le plus petit chatton

One day Jessie and I were at work when Martin and Sophie came to visit.

They brought a cat.

They said they found the little animal behind a snow shovel outside the Centre des Arts where they work.  No tags, no tattoos.

I said "Let's call him (insert stupid name I've already forgotten here)"

and Sophie says, "No, his name is Bâtard, we've been calling him that all day.  He'll get confused if we change it."

Bâtard means Bastard in English, and I'm sure that now that you know this you're thinking it is a quite obvious translation.  We're about 60% sure Bâtard was a male cat.

Bâtard is a super friendly cat who likes to have his face scratched and enjoys various meats and dairy products, two qualities of most felines in general.  He is in no way agressive and appeared to be in a permanent state of calm one might associate with the smoking of marijuana, had he been a homosapien.

We discovered these facts when Martin and Sophie brought him home from work that evening.  He wouldn't leave them alone, apparently.

Antoine is allergic to cats though, and sort of had a strong urge to kick the precious feline, so we kept Bâtard in the garage for a little while.  Then we decided that cats we designed by our creator/evolution to withstand the elements of the out of doors, and so we let him go in our backyard.  Sam and I went to the post office and watched Bâtard walk down the street in the opposite direction.

One would assume this is the end of Bâtard the grey cat, but that is not so.

The next morning as we were eating breakfast we could hear a very distinct meowing coming from inside our house; and although Julian is rather famous for his ultra-realistic animal impersonations, he was on the other side of the house.  After checking the general exterior of our vicinity we opened the door to our basement and a small kitten was sitting on the steps looking up at us like we were superior beings.  Hello, Bâtard.

We put him outside.

Not three minutes later we found him in our basement again, looking homeless and affectionate.

We played this game for about 20 minutes before we came to the conclusion there would have to be different measures executed in order to rid ourselves from this bastard cat we'd acquired.   There is an open pipe from inside our basement and the little chatton would crawl through it to come see his new friends.

That afternoon we were heading out to play games in the snow like small, hyperactive children so we took Bâtard with us.  Sophie brought some ham to guide the clingy feline out from under our porch.  She took him back to the Centre des Arts and left some more ham to deter him from his love of stalking.

We walked over to the highschool and played a game of snow soccer, which I don't recommend doing when the most recent snowfall was more than three weeks prior.  The snow fully tried to fracture our ribs, I know it.

We split up afterwards, some going for coffee and others going home.  Sophie, Jessie, Martin and others were walking through the trails behind the field after coffee and Sophie claimed to hear more meowing.  The when they rounded the corner they saw Bâtard again, sitting in the middle of a bridge.

Does anyone remember that song from elementary school "The Cat Came Back"?? Because if you do I hope you've been playing it as a theme song for the duration of this post.

That was actually the last we saw of Bâtard the grey cat with the attachment problem.

But he started a trend for homeless/lost cats everywhere.

The very next day a smelly ginger cat who enjoyed our warm house came for a visit.  He was not very friendly and really just wanted to take advantage of our house and eat our food, sort of like a really annoying, distant relative.  Jessie had to run at him at high speeds to evict him from our house.

Sophie, cat whisperer.

The con artist, Bâtard.

Eric, with his fabulous one piece and Bâtard.

Bâtard, munching on some jambon

Small town giving snuggles to the cutest cat in the world.

Sam, pretending Bâtard couldn't fend for himself.

Chat numer deux, Sam named him Simba.  He didn't stay very long.

Numbero Deux - a life in a day, a day in a year

Go.

This is part two.  Part two includes beautiful things like:

1. Trois-Rivieres
2. Victoriaville
3. Dancing
4. Veganism and the quest for less
5. A day of survival
6. Montreal, round one
7. Musée

Trois Rivieres is 20 minutes from Nicolet and on the way to Nicolet from Montreal in early December we dropped off the TR group at their new home, an apartment above a chinese restaurant.  They were previously in Saskatchewan and know how to raise a little hell.  We like them.  We like their challenges.

