. This house is a DIY dream come true (or nightmare, depending on your opinion on DIY) and even though I never was in the good old Bundesheer, I do adhere to the "Pioniercredo" which, according to somebody I know, goes: "There is hardly anything that cannot be fixed with an application of WD40 and a good whack with a wrench." Alternatively, refer to this flowchart:
So I managed to fix a bunch of creaky doors, repaired my window, drank a lot of coffee, read some more books for my literature classes and that was pretty much my Saturday.

As with any DIY day, it also included injuries, as I managed to slam my own fingers in the window I was fixing. Vicious victorian counter-weight windows.

Related note: It's raining cats and dogs outside, I'm bored as hell, and my cardreader seems to have hidden itself in an alternative dimension.

Hell, it's about time.

So, the internet is back, for parts of the house at least, and I am happy to say that I am included in those parts, obviously.

What it looks like is this: We have a new modem now BUT, for some odd reason we already have a wireless modem, which is hooked up to ANOTHER modem, which is the one that broke. So to say it in the words of the Rogers repair guy: "You took your network, and you stuck it into another network, and the result is that you got two networks, none of which are working right. That aint right." But since the security keys for the new modem are held by Campus-Coop, who were of course closed for Thanksgiving, we have to tunnel to the Internet via the old modem, which uses the new modem as both a crutch to reach the internet, and a very effective downstream brake. Seriously, I can't be bothered to try and fix that now. /nerdtalk

Other than that, Thanksgiving weekend was BORING. Everyone went back home, except for me and English girl from Scotland and Scottish girl from England, who apparently had her mother visit her. I have seen nobody all weekend, so yeah, the test for staying home alone went through and I can say that having the house to myself is more than just boring, it's a chore. Speaking of chores, nobody did theirs this week, so the house looks like a warzone in places, mostly the bathrooms. But the fire alarm went off twice in the last hour, which tells me that at least Megan is home again, and cooking.

My suspicions on another thing were confirmed: There ARE two cats at the house. Franco, the dude living on my floor, borrowed his mom's cat because he has a mouse problem in his room. So do the two teenagers from across the hall, and Rebecca across from me as well...I have no mice. I searched the room up and down and there is no sign or trail. This worries me. Why are the mice avoiding my room, out of all rooms? Better get a chem-sniffer. /conspiracy

Finally, the weather is looking good these days in Toronto, one perfect cloudless day after the other, with the Indian summer in full swing outside. Which leaves me with a weird sensory disparity. It looks like autuum out there, it smells like autuum out there (rotting leaves and wet mulch never smelled so good, I tell you) but it just doesn't feel like it. I mean, I have my window open 24/7 because the comrades at soviet Coop turned on the central heating stroke midnight on October 3rd, as commanded by the five year plan of Comrade Campus, but even at night it's barely necessary to put on a sweater right now. Nice, I gotta say.

So nice, in fact, that I went for a walk on Friday, down to Danford Square, which is the heart of downtown, to sort out my mobile phone contract. From there, I thought, hey, might as well walk down to the lake. Went down there, cursed myself for not bringing my camera, went for a two hour walk, and then back. All in all a four hour journey with some breaks for lunch (roast beef sandwhiches by the lake, jewish Delikatessen chain stores ftw) and cigarettes. Back home, asked where I'd been all day, my story was met with amazement, and the fact that I willingly walk even if the journey is more than 4 city blocks has earned me the title of most outdoorsy person in the house. Canadian Murica, fuck yeah.

Info:

Für alle Daheimgebliebenen und andere Gäste, das Internet bei uns im Haus ist kaputt, darum werd ich die nächsten Tage eher weniger online sein, also nicht wundern.

To everyone who stayed at home and all other guests, the Internet at our house broke, so I wont be online much the next couple of days, so don't worry.

Algonquin!

Since words cannot describe it, I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Algonquin

Shifting on the fly.

Well, autuum has apparently caught a case of stage fright and retreated, the last two days were at ~24°. But before I hear the usual calvacade of "Oh, you have it so good, I'd love to have summer, it's cold and rainy back here, I had to wrestle a polar bear to get into the supermarket" let me tell you something:

GO.
TO.
HELL.

