So the countdown begins..

I have nine days left in Thunder Bay.  My flight to Montreal (via Toronto) leaves at 6am on December 1st. Thank God we are travelling as a pack this time around because my first round of flights to get to Thunder Bay were very long and boring.

This past week has been great. I was house manager with Millie and we had such a good time making meals and bread and cleaning the house it didn't feel like work at all.  My second boss is in Cuba right now and my new boss started last week so I'm also thankful to have successfully avoided the first week mayhem minus one.

The group has spent lots of time this past week preparing for our final party, as a thank you to those we've met while in Thunder Bay.  It's been a pretty quiet week otherwise.. lots of free time and lots of time at the Canada Games complex!! YAY.

Last Sunday we went kickboxing at a jiu jitsu studio with a guy named Matt and his insane children.  We were supposed to have a class this Sunday as well but he had to cancel so we went to a make up class on Tuesday with the rest of his normal students.  It was really sweet to have more people there but the one on Tuesday was less of a workout which was unfortunate.

Yesterday (Saturday) we manned a Salvation Army kettle in shifts.  Jessie, Martin, Julien and I were obviously the best with our beautiful serenading of passersby but I think collectively we raised a lot of money.  It also helped that it was outside of a liquor store. ;)

Today we helped Alexa and her boyfriend move to a house they just bought.  Alexa is our Project Coordinator so she is like our project leader's boss, and although she is in charge of three Katimavik groups in Northern Ontario we know we are her favourite. :)  Her new house is beautiful and they treated us to pizza for lunch as a thank you, but it didn't feel like work.  It's going to be sad to leave without spending more time with people like Alexa.

We have so much packing to do and a lot to get ready for the group we are switching houses with.  Their group has 4 vegetarians so that makes meals much harder to make for our meat loving group and a little bit more expensive, but c'est la vie!  They have the same challenge with all of our allergies.

I have nothing more to report really.  I have really enjoying living here and it has gone by too fast. :(
Quebec shall be a fun adventure.
au revoir
Petra

Photographic Update!

Hello!

A variety of photos - enjoy!

Eric's old bike photo - 72 hours off

crew on the river - 72 hours off

breakfast

Our petite chambre

Hiking up Mt. McKay

Hiking down Mt. McKay

Murder Mystery Night - Sam was the killer.

Sam giving out the love at dogsledding (Novemer 9th)

There were 42 husky-cross dogs (all of whom were completely adorable) and we got to harness them, rope them up and ride in a golf cart which they pulled.  The owner, Paul, bought a few packs of Iditarod Trail dogs and has kept them in prime racing condition.  It was the best way to make up for 3 months of no canine company.

Terry Fox Monument on the clearest day of November

A piece of Lake Superior coast line

plucking a grouse - delicious

I hope this is enough to satisfy all the promises I have made.  I am getting much better at uploading more frequently.  

A small update:

I came home to the Katimavik house a week ago.  My billeting period was %110 great, I could not have been paired with a better family.  Anthea and Scot took my sightseeing, fed me great food, taught me new card games, let me drive their car, took me to get my hair cut and made my brain hurt with intense philosophical conversations.  It was a vacation that was definitely needed.  The sauna with Siggy and friends was excellent and would definitely be a killer warm up after a long day of skiing.  Note to Dad: build sauna.  

On Tuesday the group went dogsledding! see picture above.  As mentioned there were 42 beautiful dogs  who would greet us by jumping up to our chests and whimpering.  Paul is racing this winter down in the states and is in the process of training different teams of dogs. We went on a 5km ride and it was so neat watching them gear up and down the hills.  The dogs at the back would start to pull and twitch at the ropes and get the dogs in front of them fired up and so on up the line of 12 dogs.  Definitely something I will be doing again, and something I highly recommend.

