A very cold welcome

Hey there :) It has been a crazy week since I arrived in Canada and all the city-walking, hikes, struggling through the mounts of snow and cold have made an old injury return; my knee is giving out in pain. So, I have currently been put on a day of bed rest (aka lay in bed and let your friends feed you and do your shopping while you just watch movies). A perfect moment to take some time and share some memories with you.

Just before the turn of the year I got on my plane to set foot in this country that stole my heart during family vacation 5 years ago, but this time not just for two months of relaxing vacation. It is gonna be four months of diehard studying (uhuh for the parents that are reading this), and hopefully quite some days off for exploring the East Coast. The days before my flight, media all the way over in Europe blasted news of unknown freezing temperatures and a fully frozen country, what a luck...

The first week here can indeed be summed up by painful freezing cold and breathtaking frozen views, but it has been a warm welcome nonetheless. The 8hour flight went by without any bumps, sitting in-between the window showing snowy sights of Greenland and Northern Canada 10 kilometres underneath and two very kind Canadian guys giving me the first headsups about surviving in the cold (basically just wear clothes when you have to go outside). After having been sternly questioned about my purpose of visit and a whole range of questions on the study and a minor heart attack that my luggage went missing (they lost one of the luggage cars somewhere in the airport which ofcourse contained my suitcase), and the realisation that I managed to forget to bring my jacket ánd scarf to a country of -20 degrees, I could finally enter the cold. The first five days we spent with a group from our masters in the global city of Toronto. Despite being able to walk outside for an hour atmost, we were able to get to see all the interesting sites of Downtown Centre; lots of small castle-like churches, the huge underground shopping district with international food-truck markets, the old distillery district that looked like Santa Claus' personal North Pole factory, Toronto Island by ferry which broke just a day later by hitting the ice (sounds an awful lot like Titanic eh, the people living on the Island can now only leave and enter through their small airport), A-MA-ZING sunset skyline views of the city there, all the different nationality districts e.g. chinatown, koreatown, kensington market for the artists (colourful but basically just a complete mess) , the steam whistle brewery across the (in my opinion surprisingly ugly) proud landmark CN Tower and much more. In this country no house is the same as the ones next to it, giving the city a personal and intimate look. However, this cozy image was disturbed by the many homeless people freezing in front of the huge bank-towers in the rich financial district. Despite, the welfare in Canada, homeless people continue to fill the streets of big cities. It's a miracle none of them died this week. Not only homeless people are common here, also huge number of immigrants from all over the world (mainly Asia and Mexico) have settled in Canada. The Chinese completely take over the streets in big parts of the city, which almost made it feel weird to be white. The experience during our New Years Eve party was like that as well. After quite some hassle to reach the right street by taxi (at that point it felt like -40degrees outside and we were obliged to wear dresses and panties to enter) we found the club entrance in a dark backstreet. We were told that the coat check was already filled since everyone had put on their big furs and there was no room for more. Still, after bringing the sweet lady a free drink from the bar she made some room for us, and then we entered the club... completely filled with Indian people. That delivered us a night of weird Indian dancemoves, to music we had never heard of and with beers that cost us a fortune because these people here never ever drink alcohol (8dollars for one Heineken...) and to top that off at exactly midnight they started playing the Dutch "Nederland o Nederland, wij zijn de kampioeeen". How it happened, no-one knows, but at least we started 2018 laughing really hard.

At Wednesday, it was time to move to our new homes in Hamilton so after a last good Canadian/English breakfast (muffins, eggs, bacon, beans, toast, fruit) we left the hostel. Canada is used to snow and handles it pretty well: kilos of salt are thrown on the roads, completely cracking them up but making it able for vehicles to continue their not very friendly driving (overtaking on the right and speeding are quite normal, although everyone does neatly stop for crossing people). At the same time, they don't care about the sidewalks causing poor carless people like us to plow through the snow all day. And doing that with 30 kilos of luggage in a suitcase? Not funny! We finally got to our house and dragged all our stuff up a steep staircase, only to found out that we had entered a random wrong appartment and creeped out the residents there. It was time for some luck and friendly Canadian help. Luckily, our landlord turned out to be exactly that. For two days he took us around shopping, buying stuff we wanted to cozy up our home, showing us the city, the best places to get coffee and canadian foods, to iceskate and views from the surrounding mountains, frozen waterfalls and luxury villas. Why? Well, he just likes meeting new people and helping his tenants out. People here say sorry when you bump into them, they help pack your groceries at the supermarket and they make kind smalltalk when you pass them on the streets. O, I can definitely get used to this absurd friendliness.

Yesterday, our housecrew (Chris, Lisa and me) decided it was a good idea to check off the first tourist attraction on our list as soon as we could. So the three hour bus ride (public transportation is actually surprisingly cheap here) to the supposedly frozen Niagara falls began.. on a Saturday.. with temperatures falling to -35.. Ofcourse, the attraction was crazy busy filled with tourists, lining up to get the best selfie and driving past in queue doing alternative drive-by shootings for people who could not stand the cold enough to get out. Within the hour it took us to walk past the river and the falls even our eyebrows and wimpers were frozen and physical feelings had left us. But the views were more than worth it. Simply frozen natural violence. Even though the main HorseShoe Falls were still plunging into depth, there were big chunks of ice in it, there was a solid ice/snow bridge over the river towards the US (in previous era's this icebridge was a free tourist attraction with market stands and people crossing it to reach the other side, untill ofcourse one year in 1912 the bridge broke and peoples deaths were horribly recorded so no free entrance for us) and some of the 'smaller' side-falls were almost completely frozen. Big layers of ice covered the trees, and the lampposts and everything else outside creating a true winterland. After we had warmed ourselves up with an old-fashioned big American burger and pitcher beer, we were ready to enter the landscape by night (ofcourse getting lost and making a big detour throughout what seemed a spooky isolated village) to make it back to our warm beds.

And damn the beds are warm here. For some reason, the Canadians have the tendency to heat up their homes and public buildings to a boiling 25 degrees. A big contrast with the minus 25 degrees outside and being dressed up in 25 layers of clothes that has caused some sweaty moments already. It probably explains why the Canadians simply don't know or sell thermo clothes, they just stay inside (or in their cars) all day. They also don't know teatowels, or turning water-knobs (it's a weird North-East-South-West pushing system everywhere), or Andrélon (my hair will not survive this cold without my favorite shampoo and conditioner by my side) or cauliflower (you cán find it in the supermarket though if you look for it really hard and are prepared to pay the high prize) and I could go on for a while with the small funny weird things we have noticed. But the overall thing I noticed? Canada, a good country to live in with their love for nature and snowy scenes and friendly people that have lend us a hand. A very cold but warm welcome after all.