Humidity in downtown Toronto is currently near tropical levels. I can't blink without breaking a sweat, and thanks to a permanent overcast, the nights aren't cooler by one degree. Yesterday night was actually hotter than the entire last day. Yes, 25°. I can't sleep, I can't work, I can't do much except hope that somebody will drop a giant dehumidifier from space and either suck all the moisture out of the air or hit us square on and put us out of our misery.

Pictures! Like, oh my god, pictures!

To silence my critics for a few moments, here is the first photo-dump. I didn't realize I was on for grocery duty yesterday, so instead of updating anything, I just went to my lecture, and then on a three-hour tour-de-force to get the weekly shopping done for 17 people. That amounts to about 26 large shopping bags, which we (me and Andy) had to transport from the generic faceless megastore to our house via cab. After that, I ate, and went to bed. Hooray for exciting days.

Anyway, link.

House Pictures

Oh, and, because I have to highlight this:





Mother of god...

To the North!

Well, I booked the trip start of this week, so I am going. Algonquin National Park, that is, a three day trip. After the, well, lame day trip last weekend, I'm sort of apprehensive about the whole thing, but eh, it's hard to fuck up a two-day canoe trip, right? Right.

Why I was hestiant to take the trip is, well, my grandfather died this week. That, to make an understatement, sucks. The funeral is tomorrow, and nobody will be surprised when I say that I wont be there, right? Right. So I thought that sitting at home and feeling sad wont help me, or him, in any way, so I'm going to go ahead with the trip.

I promise there'll be lots of fotos on Monday, and then I'll get off my lazy ass and post the ones I took so far. Seem good? Hope so.

All the best to the people back home, and I'll watch out for bears.

Man vs. Cuisine

Okay, I know I am in North America right now, but still it surprised me how everything food related is really really expensive, safe for fastfood, which is really really cheap.

6$ Canadian (So ~4.30€) buys a chicken burger with a side of fries and a can of soda. The burger itself was rather a surprise already, as it was easily three times the size of my clenched fist. With fresh lettuce, and a slice of mushy tomato so large it could not have been wrought by something as mundane as sunlight and water. The chicken was actually the least interesting part, as it seemed, altogether, to actually only be chicken with breadcrumbs over it, and not some grand genetic experiment. The biggest surprise though, were the fries. They call them "farmer's fries" but in my opinion most farmers would not eat them on account of them being too greasy and wholesome.

The experience is very tasty, and in the end it's very much like having just eaten a very nourishing brick. Americans complain that there are so few products in Europe. Well, there are, we usually divide stuff into expensive but healthy, cheap but not so bad, and really cheap and unhealthy. Unless we're talking about pastries, which get more unhealthy the more expensive they get. But here, there are at least 20 different kinds of nearly everything, and all of them are somehow not quite healthy.

And who really NEEDS skimmed milk? The answer is actually pretty easy.

To set our house in order

Well, we just had our first Co-op meeting. Pretty fun, actually, and so very idealistic. If 50% of what we planned holds up, we should be fine.

So yes, it was mostly about chores and who buys/cleans what, and in the end we all agreed that we'd need to form a comittee to divide up the work. Several of us saw the irony in that.

Also: The two teenagers living on my floor are basically useless. I mean useless as in "lacking basic survival skills" useless. They have "first time away from home" as a rather good excuse, but beyond that, they really need to learn some basic housekeeping skills. As those words are coming from me, you should be able to guess how bad it is. And I finally got to meet the other people living at the house, not just the ones whom I randomly bumped into in the kitchen or on the stairs. There's actually four guys at the house now, including me, one of which shares the room with his sister. That is, in my opinion, sort of odd. But hey, their room, their problem. Speaking of the house, I'll try to get off my ass tomorrow and actually do the whole house/neighbourhood photo tour tomorrow.

Why I didn't do that today? Eh, well. Bad news from back home, let us sum it up like that. My grandfather is in hospital, and that worries me, of course. I'm worried, and that amplified my homesickness many times. Yes, I'm homesick. Very much so. It's nothing bad, but I really do feel kind of down overall today. It's that feeling that I shouldn't be here, wasting my time, but actually at home doing...well...doing nothing. And that's just it. I can do nothing, neither here nor at home, it's just a generally weird feeling that I'm somehow letting my family down, even though I know that it isn't like that to them. And because of that, the city outside feels less awesome and new, but more big, empty and strange. Oh look at me, all angsty.