Within two weeks of settling in they challenged us to a friendly snowball fight on an idle Saturday, dinner included.  It was a great game, not much on the bloodthirsty side of things but competition is healthy at any level.  They had to leave early as road conditions were rough and Katima-vans are widely known for their dainty ways of (not) plowing through snow and ice.   It's a marvel more of us aren't killed from these things.
We knew their challenges would persist.. they figured they were evenly matched; however, we knew our wit and fitness would outsmart and outrun them.

For New Year's day our program leaders got on the phone and organized a cluster shin dig.  In a sort of my-mom-will-call-your-mom way we all knew what was happening, and it was happening in our house.

The Trois-Rivieres group had the seasonally appropriate and brilliantly festive idea to have a Junkyard Wars style competition - a homemade toboggan race.  We had preparatory time and a loose set of rules, and although neither of our groups knew our third allied force from a hole in the ground we suspected they may have a certain amount of jazz up their sleeves.

Victoriaville.  A group so loud they are quiet, so dynamic they are bored of each other, so exuberant and wild they emulate self confidence and unity, bound together through what may be described as either destiny or the miracle of randomity, we met them on New Year's eve day and they proved more than worthy of stoking our fires.  They also had an average height of 5 foot 10".

We spent the day as 30 rambunctious kids in a house of moderate size, playing games, making delicious food, and when outdoors, showing them around our petite ville.  They fit in nicely.

I'm doing this thing where I upload photos. It seems to be going nicely.

Continuing..

New Year's Eve we had some good, clean fun at home with a dance party and sparkling apple juice.  Until 12.  Then we were free reign until curfew, the time of which I'm not going to unveil because I feel like being difficult and secretive. Also, I'm a tad embarrassed.  About half our group in total went to Vestige (a bar we've taken to calling The Flinstone Bar, as a direct result of the interior appearance and cave-dweller-like bar goers) and shook up the dance floor.  We had zero competition, because young people in Nicolet don't know how to move off their Flinstone stools.

All too soon it was over and our house was a mess and there were unclaimed possessions and articles of clothing *cough,  Sébastien* from people we'd known for a little under 24 hours.  If that day were a movie I would have given it lots of stars and seen it at least twice in theatres.  Happy New Year, cluster.

Over the next few days we did a haphazard style resolution meeting, throwing out ideas whenever time struck acceptable.  There were two girls from Victoriaville who became vegan in the past few months and of course our meal plans for the party had had to accommodate them.  A few days after New Year's our group decided we should give the dusty bat in the corner a swing.  None of us have ever been strictly vegetarian, let alone vegan, and as this adventure we're on constantly entertains the ideas of becoming more adaptable and trying new things, we agreed to try vegetarianism for a week.  We're on day 5 tomorrow and it's been nothing short of unnoticeable, understandably enough.  Sam and Dalandrea have done an excellent job making delicious food, sans viande.  We haven't been giving each other daily vegetarian tips or statistics or anything but we've all refrained from consuming meat this week. Food for thought.  

Yummy bean soup in the making.

What's your take on Survivor?  Yea, you know the one I mean.. that television show that's been around forever that your parents disapprove of; about people who live on some mythical island who have to do things to stay on this apparently very desirable piece of land, and watch their backs in case they get "voted" off.  I think I just told you my take on it, but I'm going to give you a better version to form opinions on now.

I guess I'll call it..

Survivor Katimavik....  extremely original and creative name there Petra..

Names aside! This day was a gongshow, quite literally. 

First I awaken to a distant sound of clanging.  I assume it to be a part of my dream, the plot of which I obviously cannot remember anymore.  I fall back asleep only to have my door busted in the next moment and take into recognition a metal kitchen bowl.  Oh no.  Soon there are three more pots and the distant clanging noise becomes a very loud and present clanging noise which is accompanied by Dalandrea's early morning screech of words I was not alert enough to grasp the meaning of.  

It was 8 am on a Saturday. Cool.

Not cool enough.  

Our first challenge is for breakfast and is called "Morning Swim".. mettre sur votre maillot de bain..

Picture 8 semi-naked teenagers standing on each others toes in the early morning sun of a quaint little French town somewhere in Quebec.  

NOW MAKE IT A REALITY.  Because that's what we did!

The last member of the two groups to stay standing on the ice won their group a top quality breakfast.  My losing group (no shame, ladies and gents) was given one orange between four of us and some rice crispies.  Good morning, weekend.

