Weekend in TO

Jorghnassen posed for a shot, dedicated to both Ms. Rachel, and my cousins at the same time. ;)

Jorgh also posed for another shot that is reminiscent of another one from England:

Contrast to this:


We also were treated to some Chinese New Year supper, courtesy of my cousins.


The trip could not be rounded off without a visit to get some asian provisions. This time Jorghnassen visited the infamous Chinese malls in Markham. This particular moment was pure *triumph.*

Notice that I didn't have to run over *anyone* to park that close to the building.

A Can of Worms? Open?

To my relief, I secured a part-time job teaching math at a private high school outside of Waterloo, with Jorghnassen's help, starting in early January. The details of the job are still lacking, but the major detail in my quest for sanity has been more or less fulfilled. On the other hand, it caused a much bigger "deal" than it fixed: zero public transit and a 20 km commute.

I had thought of every single possible way I could get there on a regular basis.

Carpooling would be the most obvious one (and most feasible) if only I had asked the principal when he offered me the job; but I was only given his cell number and it apparently costs a crapton for him to use it for incoming calls... thus I am still rather reluctant on calling him through that number again. (And I know what you are going to say, so don't say it and stop saying it!)

Someone suggested getting a bike; cheap and ideal, but I loathe to find out what kind of physical shape I am in right now. Last summer, it took me 2 hours to travel 20+ km uphill, and 1 hour to roll it downhill.

Car sharing is great, but would run up quite a bill for daily commuting, compared to the final option:

Buying a car.

(The absolutely, unquestionably retarded option my mum demanded from me, despite it not being her decision, was that I take a cab every single day until I "matured" enough to know enough about cars to get one, which would take at least a year, and even then she told me I was "too stupid" to own a car. I won't even begin on ranting on the stupidity of this.)

I thought of buying a scooter or car as the absolute last option (barring the above), as I know probably less about scooters and cars than anyone I know, and I have the most overbearing, insane family of anyone I know. Fortunately, as I am the most inept of all my acquaintances, I have the option of asking advice from everyone else. And here are a few nuggets!

Rachel's brother, Pat, who had accompanied us to Bwawston, works with and studies in cars, and has a classmate who could probably locate a suitable used auto. He also offered to service it in his school. This would be in Montreal.

Ian has prevoiusly advised me to buy in Ontario, as the transfer between provinces would cost more than it was worth, but as I was uncertain whether I had time to do that before the job started, I opted for the former.

Shhh! told me that car dealerships would take care of everything in a pretty timely manner, and that it was well worth it for him.

Davy said to look into cheap enough cars within $3000 (if I could only think the costs would end at $3000 :( ).

And alas, I know naught about scooters except deep-voiced Eugene has one that he commutes with in Ottawa to the bus station. Though scooters seem quite cute. :)

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To excuse my absence, I have been helping Jorghnassen fix up his presentation for his Ph.D. defense last Monday. Which he then passed with flying colours!

Bwawston

Jin! Jiiiiiiiiiin! Bwawston. Bwawston. Bwaaaaawston... Schouwa... schouwa...

To fully appreciate this hilarity, you have to follow this story.

Rachel, her brother Pat, and I took a weekend trip to Boston (that inadvertently led me to a week-long trip away from Quebec City). Since I had never taken a real trip to the states, I thought it would give me a good opportunity to experience the Real American Way of Life and discover why people seem to characterise americans the way they do.

The roads are absolutely wonderful. Our pathetic rented PT Cruiser experienced nothing but potholes and rocky stretches of Quebec bacon-for-roads. We spent half an hour waiting at the border going to the states, and then suddenly all the asphalt smoothed itself out like a bedsheet after a restless night.

Our drive through Vermont was quaint and picturesque. It seems that the highway cuts through the sides of green hills overlooking lush valleys dotted with farms and cows. New Hampshire was pretty much the same, and it was a hop and a skip to Massachusetts. (I don't think I've learned so much american geography over the years as I did in the last two days, but I suppose that's what happens when you travel.)

Boston is a very nondescript place if you're not looking for it. The distinct New England style houses and buildings don't make it stand out so much, as much as if a certain someone would stop and actually let me get out and look at them.... The massive underground highway project aptly named the Big Dig doesn't stick out from the skyline (not that it should anyway). The most exciting eye candy of the city is a large white bridge leading into it, composed of thick wires and probably kryptonite as far as I know, glowing eerily into the night. Actually, I didn't get to see much of Boston, having only spent half a day sightseeing at the Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market.

