The princess helmet

Luckily I didn't have an accident with my bike yet, but the speed my bike reaches everytime I go down the hill combined with some awful stories and my clumsiness which will not allow me to do crafts if I hit my head and can't use it anymore lead to the decision to go out and buy a helmet. Of course it couldn't be just some random coloured weird formed helmet, no...
I got myself a princess helmet. Luckily I am in Guelph so nobody cares if it ruins my hair for the day. And apart from looking nice an protecting my head it is also very useful, for example as a shopping basket.

I have finally made my peace with living in Guelph, I visited the homecoming football game, some parties, the movies as always and last saturday I went shopping in Toronto. Life is good. To prevent myself from being overwhelmed from the variety of items to shop (as happened in Montreal) this time I made a list of things I might need and decided only to look at those.
And I succeeded, without being overwhelmed and also without getting really really poor. After 5 hours of shopping around in Eaton Center (very sad but I haven't seen much Toronto Daylight that day) I returned to Guelph with a pair of snowboots, a sweater and a dress. Very happy of course.

And it is good that I bought boots, it is not snowing yet, but today I declared that summer is officially over and changed my ballerinas for boots and wore a jacket for the first time. It is amazing how long it had lasted, I even got severly sunburned during the footballgame last weekend. Ooooh, Canadian Football, by the way, weird sport. Or like my Romanian friends like to put it: "sportidiota". The actual game takes two hours, but then they stop it all the time to rearrange their teams and exchange people, every team consists of an offense and a defense team and they change all the time (I couldn't discover the rythm or reason for that, but I am sure there is one). A lot of other weird things that happened became clear to me during the four hours that the game lasted. Brett explained the rules to me beforehand and during the game I could enjoy Bogdan's expert comments. Lucky me. Still I want to watch more footbaal so I can fully understand it. Canadian Football is almost like American Football, with some rules changed. I recommend watching it on TV, there will be less breaks.

AIESEClife in Guelph is exploding, all those new members are around now and they are really cool!!! We had our Induction Day on sunday, where we gave them trainings and general sessions about AIESEC. Upcoming weekend we'll all go to Hamilton to the Ontario Regional Conference and in between they come into the office for their first office shifts and we get them started on everything. Soooooo exciting. I have my own team now, 6 awesome girls with who I will send many many people on exchange. Can't wait...and we have a new computer in our office, it was about time. As it is for me to get back to work. I hope I will experience something truly exciting soon to share it with you.

Canadian wildlife and the latest AIESEC news

I already showed you a picture of the groundhog and mentioned the variety of Canadian wildlife earlier. This week it was time for me to experience it. On monday a squirrel scared the hell out of me, because it jumped out of a garbage can with a donut in its mouth right in front of me. Since in my worldview squirrels are small, shy, red animals the black Canadian squirrels (fat, black and very cheeky) I am quite confused everytime I see them here. Especially if they appear out of nowhere. Talking about this to Krista I discovered that squirrels are also mean: she told me she was once sitting under a tree and a squirrel kept dropping nuts onto her head. I wonder why...

Yet I have to report another clash with Canadian wildlife: this happened on tuesday. Unfortunately most of you don't know Brett, so you can't enjoy this story as much as I do, but I will tell it anyways. My room had been a mess for some days, inspired by Brett and busy with other things I just kept clothes all over the place. I was watching Scrubs when I saw some small thing moving from my under my bed to under my desk. It was fast, so I couldn't tell what it was, my guesses ranged from small toad over small mouse to large spider. I tried to find the moving thing, but I didn't manage to. Scared by the thought of something running through my clothes I started folding them and restoring order in my room, when some time later the thing was running around again. I had never seen anything like this in my life, so I just jumped onto my bed and started screaming. Luckily, Brett came. With his excellent knowledge about animals he could tell me the thing was a centipede. I was surprised, I always thought centipedes look like this: But they actually look more like this:which is slightly more disgusting. Bah bah. Brett was not fast enough, so the centipede went into hiding again and I continued cleaning up my clothes. 10 Minutes later it was back and, clever as I am, I put a box on top of it. Brett brought a plastic container, but he wasn't fast enough, so I had caught it. I told him, since he's the man of the house (whatever kind of man) he should get rid of it. And what does Brett, the super-vegetarian-recycling-"we love trees-no flyers please" stickerowner propose: "do you have a shoe?" Of course I have shoes but nooooo way the thing gets killed in the middle of my room. Double bah-bah. In the meantime the centipede was clever enough to escape from under the box and ran up the wall. So Brett stepped to the wall and caught it in the plastic container. We both looked at the container, me pleased because the thing was in there and out of my house soon and Brett...I don't know what he was thinking. What he said was this: "We can keep it as a pet." "No, we can't. We already have a bike." (Since we don't have a shed I keep my bike in the living room :)). "But we could feed it little ants and look at it eating it." "We can also get cable and watch Discovery Channel." In the end Brett took the plastic container out of the house and released the centipede far far away outside.

