Christina <3 Montreal

Montreal made it to the top of my "cities I'd like to live in"-list. It's awesome. We had some fun times hanging out in Quebec City, exploring the city and it is also a nice place, but it was not really special to me. It could have been anywhere in Europe. And it's home to the seperatists :D. Luckily they didn't kill me for insulting them in public :D. Still, after 3 days I was done with Quebec City (though Eastern-Canada's biggest mall was next to our hotel and I probably could have spent some more time in there).

So on wednesday after a short shopping-excursion we last-minute jumped on the bus to Montreal. Unfortunately our AIESECfriend whom we were supposed to stay with cancelled so we were homeless in Montreal. Which didn't really improved my mood, but I was still very impressed and amazed by the city, I just had some troubles showing it. We walked around downtown and finally found out we could stay at one of the other AIESECers places, Rafaelle. She lives in a very nice house outside the city and we had a great bed and a great breakfast there, so we hoped the next day would be better. But we didn't count on the Montreal public transport system. We had to go back from somewhere in the suburbs of Montreal to downtown, so upon entering the bus we needed to buy a ticket. I already got used to the fact that in Canadian buses, you always have to pay the exact price because they don't give change, but the Montreal ones don't even accept bills. So there we were, bus went without us until we found someone to change our money. Very annyoing. Luckily, right after this incident we could start enjoying Montreal by walking the Old Town. There's a Basilique Notre-Dame here, it looks exactly as the Paris one from the outside, only a bit smaller. Quite different from the inside, but still awesome. Very interesting light installations. The rest of the old town was also very nice. The contrast between old-town things and american-style city makes Montreal very very special. And the contrast between English and French...my french keeps getting better and better. Especially my shopping french :)

Yesterday at night we had dinner downtown and then went to "The Village", which is the gay district for drinks. A lot of gays here. Sometimes, Canada seems to me like a very very big version of the Netherlands. Lots of gays, even more weed...apart from the farm close to our congress venue, I often see people smoking or making the smoking preparations. Right now I sent Nikolai to a museum so I could catch up on my AIESEC work, facebook and write some e-mails. I decided I have seen enough museums in Copenhagen and these things also have to be done. In the afternoon we will climb the Mont Royal. And tonight finally explore Montreal Nightlife!!!!!!!

Oh and the pictures are coming...

NOGX - finally another congress for Christina

I am still in Quebec and tomorrow I am leaving for Montreal. The past weekend I spent on a farm close to Quebec in an AIESEC congress, dedicated to Outgoing Exchange in Canada. I believe this is the right time for some explanations, especially since I have received subtle hints from non-AIESECers that they didn't really know what I am doing all the time and why I am in Canada in the first place.

The whole story started last year in May when I joined AIESEC, the biggest student-run organization in the world back in the Netherlands. Check our supermovie explaining what AIESEC is about:

There’s another one which explains in depth what is cool about AIESEC, it’s made at second conference I attended, the Scandinavian Leadership Development Seminar in Finland.

After a year, I didn’t feel like leaving the organization so I looked into opportunities I had and one of them was going on a CEED to Canada. CEED means that I would be a member of a local committee (always abbreviated as LC) and work there. In my special case I am helping the local committee of AIESEC in Guelph with recruitment. Since they don’t have a lot of members and doing a good recruitment is a lot of work, they had me come over and do that. I am closely working together with my dear roommate Brett, who should normally do that with his non-existent team. I am also the Vice President of Outgoing Exchange right now until I have recruited myself a successor, since there is nobody in the LC knowing about OGX at the moment. So, last weekend I was at the National Outgoing Exchange Congress.

In that congress I got to learn how AIESEC in Canada works, which is not entirely the same as AIESEC in the Netherlands. The Member Committee (MC, the national board) in Canada gives advice and suggestions on how to do things, whereas in AIESEC in the Netherlands there are procedures for most things and the LCs are just supposed to follow them. The Dutch approach obviously works better, but the Canadian one probably sometimes evokes less frustration on local level. I also got very very motivated to work for AIESEC in Guelph , I met really cool people and...I partied. With dancing on a table and everything. Sooo much fun.