Jin told us that the Bwawstonians don't pronounce Faneuil as we French-literate would (fan-oeil') but like some twisted, half-blind anglos would (fan'-iel... rhyming with Daniel).

On Saturday, we were treated to a breakfast at the IHOP, not at all because Jin doesn't have food at her home since I had arrived with two dozen St-Viateur bagels... but rather because she doesn't eat at home regularly. Considering that she doesn't really know how to cook (ok, not at all), we went out for every single meal.

The waitress was a very portly but charming woman, who would respond to each of our requests with a very Bwawstonian "Schouwa!"

"Can I have the whole wheat pancakes?" I asked.
"Schouwa! What can I get for you to drink?"
"Uh, some water please?"
"Schouwa!"

So to sum up the dining experiences in Boston, the portions are grotesquely and ridiculously enormous. The IHOP pancakes came in a stack of FOUR, and they are just as large as the pancakes I make, and probably 50% thicker. Rachel and I could only finish about 2 of our 4 pancakes each, and we were ready to explode. Every single other food place we visited gave us about 50% to 100% more than a normal serving size here. We had split a two-person meal at a portugese restaurant that could have easily fed a family of four. Nonetheless, the food is excellent and reasonably priced, but it's a pity that the american way of thinking of "value for money" trumps "giving reasonably sized portions without excess."

Jin also mentioned that her parents thought she had gained ten pounds since she arrived in Boston (which she had). Though she's as thin as a beanpole so ten pounds doesn't show at all.

A lot of our time was spent shopping. (Jin. 'nuff said.) The sales tax is 5% but doesn't apply to purchases of clothing or food below $175 I belive. So to sum up, it would have been advantageous to buy things in Massachusetts if not for the rate of exchange and all the other costs that we accumulated just to get to a place to shop. (We would have broke even, but I don't really like shopping anyway.) We went to a massive outlet mall on Sunday that was crawling with SUVs and other large vehicles, in the middle of nowhere. Rachel bought two watches, one for Pat. I bought a watch for Jorgh. Jin bought a metric ton of stuff including six or seven similar shirts and other things that I've forgotten already because we spent 7 hours at the place and my brain cells were just as fried as both my knees and feet.

But the highlight of that Sunday was the visit to Cracker Barrel. We had yet another breakfast/lunch at this place, where we were exposed to the peculiar homestyle favourite "Dumplins," composed of flour and probably goo. The young waitress had a habit of peppering her waitressing with "awesome"s. But the real gem of the experience was the gift shop.

Since there's usually a long wait time between tables, the ingenious management incorporated "old style item gift shop" concept in the same building. They sold various crafts and gadgets, candies, decorations, and toys. One particular toy was an electronic toucan that twice repeated whatever was said towards it in a higher pitch. So when Rachel saw this, she told me to fetch Jin and she would speak into the toy and let Jin listen to it.

"Jin! Jin! Hi, Jin!" it squaked. Jin started laughing. "We're in Bwawston. Bwawston... Bwawston..." and it went on.

Then Rachel went a bit further and the bird then squacked the infamous line:

"JIN! JIIIIN! JIII-IIIN!!! Bwawston. Bwawston. Schouwa. Schouwaaa... Faniel! Faniel!"

The best part was that the rest of the day, we would tease her with more gems like "But Jin, why couldn't you convince them otherwise? We thought you were a loyah!" Bwawston loyah. Yeah.

Finally, that evening we had supper at another restaurant but Jin wanted to pay for all our meals. We insisted on us paying our own parts, but she didn't want our money. So I said, "Jin, if you don't then we'll just have to make you take it!"

So Rachel, Pat and I squaked JIIINs, Bwawstons, Schouwas and other terribly accented things for another 15 minutes until Jin squealed out that she gave up. By that point, I was laughing so hard that I was tearing up and couldn't breathe properly, rolling around on the table. The other restaurant patrons were giving us weird looks as we were leaving but I couldn't help myself.

To sum up my trip, I learned that the culture of excess reputation is not at all unwarranted, and it was great fun to bug Jin all weekend.

Tomorrow I will be heading to Waterloo with Jorghnassen for his talk, and we'll be returning home (myself to Quebec City) on Friday afternoon.

Arigato, minna-san!

Attribute the absence of posts during long weekends to travelling.