For the rest of the day one would have found us at our usual riverside field playing chuck the penguin (an adaptation of chuck the chicken.. anyone?) a toboggan race to fill a bowl with water, playing sled dog - pulling group members up a hill, a dizzy izzy obstacle course, and an ice sculpting contest.  My team brought home the gold in the end, and our stylish medals were forged from foil of tin to recognize our devotion to surviving.

Okay, so it obviously wasn't as scripted or fake-risky as real Survivor, but I think we give the word a way better name.  Plus, we'd look so much better on TV, and our group dynamics rock out loud compared to theirs.  Our team name - the bilinguals.  I was thrilled to be included in said group name.

Which brings me, quite happily I might add, to Montreal.

Day one, wake up early, hop in twelve passenger van on loan from other group, fall asleep on partners shoulder, wake up, sing a few songs, arrive in Montreal.

Step two. Cloudy.  Not going to see much from Mount Royal viewpoint.  Next thing on the list, sledding.  

We spent several hours tugging inner tubes up a hill and twirling down the little chutes.  When we tired of such enjoyable child's play we went for a wander down the road until we stumbled upon the beautiful Basilica.

Hello Basilica.

Hello Massive Organ.

 These photos certainly don't do it any justice but it was an amazing place to be in, each footstep echoing and the lines of beautiful wooden pews empty, save a few visitors like us.

That evening we went out for dinner as a group to a restaurant called Nil Bleu, to try Ethiopian food.  (No, I'm not being sarcastic.)

Despite common belief, there is actually food in Ethiopia.  Their diet appears to consist of mainly meat and legumes, with little fruits or vegetables as one might assume the soil in Ethiopian is not fertile enough for the growing of crops.  It was a great time - we ate with our hands and the food was served on platters for four with a flat bread/tortilla as a utensil.

We spent the evening in Julian's brother's art gallery office, most of us only to sleep.  Martin took several of us off on a hunt for a shisha bar which, it turns out, was right back near the restaurant we ate at.. only a stretch of about 4 km.  We made it in time to turn around and search for a coffee shop.. not enough time to enjoy shisha as it should be was our deal breaker, though it was great to walk around and see the shops.

Our second day in Montreal we went to the biosphere, the engineering work of genius for the 1967 Expo.  The museum was focusing on a sustainability theme and we spent our time looking at the exhibition they had on "reusable fashion".  There were 16 pieces designed to make a statement about consumer waste and global issues.  link here http://www.ec.gc.ca/biosphere/default.asp?lang=En&n=8BCED24D-1 It was called ONE - Outfits from a New Era. Very interesting, we all really enjoyed it.

This outfit was made from bullet canisters.  All the info was about the war in Iraq, it was my favourite.

After that we had one last stop, this time in Old Montreal.  Down by the docks is Point-a-Calliere, and the museum there is amazing.  I've now been there twice; my parents took me and my brother there 7 years ago when we were visiting friends.  The entire museum is underground and actually goes under the street.  It shows the foundations of early Montreal and all the history behind the native settlers vs the new world pioneers.

Little Nicolet welcomed us home with a light sugar coat of snow and the reminder that we had to return to work the next day.  Bringing me to my last point is the musée, where I spent every weekday learning more french and touching more artifacts I don't understand the value of.  I'll be sad when my turn for house manager comes because I enjoy being at the museum very much.

Last week Jessie, Sophie and I tried out Mandala at the museum. The word Mandala is derived from Sanskrit and means "circle".  In both Hinduism and Buddhism Mandala is practiced and has spiritual and ritual purpose, as either a form of meditation or as sandpainting to focus attention on importance religious aspects.  In tongue of North American man, we really enjoyed making circles and shapes with different coloured sand by using little metal funnels. 

Apres le weekend.. Montreal round two and a tribute to...

I like quotes.

Don't wait. The time will never be just right.Napoleon Hill 

Petra

Numero Uno

Hi,

I'll just start slow, and use self restraint.

That's what Jack said to Jill when they went up that stupidly dangerous hill; but I've got more support than Jack had, so if/when I fall down a hill (I'm pretty good on hills though, I have coordination) I'll have lots of people catching me on the way.