After the conference we went back to Quebec City, where we stayed with some of the delegates, explored the city, did some shopping and today we went to visit some waterfalls close to Quebec. I forgot what they're called, but they're actually taller than the Niagara Falls. Apart from Nikolai (who I am very happy to see again), Laila (the UBC VP OGX) and me, everybody has already left Quebec. Ooooh and I am forgetting about Matthias, the VP OGX of AIESEC in Münster, the twin LC of my Dutch LC and of course my hometown in Germany. He is also on a CEED, here in Quebec. It was very funny to meet him, since I was faciing in their Newiescongress in May. He will stay here and we will go to Montreal tomorrow.

Concerning my work here for AIESEC, it's finally getting serious. This morning I randomly found out that there is an information fair at the university for all kinds of student organizations. So there is a lot of things that have to be prepared and the fact that I am in the nice province of Quebec does not really help, but since we have Internet in our hotel room and I still wake up early every day I get a lot of stuff done and it will be alright.

Check the pictures of beautiful Quebec, I will post them tomorrow. They are actually not my own pictures, since I am a very lazy person when it comes to that but Nikolai was friendly enough to let me post his genious pictures :D.

Je suis à Quebec...

Rien important est passé cette semaine. Le lundi je suis commencé travailler dans la université pour AIESEC et je suis alleé une autre fois au centre commercial. Comme je n’ai pas un bici je suis allée de pied et j’ai realizé: tout en Canada est très grand et loin. Bien, le mardi j’ai aussi travaillé tout le jour et après j’ai vu un film au cinema. Se s’appelait Amal et joue en India, je le recommends. Après il était temps d’aller bikehunting avec Carlos, le trainee de l’Ecuador. Malheureusement le bici était trop petit pour moi, mais peut-être le roommate de Carlos me va vendre son bici parce que va vivre en British Columbia. Le mercredi j’ai passé 8 heures avec installer des programmes dans mon ordinateur et j’étais furieuse après. J’ai aussi lavé mes vetements et fait mon valise pour aller à Quebec. A six heures nous avions un Potluck dans notre maison, comme la semaine passée et cette fois était le Potluck pour decir Au Revoir à Nilu, la fille de l’India. Je suis très triste qu’elle s’en va parce qu’elle est très agreeable et a une opionion interessante à beaucoup de sujets.

Après le Potluck on a pris le Greyhound à Toronto, ici on a pris Coach Canada à Montreal où nous sommes arrivés a 6:30 dans le matin et avec un autre bus nous sommes allés au Quebec. Tout le jour nous avons vu la ville, allée aux magasins et fait autres choses touristiques.

I will stop writing in French now. It’s a lot of fun, but my French has been better in the past and since I can’t be bothered to speak it here because I have such a hard time making a full working sentence and an even harder time decoding what the other person answers, I just speak English which also works fine. It’s really bad, because I should work on my French, but Canada is the wrong place for it. And since I am not used to having such a hard time speaking a foreign language, it annoys me a lot.
Writing in English I can also elaborate more on what we exactly did today. I tried ‘Poutine’, which is a Quebecois specialty, fries with gravy and cheese, and yes, it is as disgusting as it sounds. I would rather have ‘patat oorlog’. And I visited a Christmas Store. First one I’ve ever been to and of course I was amazed and had to stare and ‘oh’ at all the things that were there. I want to grow up very fast and have my own Christmas tree and buy a lot of stuff at the Christmas store to decorate it. Unfortunately the things there don’t really match my parent’s taste. I have also visited the Jade museum, to please my dear roommate Brett. The best thing there was that I was secretly charging my phone while staring at a lot of stones in weird shapes. I think ‘mystical creature’ was the description given in most of the cases, since it was not clear what was depicted. Later we met Andrea, a girl from AIESEC Victoria, which is on Vancouver Island.