Wednesday we went to play "goalball" at a school in Fort William (which as it turns out.. is NOT the ghetto end of town.)  It was a game invented after WWII when returning veterans who were blind needed games to play.  Two teams of three use a ball (with a bell inside) to score points.  You are blindfolded and put into a ring of rope which helps you orient yourself.  The objective is to roll the ball past the opposing team and to stop any balls rolled to your end of the court.

Fairly simply game right?

Not at all.  Difficult to start out with, but by the time you've played a few games it got a lot easier and your sense of hearing was heightened immensely.  

Friday and Saturday we drove an hour out of town and spent time at Tenkula farms, owned by a woman named Lisa who breeds Tennessee Walking horses.  We stayed the night in her hay barn and the temperature dropped to at least negative 7.  It was fun times!  Snuggling was a mandatory activity on this excursion and we made little hay cabins to sleep in.  The ride was great, Dalandrea's horse and my horse were egging each other on and both of them would not stop jumping.  I think I took flight 6 times during the ride.  Dalandrea fell off, horse riding - not her cup of tea. Turns out they were the only two horse that weren't Tennessee Walkers (whaaaat luck) so their pace isn't as quick.  To compensate they were trotting and jumping all over the freaking place to keep up.  Also, mine had a cut leg, thus lacked the capacity to walk through mud without freaking out.  Hence the jumping. I still had a ridiculously good time.  Finnish pancakes for breakfast!

This week my new boss starts, but unfortunately I won't be spending time at The Arthritis Society. I am house manager again this week, this time with Millie!  Should be fun times, we're making Colombian food as Millie is from Colombia.

oh hey, look at this.

http://www.ted.com/

BYE!

Petra

Whoops!

Forgot to mention!
Sarah's friend Ooysem took our group curling last Monday night.  I seriously enjoyed curling and we are trying to do it again as a group.. but it's hard because it's HUGE here in Tbay.  Here, I'll put a picture up cause I'm GREAT at blogging now.

please check out Michelle's Italy blog, she is hilarious.
http://www.italy-michelle.blogspot.com/
I miss this girl.

okay ta ta !

So Fast

Hello!
Many things have happened since my long post below. Many things. But please understand these things happen fast and then they make me tired so I go to bed instead of blogging about these things.

These things include:
Hiking (up the one mountain Thunder Bay possesses)
Cake Making and birthday celebrations
Attending Shows
Billeting
Making lots of food
Becoming caffeine reliant
Gabe
Halloween
Update on the French

I will try my very hardest to cover EVERYTHING.

Hiking started out with our entire group leaving late. We packed a stupid amount of food and loaded ourselves into the van about 4 times before we finally left.  The first part of the hike was SUPER steep. At one point the mountain was a ski hill with a lift and everything but now it just has crazy steep 4 wheelers tracks all over it.  After the initial altitude gaining hill it's a pretty nice hike, a little bit of scree and a little bit of dirt paths, but for the most part we just wandered all over the mountain.  It is necessary to cover all sides of a mountain this size in order to get a good work out because up and down takes about 1/2 an hour each way.
We ate some lunch at the top and took pictures and made Petra super mom-nervous by going really close to the edge of large cliffs. Thanks guys..
On the way down we literally found ourselves in the cross fire of a game of paintball.. no injuries though.
After our hike we went back to Gale and Volker's house for chilli and we watched the rest of K2, which we started on Thanksgiving. Funny, funny movie. I don't recommend it.

Cakes
Eric (our baby) turned 18 on October 23rd.  I made him a 5 layer chocolate cake from scratch, icing included.  Sam decorated it with gummy bears we stole from Dalandrea.  We got him a sassy fedora also. I love Eric. I will put a picture up. I promise. I'm just not on my own computer right now.

Attending shows. Last Monday we went to a Magic show.  We got free tickets from the Salvation Army.  Really nothing much to say.  Sometimes there's a reason things are free.  Sometimes I should check what age group things are intended for. Magic sucks without cool lights.

We also went to Fierce Light, but I posted that below so check it out!

