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.