Tonight we are staying in the university dormitories to go to a congress tomorrow afternoon. In the morning I will be working at the office of AIESEC here, since I won’t be in Guelph the whole next week and there is a lot to prepare for the next weeks. I will stay in Quebec and then travel from here to Montreal and stay there until next week Sunday. Nikolai is coming to the congress tomorrow as well and we will hang out after. It will be so good to see a familiar face and have someone to share all my evil thoughts with after such a long time!!! And I’ve had a lot of them recently :P. Also I can’t wait to be in another congress, since the last one was in may and that’s a very long time for me to go without congress. Though this one will probably not include crazily jumping around and dancing, since I don’t want to mess up my back again. We’ll see how this reasonable thought works out in practice.

A bientôt!

First Guelphish weekend

My first weekend in Canada is almost over and I am not really awake right now, but I will write something anyways and then go to sleep after. The reason I am so tired is that my body still thinks I am in Europe and wakes me up every morning at 7 or 7.30. I get tired around 6 pm and then, at 11 or 12 pm, I really have to go to sleep. I think this will be alright somewhere next week.

I was just hanging out on thursday and on friday I had my first meeting with Whitney, the Local Committee President (LCP) of AIESEC here about what exactly I will be doing here, so I could get started and I already did make a planning and some nice to-do lists :). It feels soooooo good to finally be doing some AIESEC work again. On friday night Aida, her boyfriend Dan and Amos woke me up because my place is apparently the party place where everyone meets all the time. Of course I knew they were coming, but I had to take a nap anyways. Which extended itself...
With more people around we prepared for a night at the bars, preparing meaning drinking in this case, which I did not join in for a change. We went downtown to a bar at 12, where we danced until 1.30. That was when my back started hurting really really badly again and I had to go home. I didn't miss much though, because bars in Guelph have their last call at 2 am and close at 3 am latest. Poor people here. They miss the whole fun part. Mean Canadian government. There are probably after-bar-parties at peoples houses, but wtf...I already miss Copenhagen party nights till 7 in the morning and I finally understand why all the Americans go crazy once they come to Europe. By the way, the mean Canadian government also has the monopoly on the sales of alcohol. Probably like in Sweden. But as in Sweden I'm not sure it has a positive effect on the population's alcohol consumption.

On saturday morning Krista, the VP ICX (Vice President of Incoming Exchange) and I went to the farmer's market which is every week just across the street from my house. Very convenient, it has a lot of organic nice vegetables and fruits, Amish cookies, dumplings, nice juices, salsas...really cool. And to me, still used to the Copenhagenish price-level, everything seems very cheap there. I think the vegetables are, even compared to Germany and the Netherlands. The Canadians consider the stuff at the farmer's market expensive, because it's not genetically manipulated. Like a lot of the produce you can buy at the normal stores. The onions here are incredibly big and I've also seen some scary cucumbers and tomatoes. And people can't believe me when I tell them that this is forbidden in Europe.

After the farmer's market I went home and that's where I stayed, doing some AIESEC work and reading. I was supposed to go to a Barbecue at night, but since my back was hurting so badly I was messed up by the pain (and also by the painkillers I had taken) so I decided to stay at home and watch a movie so I would be alright today to go to the zoo!!!!