Billeting.
We had our billet family BBQ last Tuesday. We made a TON of food and accommodated.. way too many people for our little house to handle.  A week before we called in the local paper to promote us; they photographed us and Sam and I did an interview, which was great because the reporter was a fine specimen of a man. 
Basically the idea of billeting is to give you a break from the whole program and everyone you live with, as we are literally packed into that house. (I'm on the bottom bunk these days, Sophie and I switched) 
I started billeting last Friday.
I live with a couple named Anthea and Scot and they are really sweet.  We live 40 minutes out of town.  Anthea and I drive in every morning around 8 because she works at the university as a student advisor (I know, SCORE!) and Scot works at home restoring canoes and building things with his carpenter skills. They have 3 kids who have all left home so I share the top floor with their grumpy 18 year old cat who licks my feet.
This weekend they took me everywhere I haven't been here yet. 

I FINALLY SAW THE TERRY FOX MEMORIAL!! pictures definitely will be up soon, bear with me. (Anthea and Scot don't have wireless)

Then we went to Sleeping Giant park and walked around the cottage area.  People here are in love with their cottages, which they actually call camps. We also ran into lots of deer which are more or less tame. Pictures, I promise! We also went to a little camping/touristy spot near their house called Kekebeka Falls, it was very pretty.

On Saturday night I stayed in town with their daughter who is a 3rd year at Lakehead.  Her and her crazy roommates took me to a Halloween party which I wish I could remember more of.  We didn't stay long. Tonight they are taking me to Kanga Sauna.  It's a Finnish tradition to do group saunas and by the sounds of it a Thunder Bay drinking tradition.  I'll update on this one soon!

Caffeine
I drink coffee, daily.  I drink coffee and I don't have massive anxiety reactions or the desire to DO EVERYTHING WITH LOTS OF EFFICIENCY!  I drink coffee and I like it, and it appears to like me back.  I should probably not blog about this as it has zero point or affect, but I find it strange that I of all people now drink coffee. Okay, I'm over it now. Ignore this.

Gabe.
I came home on Wednesday of last week to find an unfamiliar face in my house.  I said hello to him nonetheless and then reached for a piece of celery which my beautiful house managers Sam and Martin had prepared for their working children. 

There was a lizard on my piece of celery.

Gabe (that's the guy, not the lizard) has a pet gecko.  I can't remember the gecko's name because I kept referring to him as Geico and speaking in an Australian accent to him. He was such a champ. Gabe was part of the program a year ago and lived in our house. He was driving back home to Quebec from Calgary where he had not be successful with finding work.  He had a really cool tattoo of a snake around a half-moon which was symbolic of his ADHD.  Best of luck Gabe, I hope you find work.

Last night was Halloween and Eric called me.  He's staying out of town too but in the other direction; he lives on a farm with a girl named Marcel who taught us how to make bread when we first got here.  Her and her boyfriend have a few animals but mostly they grow food to sell and contribute to the slow food trend that is growing quickly around the area.  Eric skinned a deer this weekend. I was extremely jealous. UNTIL...
Scot went out and shot a grouse and let me pluck it! I really don't know how to describe how strange it felt to be pulling feathers out of a bird that was still warm in my hands but had no tail feathers or head.  Pictoral evidence will come for this too, you bet!

French
is going well for the most part.  I'm wondering how fluent one can possibly get when all they say is "Ce quoi ________ au francais?"
Progress is progress though, but for the sake of measuring goals I'll say I'm at a 3 out of 5 on understanding and a 2 out of 5 with reiteration.


Okay, pictures soon!
Bye
Petra

ps. Comment section below does not require an account! Say hello to me! I want to hear from you!
pps. Hi Mum :)

Shakin' their Sassafrass

Tonight I went to see a film called "Fierce Light".  It was pretty sweet. I could maybe explain it but it might just be nicer for you to watch the teasers. I would really like to see the first part of the trilogy too, and the third comes out in 2012.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqhyBdb9JKA

do enjoy.
Petra

Weekend of WHAT?