Tomorrow though, classes start, and I'll be forced to deal with all kinds of problems and course schedules and assignments, so I'll have less time for all that.

But still, the worry remains.

Pic Dump Day 1-2

Here ya go, some impressions from Day 1 - 2 in Canada. More photos to come after I finally shook off the jetlag. My body is pretty persistent in its insistance that it's currently 23:18, not 17:18.

Das Picasa-Albumen

On and on

Yes, well, today is try #2 to get a bank account, now that all university application problems have been sorted out on their side, and now that I have a Canadian phone plan. Danke, Christoph, das Handy funktioniert super!

Met some of the other residents yesterday, decided to go "somewhere", ended up sitting in the common room and drinking beer. Welp, I officially am the oldest in the house, by a one year margin. Decided to celebrate my elder status by getting smashed with everyone else.

And today: Bank account, then CIE Orientation.

More things to consider:

- Some of the other tenants are actually in their middle twenties too, I feel reassured immediately.

- The walls in this house are typically American (i.e. very thin) even though it's a Victorian house, which means that I know three things now:

1. Whoever lives down the hall has a really terrible taste in music. If you can call 2-hour loops of repetitive super-commericalized gangsta-rap music. (/oldman)
2.Somebody on this floor likes to sing in the shower, and has a great blues voice
3.Somebody on the first floor has very very noisy sex. Seriously, when I got home, I thought I'd walked in the set of a porn film.

Curiouser and curiouser. Except for "Passionate Patty" who just annoyed the hell out of me. Sweetheart, it's great you got sex, but I didn't need to hear it while trying to sleep at 2am. Besides the fact that being forced to listen to your moans of passion is slightly embarrassing, you also got quite the volume level.

Adventures in auto-immunity.

Well, that was messed up.

I reported in to Cumberland house to basically tell them I'm there, and they tell me I have to go get my ID tomorrow morning, pay the insurance, etc. Again, everyone really nice, especially once they realize I'm a foreigner. The lady even remarked that I can take my time with the insurance because I seem to be a "healthy young man". Irony to follow.

So I take a stroll about campus, wanting to look at my college, just get to know the grounds. Last night's downpour left everything pretty cold and actually quite pleasant, so it's nice to be out. Then I get to Queen's park. Suddenly, I'm seing double, literally. My eyes swell up and start running, my vision blurs, and my head spins a little. At the same time I'm having this little fit, a gang of engineering freshmen is herded into the park by a squad of sophomore guides and, here I kid you not, lined up next to an equestarian statue of George the 5th and made to kiss, one by one, the horse's bronze ballsack. All the while hollering like freaks, and being painted lavender. It was like Lord of the Flies vs. every single college flick from the 90ies.

Exiting this surreal scene, I stagger through the park, looking probably more like a pothead than any actual pothead, and I realize that I am lost. There I was. Alone in Toronto. Plenty of cash, no idea where Victoria College was. I didn't even know they hazed people that hard at U of T. So I tried to decipher the college map I got earlier, and started to lurch off, back towards what I think is home.

I tell you now, that was the most undeserved walk of shame I have ever undertaken. With red, puffy eyes, I managed to get lost twice and stagger through about 15 groups of my future fellow students. Paranoia may be a deciding factor here, but I bet they all thought I was stoned. Which would bother me considerably less had I been, at least then it would have been worth it. Luckily, the veil of tears in my eyes blocked all but the most withering stares (Lady, your kids probably would not even have noticed me had you not glared me to a crisp like that) and I finally make it home, to a house filled with giggling freshmen. Man, talk about embarrassing.

So yeah, I sat on the floor of my bed-less room for three hours, watching movies on my laptop and waiting for the swelling to subside. When I finally feel like a human being again, I go out onto the porch to smoke, and meet the guy who lives in the room next to mine. We chat, and I find out that of the 12 inhabitants of the house, only 3 are guys. And to give you an idea of what it's like here, the two girls on my floor are both 17.