Enough metaphors.  This post won't bring you, the reader, up to speed with me.  I don't do things television style though, so you'll have a nice solid ending with all sorts of great morals and life lessons, and possibly fireworks.

On the 18th of December we put on our boots pretty early for a Saturday and trucked off to the Centres des Arts to help out with a food drive.  I got paired with two guys who had the goofiest toques on the planet and kept hitting each other.  Their names were Alladar and Jacques.  They stuffed me into the backseat of their car with four boxes of food and offered me cigarettes and told me in broken English that I would be the one to carry the Christmas present because I was much cuter than they were.  Then we took off from the icy parking lot at lightning speed and almost hit a helpless, dumb squirrel.  I told them small pieces of info about myself, in French, and the one driving almost took out a garbage can when he looked back at me.  "YOU TALKING FRENCH?"
Hah, my God, they were so funny, they acted more like teenagers than I do.  But when we arrived at our destination of a top floor apartment, they turned into mindful, calm people who spoke slowly and wished the woman of the house Joyeux Noel while gently kissing her on both cheeks.  When they dropped me off at the Centre des Arts they gave me bear hugs and gave me double kisses also.  I suggested in what might be described as a kind, holiday tone, that they have a Joyeux Noel and they laughed and said "Why don't you have a Joyeux Noel!!"  That has been the craziest 15 minutes of my life in little Nicolet, thus far. (Besides Sam's speeding fiend of a boyfriend..)

Before or after that, one of the two, the day doesn't really matter, we went out of town a ways and walked along a beautiful snowy boardwalk to a viewpoint of the St. Laurence.  It wasn't a very clear day but we did take some group shots, just for the sake of it.  The area is a protected bird sanctuary; the forests are all untouched and the road doesn't go right out to the river. There was no noise.

Martin and Eric bought their hideous, wonderful one piece ski suits at the Thrift store while they were house managers together, a $3 investment for each of them.  It was an interesting week when they were in charge, every meal had the addition of food colouring in some portion.  Blue mashed potatoes anyone?

My last day of work was the 22nd, but I didn't go because I chose instead to have a ridiculous head cold matched with a throbbing head ache and as a result slept for 17 hours straight on my top bunk.  Then I got up, did some laundry and then slept for another 12 hours.  After waking from my state of semi-coma I thought it would be a great time to partially lose my voice and become a coughing, grumpy mess.

During my hibernation, the rest of the group thought it would be a great time (or rather, it was on our schedule) to have Winter Olympics, Katima-style.  They ventured into our snowy outdoors and made snowmen and threw spherical chunks of snow at one another and had a jolly, Pre-25th time.

We didn't do much that evening, and the next day being the 24th was a suuuper looong sleep in day.  I was cured of 95% of all illnesses when I got up and in pretty fine form for the rest of the day. Antoine put half a turkey in our piece-of-crap oven at 8am and by 7pm that evening it was a cooked to a tasty perfection.  Just took 11 hours.  Many thanks to his parents for the turkey, our budget wouldn't have allowed for a turkey that week because of our New Year's Eve plans (in future post).  We all made some part of Christmas dinner and had to dress pretty because Valerie, our program leader, loves pretty people and despises sweatpants and sports bras.

Just whipping up a cake, no big.

At 11pm seven of us went out to midnight mass at the church and as it was mostly anglophones, save Martin and Valerie, we had to wait for obvious sit-down, stand-up, get-on-your-knees-and-pray cues from the other churchgoers in order to look like regular people.  Being a Quebecois church it was Roman Catholic and extravagant.  The building is shaped for optimal audio quality and each pew has a speaker.  This was a pretty monumental event for me as I've really only been inside churches to take pictures and see people get married or attend Girl Guides during earlier years of life.  Needless to say, I didn't understand one word of the sermon and could only sing along with Silent Night, but it was a fabulous experience anyways, and a way of doing Christmas I've never tried.