For Thanksgiving we took time off.  Because it is a stat holiday it was the only time we could extend our 48 hours off time period to a 72 hours off.  Considering we've been cooped up in this little 4 bedroom house for the last 5 weeks it was nice to get a break.

SO! here's a great story for you, little Rossland.

We decided we didn't want to spend our coveted $20/week allowance on an expensive hotel in town when we could have free accommodation at the house while in town.  So we did a little research :)
We found an International backpackers hostel about 40 minutes outside of the city. We booked ourselves some rooms and had plans set by Monday of the previous week.

Saturday morning Jessie and Eric and I went out and got various body parts pierced. bellybutton, ear and eyebrow.  We make a nice set of silver triplets.  Dalandrea and Millie also got piercings that morning and ever since then we have had saltwater cleaning parties in the bathroom which gets quite cramped and odd.  We are sure not to double dip, we're champs.

After this exciting experience six of us jumped in a taxi and cleared out of 32 Dalton.  Sophie, Antoine, Eric, Jessie, Sam, and me. We are definitely the six that give the group energy so the house must have been quite dull without us.

After a brief stop thanks to our incompetent taxi driver we arrived at the Thunder Bay International Hostel.
Seriously here.. quite a site. (I'll have pics up soon)
Outside on the road were three big sign posts with literally hundreds of different directional signs to cities all over the world.
We went inside and met the owner who appeared to be a nice woman in her senior years.  She takes all around the place and then out to the building where we stayed.  It's hard to describe a place like this one.  One of those sort of.. dodgy looking on the outside, musty smelling on the inside, not quite sure what's on the carpet, no matching furniture, 8000 encyclopedias stacked in the corner, multiple afghans lying all over the place, cats running free range, knitted place mats, doors that don't lock- let alone close, bathtub painted green, lots of old newspaper clippings all over the walls kind of places.
Not two seconds after we'd begun to relax a nice looking old man (don't be fooled though, stay tuned) tells us that he is taking us to the dump. I had not exchanged a handshake with this man, he did not know me from a hole in the ground and yet all six of us jumped in his mini van and off we went.
To the dump.
This man, whose name is Lloyd, is a big fan of taking photos.. of art.. So he had us create art, at the dump, out of dump materials.  This experience included us picking the dump, and creating a smiley face... yes, interesting. It gets better yet.
We took photos at the dump and someone (probably Lloyd) found an unsuspecting stranger to take a photo of us at the dump with Lloyd.

Picture one shows a nice picture of our friendly group. Please note man in plaid shirt with hand around Eric's waist. Clearly visible to any passersby, any person viewing this picture. Nice and appropriate, PG13 if you please.

Now take a look at picture numero deux.

Lloyd's hand is missing from Eric's waist.  

Expressing great concern and angst Eric came up to me after our little photo shoot and says in a strained voice "The old man just grabbed my ass!"

Sorry Eric. But this is even funnier than the time Scott got arrested.. (will come in future blog posts)  The fact that this event has been captured with pictoral evidence just makes the entire event so much funnier!

Our dump experience was amusing and I met a nice dog and scored a sweet jaguar kitten backpack circa 1997.  I gave it a wash when we got home even though it was still in the packaging but I haven't taken it out on the town yet.. 

Lloyd got us to take many things from the dump back to his home, which made us question what else from that house was from the dump... mmhmmm..

Upon arriving back at our home away from home away from home we had to kindly explain to the perverted old man that this was our time OFF from the program and that we weren't expected to be doing any physical labour or activities we didn't find entertaining over the next 24 hours.  