Yesterday Brett found another bug which we couldn't identify, it looked like dust with legs. So Brett put it into a box and gave it cereal and some vegetable leftovers. He named him Ichabod. Someone apparently has loneliness issues. That's what living in Guelph for four years turns you into. Ichabod has also been released yesterday night because he didn't eat the stuff Brett gave him and he didn't want him to die. How nice :P.

Apart from domestic animal trouble, I have been hardcorebusy doing AIESEC recruitment, more presentations in classes, infosessions and yesterday night finally: the first General Meeting of the semester with 22 new members showing up!!!! And people keep e-mailing me saying they couldn't make it to the meetings but want to join anyways. So for now I have reached my recruitment target. Now we have to make them stay in AIESEC. Since they are Canadians with a much smaller sense of responsibility this is more challenging than it is in Germany or the Netherlands, but I am looking forward to do this. And my whole Executive Board with me. So things are going well...tomorrow and next week we'll have Personal Development Talks with the new members and then allocate them to portfolios. Things are getting exciting. Even in Guelph.

Good things about Guelph

1. AIESEC in Guelph
2. The farmer's market
3. Meow and other vintage boutiques
4. The bookshelf
5. The Dutch Store
6. The running trails at the river
7. Cheap cocktails
...
(hopefully to be continued)

I'm a car

Yes. By Ontario Provincial Law, I am a car right now. That is because I have a bike. And as a biking participant in traffic, I get treated as a car. Unfortunately I am not as fast and as strong yet, but I just got started. 

I bought my bike from Carlos' (the ecuadorian intern) roommate who moved to Vancouver and obviously could not take his bike with him. I feel a little bit bad because it is a very expensive and good bike and I only payed 70$ for it, including a lock, but I guess that's life. The bike has 21 gears, but I only know how to use 7 of them, which is enough for me. And it is much more flashy and fancy than all the bikes I had before, because it is a Mountainbike. Those are obviously not necessary in the Netherlands, but here they are. University and downtown are on hills and my house is in the valley between them. Anywhere I go, I arrive very tired. But after a long day at university I just get on my bike and I am home in no time and with no effort. Unfortunately the hill university is on is very steep, so me and my bike get very fast on the way down. Stay tuned for news on upcoming accidents :P

Apart from buying my bike, this week was a very busy week for AIESEC. We got our shirts, the last two days were clubdays, so I was standing in the University Centre all day having people walking past and saying: "Oh, you're from AIESEC. You were in my class the other day/someone told me about you/I saw it on the internet and I want to join." It was very easy and at the moment it seems like it was also very successful. Before the clubdays I was sending out emails, making posters and doing classroom presentations. And, the most special marketing thing I ever did: we wrote AIESEC things with chalk all over Campus. It all was a lot of fun, but I realize today how tiring it also is.  

So I'm glad it's weekend and I have two days when I don't have to bike up the hill and can do what I want to. Read, go to the farmers market, go to the movies, go running at the river oh and Krista wants to take me to a Cowboy's bar tomorrow. I might stage a bike-accident to avoid that. And I am soooooo excited about next week, when we have infosessions and the first General Meeting of the semester and I will discover if my work payed off and we actually get members. All the Vice Presidents are curious about how it will be if we are actually having other people to do all the things we're doing on ourselves right now.

Unfortunately Guelph is not a very exciting place, so I don't have really exciting things to tell. I almost gave up hope that that will ever change. 

The All-Canadian Tourist XP

Finally, things start to get busy in Guelph. Summer vacation is over, the students are back in town and every night they are drunk-walking past my window to go out downtown. It also has a lot of positive effects, and they clearly outweigh the annoyance of nightly noises: my real AIESEC-work started!

On wednesday, we had our first booth during the orientation week resource fair and we talked to a lot of first-year students and told them what it was all about and why they should join AIESEC. I hope to see some of the back at our info sessions next week. I also made a classroom presentation (which I won't be able to use in some cases, because the classrooms here don't always have projectors, another little culture shock for me) and emailed a lot of professors and did many other different things to ensure next week everything runs smoothly. It feels very good to be busy again. And to have more people around - the number of people I know in Guelph probably tripled this week.

And even more reasons to be happy: this weekend I did a lot of things that were on my to-do list in Canada: visit Toronto, an Icehockey-match, the Niagara Falls and the US. Martijn, a friend from AIESEC in the Netherlands who is on an internship in Ottawa right now came to visit me and we played tourists. On friday we went to Toronto and explored the city. Absolute HIGHlight (haha) was the CN-Tower, a very very tall tower (553m). The elevator girl said their top platform is the highest viewpoint in the world, but then in the leaflet it says it does not hold the record anymore, so I am not sure what to believe. Truth is: it is freaking high. Weather was not really good, on nice days one can see 100 kms. They also have a glass floor in the middle deck. That was very very scary. I did not feel really comfortable up there, but it was definitely an experience. There are not so many other exciting sights in Toronto, so we visited Lake Ontario, the Rogers Centre and the old and the new City Hall and just walked around. It's a nice, huge city, but I was not as impressed as I was by Montreal. It's a sort Rotterdam. Even comes with the tower. We had to head back early in the afternoon, because another highlight was planned for the evening: The Guelph Storms played against Brampton Batallion, another local icehockey team. They were handing out free tickets during the resource fair, it was a great opportunity. The match itself was not very spectacular, since it was pre-season. The mean Me would have liked to see some more fighting going on, but I liked the atmosphere and the experience. Although my nose got cold.