Joyeux Noel! On the morning of the 25th we opened presents and ate delicious food and had a dance party in our kitchen.  At 12pm we got into that famous white Katimavik van and drove out to our french teacher's family's farm.  The house had an indoor pool and hottub and a huge living area where everyone ate food, played dominoes (mexican trains!) and spoke loudly. It was the perfect afternoon.  Marie Douval, our french teacher, was born in Romania and her parents took her and her siblings travelling as kids.  I'm not entirely sure what her first language is or how many she knows, but she's pretty excellent at teaching us French!

The 26th was our boy Scott's birthday.  For a nineteen year old to be completely happy on his birthday, we discovered, he needs - a cake composed of three doughnuts, hot dogs and fries for dinner, and winning a game of football.  We figured the physical activity would counter the sugar induced hyperactive state we knew Scotty would adopt.  Antoine had Scott for secret santa the night before and bought him a football, because the only thing Scott loves more than watching football is playing football. So we went down to our riverside field (previously and since used for events such as Trois-Rivieres vs Nicolet snowball fight, chuck the penguin, and homemade toboggan race katimaa-cluster style.. stay tuned) and kicked around the old pigskin for a while.  Can anyone tell me if I can use pigskin in this sentence?  Scott's team brought home gold so he was a happy, legal-in-all-provinces, boy.

Young Creechan, opening his football.

The next three days consisted of badminton at the Police Academy gym, a hilarious movie filmed in Montreal called Filiere 13 (highly recommended!) and French games, which are apparently helping our knowledge of this confusing language, but seem to just bring out our competitive energy more than anything.  We had a visitor on our games night, a previous katimavictim from down the road.  He had a nice set of locks and a full beard and this matched with some excellent handstand skills made poor Martin quite envious.  The most enjoyable part of the evening was watching them turn beet red, upside-down and smiling.

We also painted the daycare Eric and Julian work at during the week, Gripette.  The man who showed up to give us directions was much more interested in going snowmobiling that afternoon than putting his 110% into painting, so we had a full 6 hours on painting under our belts by the end of the day.  It's hard to say if it looks better than it did before, but painting sure felt satisfying!

Martin, hard at work.

Sam and Jessie, hard at play.

Coming soon.. maybe even tomorrow, but don't get excited..

Part II - Ringing in the New Year, Montreal, and Batard the cat. (you should look that up, yea)

A belated Merry Christmas/Hanukkah/Quanza, whatever you celebrated; ditto that for New Years.

"Never Year's Day is every mans birthday" - Charles Lamb

Oh look! Some fireworks, just like Petra promised..

photo credit: Walt Disney 2010 New Year's Eve, Beijing China

say it

I've been meaning to do this for a while.

And unfortunately, I'm going to have to keep on meaning to do it until I actually do it.

The holidays have been long and energizing and all kinds of crazy. I've got a blog post up my sleeve somewhere and it will come soon, but it's still a little embryo right now and needs nurturing.

Also, due to the amount of French I've been speaking I'm losing the English language faster than my $3/day allowance so the timely practice of spell checking my work is highly necessary for readable posts.

I hope everyone reading this had a great holiday season and rang in the new year with a smile, and possibly a resolution if you're that kind of person.  Remember, don't fix it if it aint broke.

all my love,
Petra

French Roast

Today the world politely reminded me that it is not unilingual.  At the exact same time it also reminded me why I am in Quebec in the first place.

This story really starts last night, when our group went swimming, at a pool, oui.  The pool is in a Police Training Academy that is apparently quite renowned and famous in Quebec.  It is this great big beautiful stone building (this sentence can also be applied to 2/3 of every building in this provence) in the middle of town.  On one wing is a fitness facility and a community auditorium and the rest is probably top secret high security business with shooting ranges and dramatic crime scene reenactments.  At least, that is how it is in my head.

I quit swimming early a) because my left ankle decided it would be a great time to swell up to the size of a small mango and b) because i'm fairly incapable of doing front crawl.
(A small aside - Eric greatly improved my stroke when we were in Thunder Bay, but without him by my side I tend to hyperventilate and my flutter kick looks more like a person having a seizure)

Another important fact about swimming:  It's not cool to pretend to be an orca whale, surfacing for air, when kind, elderly men are busy workin' on their fitness in the next lane over.  Martin, with his long hair, fully splashed about 6 people while becoming the human incarnation of Free Willy and I was ashamed to be seen as his swim partner. Especially as my french capabilities are not great enough to defend myself.  I don't think so anyways.  I should put more faith in my language.