He got very offended.  He spent the next 4 hours editing his new photos and "catchin's up" with all his pals on facebook.  We left and took the bikes the hostel provided for a little spin around the countryside.  Good thing these bikes weren't any better than the sh*t bikes the Katima-house has otherwise we might have actually had an efficient trip.. and that would never do.  I got stuck with a 12 year old boy's green bike, possessing very sloppy full suspension and a lack of the ability to shift out of first gear.  Ontario may be flat.. but it is still necessary to pedal in order to get from A to B so by the time our little journey was over my legs were fully exhausted. For the last leg of our journey though Eric fixed my bike with a piece of bark so that it would stay on the second gear wheel.  We found an amazing old railway bridge and a cute little stretch of river. Good thing we took pictures! I'll have them up soon!

Back at "home" we tried our hardest to avoid our new crazy homestay.  After eating some dinner and wasting some time around the house we went back to our building hoping Lloyd would be in bed.  

He wasn't.

After having previously thought that our adventures of the day were the way horror stories begin I was a little creeped out that he was going to be hanging out in his makeshift office five feet from the door I was supposed to be sleeping behind.  

(I may be exaggerating here a bit. This man did not threaten me in any way nor make my stay uncomfortable.  I am not intent on cutting him and his ways down, but the entire weekend was such a peculiar experience and he played such a role in it I feel the need to expand on each small detail.  Had I been a backpacker or someone staying at this hostel if I had been a road traveller I'm sure I would have enjoyed his company a lot more.  But as it was our only time off and about on our own we were all hoping to have the privacy of a place out of the way.  He is an incredibly interesting man - a die hard Catholic who writes essays by the thousands.  He has had Cambodian boat people stay with him, has four kids of his own and has adopted another two.  He is able to stay incredibly devoted to his faith and still have an open mind to accept life's difference [we noted specifically, homosexuality] and keep his various human service projects non-religious. He has had quite an interesting life and him and his wife have traveller all over the world, as we could tell by their hundreds of photo albums.)

Okay back to the juice. He was serious deranged. 

That evening we met a guy named Cosmo (or so he said) who was a crazy man who worked for bell and  swore a lot.  He convinced us that Lloyd and Willa were millionaires and told us their whole property history.  He could be right.. they pick the dump after all.  Cosmo compares Lloyd and Willa to his grandparents, a statement which makes me question just how screwed up his grandparents must be - I know my grandparents are NOTHING LIKE THOSE CRAZY PEOPLE!

The hostel had probably close to 250 dvds and after critically reviewing all of them we decided on a great option... The Lion King 1 and 1/2.  Beautiful.

The next day we ditched the crowd around 11 and took the bikes (this time I got one with curved handle bars and back-pedal breaks) and jumped across the highway to where a new four lane highway was in construction.  We came to a half-completed bridge and scrambled down the gully and followed the little river upstream for.. what felt like way farther than it actually was.  We rock hopped most of the way up to a gorgeous waterfall.  Antoine found us a sweet spot of rock to eat lunch on.  October 3 and all of us were in shorts and t-shirts and none of us brought sweaters. And they say Northern Ontario is cold.. what?

We spent the whole day on the river, half swimming and skipping around the rocks and bathing in the sun.  Definitely time well spent.

When we got back to the hostel we painted our own sign post and of course added our signatures and hometowns. Lloyd was very grumpy that we were leaving. 

Our adventure came to an end with Lloyd cornering Eric into given out his email address (a move which would eventually lead to a friend request on facebook which was promptly accepted, thoroughly creeped and then deleted) Eric is now more conscious of pedophiles and we have taught him how to make up a fake email address on the spot.

When we got back to Thunder Bay Jessie, Eric and I went skating (it took a tad bit of convincing) and then biked home the long way which ended up with us getting lost.. which was chill.. UNTIL SOME ASSHOLE DROVE BY AND THREW A POTATO AT JESSIE!!! Thunder Bay youth have serious issues.

Overall a completed unplanned, spontaneous and fabulous weekend.

BUUUUUUT it wasn't over.