So this morning we got on the greyhound bus to Toronto at 9h45, it took us an hour to get there. Luckily no scary things happened. Scary things related to Greyhound bus travelling in Canada like the decapitation story that happened some weeks ago in Edmonton...bah bah. The greyhound bus has a sign that says "don't bring weapons" and "violent behaviour towards the driver or your fellow travellers will be punished". Sometimes the Canadians are not worried enough. Most of them don't lock their front doors. I trained Brett to do so and when I told him why we do that in Europe and that it also has something to do with insurance of the stuff you have in your house he was like "oh I never thought about that". I hope I didn't worry him. Still, apparently they are as worried about terrorism about Europeans, because they have the same rules for hand luggage, even on domestic flights. . I see a mismatch here. Anyways, Greyhound took us safely to Toronto, there we went on the subway, another subway and a bus to the zoo. Which was quite cool. Unfortunately the main reason we went there was because Nilu, the Indian trainee wanted to see polar bears and penguins. They don't have any penguins anymore and the polar bears are temporarily moved to another zoo, but we still had a great time. I saw more groundhogs. And took a lot of pictures, I'll put them online tomorrow. Unfortunately, walking around the zoo all day makes very tired. I will remember that for if I ever have kids. So I already fell asleep on the bus back to Guelph and am sleepwalking ever since we got here, it might be time to go to bed then. Especially because tomorrow I will start going to the office and everything.

Address

And in case somebody wants to send me letters (which I would of course like very much) or packages (which I would like even more), my Canadian address:

Christina Brauer
31 Gordon Street
N1H 4G9
Guelph, Ontario
Canada

Welcome to Guelph!!!

I made it. And I got a very warm welcome. But let's start at the beginning.

I had all these bags packed, exactly 45,8 kg. I was allowed to take 46. So my father stressed me to leave on time and I was at the airport far in advance, still not early enough to get myself a nice spot somewhere at the aisle which would have allowed me to stretch my poor back. Luckily the nice Lufthansa steward got me a seat in the front row at the aisle later, so I really enjoyed the flight which was also really calm. Food was decent, I had enough space and it was only 8 hours, so I slept and read and then we were there.

I was picked up by my roommate and fellow AIESECer Brett, his dad and his dad's German (girl?)friend. She emigrated from Germany when she was a year old, so she talked to me about prices and compared to Dmark and Pfennige, which I found really sweet. When Brett first took me into our apartment I almost walked backward and out again, because it was sooooooooo messy (and I consider myself pretty used to messy, but this was too much). But my room was empty and my bed and desk were still in the living room, so once we had that straight it was okay...now there is some messiness left but it's not in my room and not in the central living room so I don't care. Once we had everything straight people started to arrive for Brett's weekly Potluck. This involves everybody bringing some random food and then eating it together. So there were Krista, Dan and Whitney from AIESEC here and then the trainees: Carlos from Ecuador, Niul from India, Bogdan and Aida from Romania and Amos from Kenya and Carlos also brought Axelle, a french girl along. I had a great time having AIESECers around me after a long time without, they made me feel at home immediately. And very welcome: they brought a huge bottle of Champagne which I had to open. Soooo cool. I managed to stay awake until midnight and just ignored the time difference. Still I woke up at 6, wide awake but then put myself back to sleep in order to adjust to Canadian time. I hope that was it with my jetlag, but I already feel getting tired and it's not even 6 pm here yet.

This morning Brett took me around town to change money, do groceries, get me a Canadian phone (email me or check facebook for my number) and discover the city and also university campus. Good thing about a university with a large agriculture department: it looks really nice. The town of Guelph is also cute, it has 118.000 inhabitants, so it is not very big, the sense of style of the people is not as good as in Copenhagen, but as far as I've seen also not as bad as in Twente. And I already discovered the Canadian wildlife today: I saw a groundhog. I discovered later that it's supposed to be what we call "Erdmännchen" in Germany, but it's a zillion times bigger than the ones we have at the zoo and I found it really cute. I want one!!!!!

All my bags are packed...

And I am sooooo ready to go. I liked my home intermezzo, especially because it was for a very limited amount of time. It was fun being around my family and meeting some people, but as I realized the moment I entered the ferry from Denmark to Germany and everybody was speaking German and behaving German: I don't belong here. The big question arises where it is that I belong and where I should feel at home then and at the moment the answer is as simple as it is disillusioning: nowhere. In every country I go to I feel like a welcome guest. And I behave like a guest, so everything is fine. I can perfectly live with that. But then I enter Germany...and I don't feel at home. Which I obviously should. Of course my parent's place is a different story, but the country :(, no. When I was on the ferry from Denmark I pretended to be something else and only spoke English to the people. Evil.