On my way back to my locker a nice policelady says things to me in French (Voulez-vous prendre une douche?)  which I take to understand as "Do you want to shower?"...  I also took this to mean "Would you like to shower with me?" as there was no one else in the room and I had not expressed interest in showering prior to this conversation.

Oh.. hmmm... okaay..

This one caught me off guard a little bit.  But, upon looking to my right hand side I discovered there were several shower units... shower units which I was blocking.  So, facial expressions summarized, first I give this person a look of complete bewilderment, then comes confusion, then comes realization that Hey! There are some showers right there! Look at that! You are asking me to move and not to shower with you! Right! and lastly I manage to actually speak, only to spit out, "Oh! Oui" and move out of the way to let her through. Which in hindsight, I realize, doesn't make sense.  "Yes, I'd love to shower, allow me to move away from them quickly."

I wonder if she knows I don't speak her mother tongue or if she thinks I'm just a really clueless francophone with a very expressive face.

I've been having a lot of trouble with this sort of translation, and have now taken to calling it the shower translation; this furthers the confusion I instigate, I imagine.  I've found lately with the whole question asking that is it more intonation changes than phrase changes and I'm not great with voices I'm not used to.

Today at work I spoke more French than usual and I'm not sure why, though possibly just because it's fun to actually talk to the people in the office instead of just sitting around at break time looking at everyone's shoes like some tired puppy.  After work however I had to go downtown (a phrase which is not used in small places like Nicolet where there is no actual downtown) to buy some tape for said mango sized ankle.

No luck at the grocery store less that 30 m away, although a cute boy with snake bites told me to "check street down with colours".  Although this was in English it needed translation.  I came up with few answers but I continued walking down the street to a drugstore which is called Family with a strange ending.  I walk in and quickly find out that the woman at the front speaks no English. Whatever.  I ask her for the medical stuff.  She points left.  I go left. The store isn't very big so left doesn't leave much room.  I find the medical stuff.  A pharmacist finds me. I express my concern.. in English.

Bad move.

She begins to freak out.

"Non! Non! Non! Jenpeuxpasvousaider!"

Oh great.

I say "It's okay, I don't need help" but really couldn't find it in me to say this in French so I just walked away.  I go back to the medical bondage section which is a small section with nothing in it but tensores and polysporin.  Also great.

At this point I was late for dinner and in a mood that may be described as irritated; I just want some stupid tape!

This came out of my mouth accidentally, as I walked down a different aisle so I looked behind me to make sure I hadn't inadvertently offended the poor, hypersensitive pharmacist.

Rounding a corner I run into what appears to be another pharmacist.  I quickly squeak out a "desole!" and try to veer right to avoid any more problems. Possible-pharmacist woman turns to me then and says "The medical tape is over here and the scotch tape is in the school supplies section."
Hallelujah.  When in doubt, get a little bit angry and say something without meaning to near an anglophone! H'okay let's get this tape and go.

Oh right. Cash register. From personal experience on both sides of a till, language barriers with money are relatively easy to solve as numbers are still numbers and it is general knowledge to have basic 1-10 in another language down by age 6.  I give the girl my card and she tells me my total.  AND THEN IT HAPPENED AGAIN.

While I'm punching in my pin the girl asks me "Voulez-vous un sac?"..

Don't be alarmed though, I was well prepared from the evening before and breezed by with an ultra cool, "Non, merci" as though I had never freaked out at intonation-type questions before in my life.

Bon Nuit!

Petra :)

The Last Days of TBay - a Pictoral Edition

Bonjour,

That's it for the French, chill out Rossland. (and others.. dare I say I have other followers?)

As you may have realized, I do in fact, have a terminal condition which prevents me from uploading, posting and taking photos. I've had it most of my life but must have figured I could overcome it by promising multiple batches of pictures on my blog. It's a mildly contagious predicament which sometimes results in lack of evidence and irritated family members.  But as I am a firm believer in overcoming illnesses (especially, hypothetically speaking here, those of the mental variety) I have decided to upload several photos.