I am 9 years their senior.

That actually made me laugh, both inside and out. I'm a red-eyed creep shacking up with a bunch of minors.

Leo Valenta, cheap, but not as cheap as your freshmen.

P.S: OhgodohgodwhathaveIbecome?!

Moving in

Well, talk about culture shock. Everything's open on a Sunday. Except banks.

The people from Campus-coop actually had their office open today, and yes, I got my keys. Buuut, the rooms been refurbished and there aint no bed in it. Well, oops. They had me booked to a different room, since the bed will be in by tomorrow night, but I already paid for the hostel, so stay there I shall. The campus is quiet, green and weirdly clean. Also, it's infested by hundreds of incredibly cute black squirrels which are about as shy as a pampered housecat. They look cute, but they're though little bastards, most of them have scars and look like little furry gangbangers when you view them up close. The house looks like something from a Charles Dickens book, and my room, sans bed, is really really tiny, but it'll do just fine. Well, one problem down, 98 to go. Next up: Where do I have to go tomorrow?

Other than that: It's humid. THE HUMIDITY OF IT ALL. It's nearly tropical in my opinion. But ya, sitting outside on the patio at the hostel, it's bearable.

First Steps

Well I made it. I'm in Canada. Toronto. Well, Missassagua (How DO you spell that) to be precise. Didn't seem to me I'd make it. To the hotel that is.

The journey lasted a total of 17 instead of the 14 hours promised by British Airways, mostly because of a holdover of more than an hour at Heathrow because there was something wrong with one of the hydraulic pumps in one of the engines and it had to be replaced, etc.

Just so my luck that I was stuck right next to the wing, in the middle of a very friendly Egyptian family with one of the stranger toddlers I met so far. An absolute angel when he was allowed to sit on the floor in front of his seat and quiet the entire flight, he turned into a hysterical, wailing tyrant from the moment and for as long as he had to put his seatbelt on. So takeoff and landing were...interesting. It's amazing how a toddler can scream at twice the human pain threshold despite the obvious physical impossibility of such a feat. Oh well.

After landing and going through customs and immigration (which took a grand total of 20 minutes, faster than security at Heathrow and didn't leave me feeling less safe than before)it was 21:00, and I of course didn't reach anyone at the Campus-Coop office, and they hadn't left me an email. So I sat there, sweating (it's ridiculously hot and humid right now) with no place to stay, and a bleeding nose (my sinuses dried up during the flight and a tiny vein decided to rupture when I got out of the climate-controlled bastion of the arrival area) feeling kinda miserable. So I thought "well, either time to cry or time to sort it out". As a wise sage told me yesterday, getting shit done abroad is easier because you JUST HAVE TO. So I decided to seek help.

And here it began, my pleasant surprise of puking rainbows and floating little angel-kittens. Everybody was tripping over themselves to help the sweaty, disshelved Austrian, from the elderly couple at the traveler-aid station, who phoned seven hotels to see if there was room, to the girl from the Rogers exchange student bureau who started calling her friends to see if anyone would take in two lost exchange students (I met a mexican dude with the exact same problem, sans nosebleed) she just met at the airport.

Well, long story short, between bank holiday monday (how could I overlook that?) and a national exhibition, Toronto is as booked out as a national library. Me and Edgar finally found one last hotel which took in people, the best western Airport hotel. 2 single rooms left, 100$ a night. So yeah, one Taxi ride and one "At this point I'd take on a midget in mortal combat to be allowed to sleep on the doorstep" look when told the price later, I now have a room. And thanks to the girl at the helpdesk, I got a hostel until Tuesday when the Campus-coop people will hopefully staff their office again, lest I visit my unholy wrath upon them.

I actually took a bunch of photos already, a few of the room to see if the camera survived the trip. The only other ones seeming worthwile would have been at Heathrow, but as we were vaguely told that "taking pictures of security personell and equipment" is strictly forbidden, and there were grim looking gentlemen with flak jackets and submachineguns at every corner, I didn't feel compelled. Seriously, Terminal 5 looked like some sort of luxury prison with all the armed guards.

But oh well. More posts when I find something to write about. Sleep now.