The next day we had another adventure awaiting us: the Niagara Falls. Going by bus via nice places like Hamilton and St. Cathrines, we arrived there around noon. And I was officially impressed. Even though the Falls are not as tall as the one I saw in Quebec, they are much wider and because there are rocks under one of them, you get way more wet. We did not enter the city of Niagara Falls, which is basically a big Carnival for all the tourists. They have some quite impressive buildings and I have heard of the haunted houses, but that was not really necessary. What really was necessary for me was going to the USA, since it was only a bridge away. Very exciting. Leaving fingerprints and everything. And I learned the correct answer to: "Why are you coming to the US?" is not: "We just want to cross the border." Once we explained the "true" reason for our visit, to watch the Falls from the American side, we just had to pay 6$ and there we were in the country of unlimited possibilities. Our "true" reason was a lie by the way, because the view of the Falls is much better from the Canadian side. After running back from the US to catch our bus, we travelled back to Guelph via Toronto. And it was not over yet: since we hadn't seen "The Dark Night" and many people have told me to see it we went to the movies with Brett and Krista. And for the second time of the day I was officially impressed. I had high expectations and they were not disappointed at all. For some reason I had difficulties taking a Batman movie serious as a truly good movie, but I learnt better.

After all this exhausting activities Martijn and I just had coffee today and hung out at the Café of the bookstore in Guelph (I am very excited about discovering it, since it is really nice) and when he left I caught up on my AIESEC work and discovered the new facebook, which I by the way strongly dislike. It looks as if they got it inspired from Office 2007 (which I like, but not for facebook!!!). Anyways, it is dark outside again, the student crowds walk past my window and I will also go out now to the to see an Indian movie with Whitney and then sleep and next week find a lot of new AIESECers.

Home, sweet home - II

I am back from my petite voyage to the lovely province of Quebec. Those were fun times and it was a bit sour to return to Guelph, even though I should be considering it my home sweet home now. I almost burnt down the home sweet home by making toast with our medieval toaster. I was in my room when I heard the fire alarm going off, the whole kitchen and living room where covered in smoke :) Luckily there was no fire and the toaster still works.

Right after my last entry in Montreal, Nikolai came to pick me up from the café where I was in and we climbed Mont Royal, the mountain/hill of Montreal. Laila and I were very lazy and Nikolai had to kick our asses various times in order to make us go up to the highest point, but I am still deeply thankful to him that he did, because the view was amazing. We had no real plans for the night, so after we climbed down the mountain again we decided it would be fun to crash the Executive Board meeting of AIESEC Concordia. Courtney, our host for the last two days is LCP there, so we knew where and when to find it. Unfortunately the meeting extended over three hours, since it was their recruitment planning meeting and we were there, hungry and eventually also getting bored. Still it was very very useful to me, because I can consider everything I heard there in my own planning. Since we were all exhausted after the meeting and it was already midnight we just went home, discussed some global issues and fellow AIESECers and went to sleep.

On Saturday, Nikolai went to visit the Olympic Stadium and the Biodome but I had enough of the touristy stuff and decided to enjoy myself in the shops downtown. I got myself some nice new black shoes and some other small things I really needed. I think I was just overwhelmed with the variety and quantity of stuff there is to buy, that's why I couldn't just shop randomly. Too many things. A long street, full of stores, which already amazed me, but when I took a closer look, there appeared to be a several malls behind this front row of stores. So after three hours of gazin at stuff I gave up, also because shops in Montreal close at 5pm on saturdays. WTF!
So I went home, cooked a nice dinner for me and the guys and we started to get ready for Montreal nightlife. A crazy metro ride (chasing each other through the different wagons of the metro) lead us to the village, the gay part of Montreal where we went to Sky (that's what I think it was called, I have trouble remembering :P), a gay bar, but according to Courtney it's half gay half straight people there. I believe I haven't seen many straight people, but never mind. We had a lot of fun. For details, please skype, e-mail or facebook me.

Unfortunately I could only get two hours of sleep and was kind of messed up when I got up to go to the airport, it was also later then I planned. My flight was okay, I didn't feel too well. Still, Canada looks amazing from an airplane, because there is a lot of fascinating landscape, tons of lakes and forests. Since I was flying with Porter Airlines, I didn't arrive at Pearson, but at the downtown airport of Toronto, which is located on an island. Landing I had an amazing view of Toronto. I took the metro and then the Greyhound back to Guelph, where I went to bed, dressed as I was. So much for my Montreal adventures. I love the city and the people there and I think I'll pay it another visit before I leave Canada.

Being back in Guelph was a bit boring in the beginning, but I have watched a lot of Sabrina and got everything prepared for recruitment which will start tomorrow. I am very very exciting and hope we will find a lot of people to join AIESEC. I think I am the best proof of how much fun it is. Tomorrow I'll also have my first meeting with the Executive Board here. Exciting!!!!