Because on Monday we went to Gale and Volker's house for Thanksgiving dinner.  Gale and Volker are more of Jessie's work partners from the food bank. I guess everyone cool wants to work there.

Volker is the funniest and most brutal man I have ever met.  I think he hit me four times that night.  He is a mountaineer so I kept thinking of my Dad and his late climbing partner Steve.. same sort of humour exchanged.

For dinner we had turkey, goose and quail. I'm getting used to all the wild game eaten in Ontario.  As we are deprived of ice cream in the Katima-house we literally fought over all the ice cream they had.  So embarrassing. hahah.

We do summer camp like things and wash dishes in rotations, so that's how we came to be cleaning their kitchen at 9:30pm.

(As a side note: we also make our own ketchup, mayonnaise, salad dressing, bread, yogourt, granola, fajitas, and more or less everything else under the sun)

It was really nice to be in someone else's home for Thanksgiving.  I know we all missed family and friends over the weekend but no one was really out of sorts and we all had a great time.

"Wherever you go, there you are" Confucious

Petra

The worst blogger in all the land.

I'll start with apologies. I won't promise that this will never happen again but I will promise to try my very hardest to never allow such a gap in between posts again. There, it's in writing.

Now for some juice.

I'll start with where I left off.

My house manager week finished on Sunday the 3rd.  Halfway through the week I made cinnamon buns to celebrate the fact that we were out of our "Probation Period" which means nothing to you and next to nothing to me so don't worry about the details.

On the weekend we caught the tail end of a cultural film festival.  One of our planned activities was to watch two of these films so we all sat through the most painful movie of the Finnish peoples most common historical.. thing... It was not a fabulous time, but all the Finnish people in the crowd loved it so.. well whatever.  Thunder Bay has the largest population of Finnish people outside of Finland.  So the last names here.. whew, fun times trying to pronounce those!  The next night however we had free time so Jessie, Eric, Sophie and I all went back and watched a movie on the history of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. It was definitely time well spent; we got to talk with the writer/producer afterwards.  I'm not sure who won people's choice award but from the 5 films I saw he definitely deserved it. Wish you could have seen it Cydster.

That same weekend we went to the Food Bank where Jessie works on weekdays and helped out a food drive.  While it is nice to think that loving people donate the food from their home they don't want it's actually really nothing like that.
Big corporate companies like Safeway "donate" all their just about to expire food and Walmart donates 8,000 dented cans they can no longer legally sell to the public.  There are a lot of other companies that have sponsors who specifically want their dollars to go to charity so we'd get boxes full of peanut butter and pasta.  It's an easy way for a lot of companies to write off some taxes while still being able to say they donated.
Nonetheless we filled nearly 350, 24 pack beer boxes full of food. I think it filled like 7 and a bit pallets. Just ridiculous.  It was fun times. lunch provided.

Monday was our welcome party where all of our workpartners and neighbours and potential billet families came to see our tiny house and postage stamp sized backyard and oggle over how we work together and size us up by our profiles.  It went well considering our advertising sucked.

Tuesday we hopped the fence to a closed catholic school and played soccer and other fun games.  There is one school across the street from us that has been closed down and one down the road that has been closed down. Remind anyone of the Kootenays?

The week continued with me and Charlene going to lots of restaurants all over town to deliver caterer's packages for the ladies night I'm working on for February.  I've seen more of Tbay from her little CRV than from the Katimavik van.. how sad is that?

STILL HAVEN'T BEEN TO THE TERRY FOX MEMORIAL!!!! SO RIDICULOUS!!!! UGH!!!

On Thursday we went to Lakehead Uni for a presentation from the Stephen Lewis foundation which is funding girls education in Malawi.  If it hadn't been a huge sales pitch I'm sure it would have been great. We signed up for it because it was advertised as African women living with AIDS talking about their experiences with a lost generation. It's a great foundation by the sounds of it but I would rather have been sleeping that night.

That's it for this one!
aaaawwwwl my love :)
Petra