I had some great moments this weekend. One was jamming with Davy on his gui-tars in his fantastic loft downtown Montreal. Not that I know how to jam on a guitar. Jorghnassen kareoked to Davy's strummin' to the oldies. He also invited us to taste the 99% chocolate-with-warning that left some of us (Jorgh and I) quite shocked at its profound... cocoa-ness.

Related to this thought, we made brownies this morning before I came back to Quebec. After a few chunks of semi-sweet melded with oil, flour, eggs, sugar, and even more oil, I wondered why one cannot eat the baking chocolate in a similar fashion as mentioned above. Of course, the answer lies in the fat content and the nature of the product. I also discovered that the cheaper the chocolate, the less you're likely to enjoy it. (Case in point: milk chocolate Easter bunny priced at 89c ... before Easter.)

I also had a nice Schwartz lunch with friends yesterday, followed by a pretty entertaining game of Cranium. Unfortunately, Jorgh and I were an over-powerful team, since we had the greatest factor of communication between ourselves (6 years of experience and counting) compared to Johanne and Rachel's teams that knew each other for barely 5 months. Also, Johanne's boyfriend Francis was clearly more francophone than his anglophone game-handling skills could compete with, which did lead to many hilarious moments for which we all did applaud in merriment and good show. (Push versus pull?)

My most unfortunate change of plans was to discover that the learning center cancelled my Thursday and Friday dates, but wanted me to come in tomorrow. SEE BELOW. Unfortunately this message was left on the answering machine on Friday when I had already left Quebec (and my mum only told me in the evening), and today is a holiday. I hastily left a message on their machine Friday evening from Montreal... So they will probably already have either someone else scheduled for tomorrow, or I will find out in the morning if they confirm this message.

EDIT: No, my mum misheard. It's 2 Tuesdays from now, not tomorrow.

Year-End Update

Dear all,

Amid turkey leftovers, guest-receiving, chocolate overdoses, a new washer arrival, and a terrible, terrible mess to clean up from the delivery, I'm having a wonderful holiday. It lasts for another week, or two, or whenever. As it so happens, my long vacation is a result of a good and/or bad thing - being a supply teacher.

Anyway, I would like to start to end this year's blogging by trying to remind myself what happened over 2005. Uh...

January

Continued to work at the school. Constant reminders of why teaching is a hit-and-miss game pop up everywhere. Also, January tends to be the most depressing month due to nothing happening.

February

Ivo comes to visit and cheers me up immensely. :):):) ... Winter is also starting to look less ugly due to my first trip to the tubing place. Stupid shit happens with the landlord.

March

Nagging thoughts over purpose of obtaining two degrees.

April

The Pope dies. Why is this such a big event to me, I'm not even sure anymore... Waves of strike days further disturb the regularity of the school year at the school, not to mention the teacher turnovers during the year.

May

More of my strike escapades. 3/4 of the school disappears to the wild for a character-building camping trip, while the leftovers like myself are stranded at school to fend for ourselves.

June

Exam corrections, and biking diversions pepper my month. The anniversary of my father's death still hurts.

July

Trip to Cowtown and environs. Weddings strengthen the family bonds. Got to see Wesley. :D Also, got to meet the psycho vampire dog Bobo. :|

August

Disappointed with myself not getting a job for the school year. :( Nonetheless, I made a vow to continue working in Quebec.

September

Amazing training to run 5 km! Well, not really that amazing. I turn 25. Does that mean I'm just an old baby?

October

Amazingly completed the run. @_@ Also, amazingly obtained a driver's licence. @______@ Also, the start of a long supply teaching run...

November

Continued the long supply teaching run. Happily, it means that I shouldn't be as worried as the summer to obtain a job, hopefully for the reasons I'm thinking of. The word "pancake" keeps popping up. Eddie's grandma passes away. :(

December

Birth of PJ the 3rd. :) Along the same lines, I learned the virtues of ordering things online. The possible start of crazy buying sprees... Felix and Rachel separately visit for the holiday break. :D:D:D

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Jorgh visits me every month or so. I also go to Montreal every so often to shower him with gifts and/or food. I mean "and."

I met many interesting people and had lots of memorable experiences. I keep reading more and more manga when I should actually try to read real books, but I find pictures and stories more attractive. Might this be the real start of a different path?

Run with Us

T-10; 11:27 + 10 minutes. - picked up garbage again in the same damn spot. + inspirational words from Rachel :)

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Oh hell yeah!