This is me hanging from a rafter at our rotation camp destination.  We went to a really cool conference centre on the outskirts of Thunder Bay.  The man who built it is a closet engineer who built off the grid because his wife has multiple chemical allergies related to urban living.  The basement has a swimming pool which heats the rest of the house and the lodge we were in.  It would be the perfect ski lodge, complete with customer kitchen and cute little tablecloths.  There were however, no ski racks and though it was close to a ski hill, it was not close enough.  "Rotation Camp" is where all Katimavik groups in one district get together and break down the rotation (aka, 3 month period) but as we were 5 hours from the nearest group, it was just us.  We played some awesome games and talked about moving to Quebec; we also slept sans thermarests, thus, sore backs in the morn.  

When we got back from the conference centre our house was occupied by the next program leader who was setting up for our sister group to arrive.  We spent the night at The Boys and Girls Club of Thunder Bay - one of the first places we came to when we arrived in Thunder Bay.  The club has pool tables and xboxes and rock band and other great things which kept us amused well into the night.  Our plane was due to leave at 6:30am the next morning and we had to be at the airport for 4:30am because we are a large group.  So, naturally, we didn't sleep but instead chose to take advantage of the 5m x 15m bouncy castle the club had nicely packed away in storage.  This event was accompanied with streaking and a rush to get packed when we became aware of the time.

Temporarily stuck..

A few days before our rotation camp we went to the university fields to play some snow football because  a certain group member who goes by the name of Scott is flippantly obsessed with football.  Afterwards, we went to his billet family's house to watch the Grey Cup.  It was a fun time but unfortunately I have no photos from the Grey Cup and I don't remember the score, nor do I really care.  I considered writing that after watching the match I realized that I like MLB much more than CFL but if I put that my parents will probably celebrate to the point of extremism which could dangerously affect their so far healthy ageing.  I'll just say CFL is ridiculous.

I had this brilliant idea to crochet Sarah (first program leader) a hat for a goodbye present.  At this time I was not exactly great at making hats.  Maybe I'll post a picture of the first hat I crocheted.  Maybe not.  Anyways, several of us in the group crochet like we've got no other purpose in life and it was kind of a theme in our house in Thunder Bay so I thought it would be cool to make Sarah a hat with a line crocheted by each of us. 6 girls 5 guys.  I figured this would be a challenge as most humans of the male array are somewhat incapable of touching yarn let alone crocheting.  

(Just telling it like it is, hats off (ha) to those beautiful men who do) 

Halfway through the hat-making process Sarah says "Can I crochet a line?".  Who was I to deny my dear friend a line in her own headwear? She's up there with the rest of us, the red one, right in the middle.  <3

(result - she had no idea, and was seemingly quite pleased! ..

..though possibly blinded by it's intense colour scheme..)  

On the way to the conference centre (yea, I'm back to that, I like to jump around) we stopped at Kakabeka Falls, a beautiful landmark near Thunder Bay.  This is one of many attempted group shots.  The falls were frozen on the outside which led to an impromptu snow ball throwing competition to break through the ice.  Eric won.

Dre, Me and Sam on our first plane ride of the greatest day of airports in my life. Note our smiling faces.

On one of our first evenings in Nicolet Sam took this photo.  The sunsets over the river are so gorgeous.  Please observe my t-shirt.  Please know that the next morning we received 6 inches of snow.

And an ending note from my dear friend Sam Middleton, an avid Katimavikker.

"Roses are red,

violets are blue

some poems rhyme

and others don't."

Bon Nuit.

PetraFied

Nicolet QC, in all it's glory

This post is a little late (huge surprise there) as I thought I should wait a little while and not write on first impressions.  So instead here are some third, fourth, fifth and six impressions.

Nicolet is pretty small. Nicolet has one grocery store.  Nicolet got 7 inches of snow yesterday.  Nicolet has protective females.

An extension of these facts.

Nicolet has 7,800 people.  But don't be fooled.. many of those people live on rural property outside of town so the so called "main drag" we live on gets about.. well it doesn't really get any traffic.  Our Katima-house is five minutes from downtown which includes but is not limited to: several restaurants, a post office, a library, a drugstore, multiple bars and a hardware store that appears to only sell snowblowers.