Not as evil as the people here. On saturday, I went to get my hair done. I ended up being served by the boss of the place, who was kind of rude and also had very clear ideas about what should happen to my hair. Unfortunately my ideas were not as clear so I had nothing to oppose him and ended up with my hair cut in a way that I wouldn't have proposed. If you have a service business, why don't you listen to your clients?
Next day, same story. On sunday the ongoing pain in my back made me visit a hospital. The normal doctor was fine, he even offered me to have me wheeled to x-rays (I thought that was a Danish specialty), but since walking and standing are the only positions I am really comfortable in I declined. The radiologist was a really mean woman who moved me backward and forward and wasn't impressed by the fact that I was crying from pain by the movements she imposed on me and just kept being rude. If you can't show even a little compassion for the people in pain you're helping, why do you become a doctor?
Yesterday I went to the Netherlands, where I felt like a welcome guest again, so no weird things happened to me.
I also went to see the dentist with my whole family (probably worth a blog entry on its own) and got every single point from my to-do list done. Even with evil Germans in the way doing everything to prevent me from doing so.

Good me, so today I could pack some more and meet more friends which was really cool. So right now I'll take one last rain dance shower and then put myself to sleep with all the painkillers the nice doctor at the hospital prescribed me. I am already looking forward to the moment that I checked in my luggage and can wander around the airport pretending to be a foreigner again.

Home sweet home

There I am. I spent my last days mostly in the library or at Naomi's place, studying for my finals which went okay. Micro went well, Macro went okay, but I think I passed. In the early morning hours of the exam days Naomi and I finally understood the economic way of thinking. There is no forest there. It's only economic principles applied to different situations using pure logic. It took us a longer time to understand that and with every model exam question we answered we were looking for the tricky component of the question: it was not there. If from now on somebody tells me he studies Economics, I won't be impressed anymore. Still, the studying for the exam was quite intensive and the fact that they were over had to be celebrated. With only four hours of sleep every night I was a little bit exausted, but thanks to CULT I made it. Taurin is forbidden in Denmark, that's why they don't have Red Bull, but they have CULT, their own energy drink, which comes even in different tastes. And there is also CULTshaker -the partymaker- pre-mixed Wodka Redbull...

So after my exam I got myself a bottle of this, amongst other things, and went to the city to buy the Mandarina handbag I had been admiring for some time and after the exams I decided I deserved it. After I packed my first suitcase I went off to start the evening with a BBQ at my second residence, Aboulevard. Second residence because I had been hanging out there a lot throughout the whole programme and the last days even slept there because of the exams. Some people seriously thought I lived there. After the Barbecue we went to celebrate Nicole's birthday with cake and Malibu at the harbour, after that we stopped by a house party at another residence and then went to K3, a club where we hadn't been yet. We stayed there until it closed and then it was time for farewell, which was really sad. I went with some people to 7-11 to get something to eat and then to the Metro. Unfortunately it was raining, so the Metro stairs were slippery and I was wearing Chucks, so I fell down half the stairs. At least it looked funny and the guys who were with me had a lot of fun. I am still in pain. Packing the rest of my stuff the next day after 3,5 hours of sleep with an aching back was not that much fun and luckily I had the Lovedoctor helping me to get all my stuff to the Central Station, from where I went by train, by boat, by train and yet by another train to Münster. I managed to change trains with all my luggage, but this time there were a lot of friendly people around. The only thing that's wrong with them is that they all speak German. That's something I really have to get used to. Or not, because I'm not staying that long. Also paying in Euros again feels funny.

It's not for long though, I already unpacked all my stuff and started packing for Canada, which involves a lot more clothes, because I will also be there in the winter and everybody is warning me about the cold there. So I will bring gloves and a scarf and maybe I even go as far as wearing a hat...