The grocery store is called super C and it is a 30 minute walk down the strip of highway that Nicolet is somewhat built around. We take the van.

On Saturday we went to work on a vineyard 30 minutes out of town.  The man who owned it was really interesting and he and his family have been running a "Medieval Children's Camp" on their property every summer for a few years.  They also had a guest house with a hot tub which we will be going to for New Year's day.  As a small aside, I had a lot of fun on Saturday.  Our group is kind of ridiculously exuberant when given physical tasks so the work was a lot of fun and didn't take long.  It's the best kind of work when it just feels like hanging out.  He (I've clearly forgotten his name.. :( ) was very appreciative and made really good soup for lunch.

When we got back from their place I walked around town at about 5:00pm in a t-shirt and jeans.  Sunday.. not much difference, beautifully clear day.. Monday.. torrential down-flutter (well you can't really say down-pour, work with me here) of snow.  Today, Sam and I had to practically pull each other out of the ditches we sunk into on the way to work.  We have a foot of snow.  Guess what? It's snowing again tonight.  J'aime Canada.

On Thursday night when we got here a few of us went for a walk with Valerie, our new program leader and afterwards we went to a bar.  There were a few locals who appeared to live at the bar on a permanent basis and several people who said bonjour to us.  We figured petite ville Nicolet was nice and friendly.  Then we went to the bar on Friday night.  Our pretty faces were not so warmly welcomed.  We got glares.  French glares.  One particularly intoxicated young lady told us (en francais) to "not kiss her boyfriends".  But all is well now as we met some of them at the next bar and they were "merely interested as to know who we were because we did not look familiar".  Which is cool.  Our English probably helped them come to that conclusion.  Small town Quebec = also not very bilingual.

We had work interviews yesterday (en francais, s'il vous plait) and right after them we were given our work placements.  I had really wanted a daycare job that was split with an out of town job where you would shadow a biologist working with the large swan population in the area.  (Nicolet is home to a bird sanctuary)  My second choice was working at an Arts Centre.. moving chairs and tables, setting up for events, cleaning, shovelling snow, joking with the funny guys who work there. (Rosslanders: picture a much larger Minor's Hall with an arched ceiling that looks like the inside of a great ship.)

Buuuuut in the end I got a job at the musee des religions de Nicolet.  It's one of only 3 museums in the world and the only one in North America that focuses on all 5 main religions.  Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  It's a beautiful building, the staff members are great, and on top of that Jessie and Sam both work there as well.  We will be switching jobs weekly so hopefully it won't get too boring and repetitive.  The job I'm doing this week (get ready to shake your head and blow me kisses from wherever you are..) is scanning religious images. All day. For a week.  Just that. Yup.

Jean-Francois, the director and our boss, is super sweet though and gives us lots of breaks and is nice to chat with. He is more or less the only bilingual staff member.. which is difficult, oui.  My french improves chaque jour.  But don't blow me too many kisses because it will be a fun job.. The scanner is really slow which allows for optimal movie watching, music listening and reading time.  I forgot my book at home today so when I was at work I picked up a casual copy of the Satanic Bible.

Don't worry, I felt morally confused scanning First Communion images from 1924 Italy while reading verses from the Satanic Bible.  Little bit of a paradox, yea. The museum has some pretty great reading material though, and lots of French children's books for me to practice reading with.

Tonight I had a 2.5 hour French lesson.  You could probably blow me some more kisses now.

Actually it wasn't really that bad but because it was our first one it was a big review of highschool stuff.  French lessons every week will be good though, and we didn't have them in Thunder Bay so we're all really behind.

We've been planning excursions as a group and it looks like we will be making one to Montreal, one to Quebec City and on top of those we also have 48 hours off in January when we can go wherever we want. And on top of that we are  also going to Trois Rivieres to stay with the another group of Katimavictims for New Year's Eve.  FUN STUFF.  For Christmas Day we are going to our French teacher's house but are also having a dinner at our place.

I plan to have more adventures soon so as to not fill blog posts with boring things like grocery stores in rural Quebec. My sincere apologies.
Now, I will blow you kisses!
Bon nuit
Petra

Pictures coming soon (just for you, Anthea/Scot!)