Life in the Old Country

So sorry ar, I wrote this entry earlier this week but forgot to post it...

It's now been a month since I've been home and I guess I should update before I start doing new things and the thought of updating becomes daunting.

The flight feels like yeeeaaarrrssss ago, but from what I can recall, it was long, exhausting, and I started to go a little crazy by the end of it. On the final two-hour flight from Toronto to Halifax, I had been awake for upwards of 50 hours straight. In the past, people have told me stories of flying back to Halifax from Toronto or Montreal and the weather conditions being so bad that the plane had to turn around and go back. My plan for if this happened was to hijack the plane and make them land.

I sat next to a man and a woman on that flight who were documentary-makers. They offered to buy me an alcoholic drink. I think they thought I had already been drinking (too much air travel makes you start to go crazy). I asked them to help me do a cryptic crossword puzzle and remember blatantly made up all of the answers that I didn't know. When we got to the airport, my brother was late to pick me up and they offered me a ride into town. They were there to make a documentary on microcredit.

Strangely enough, on my first weekend home, Halifax, Nova Scotia, hosted the world conference on microcredit. Funnier yet, no one talked about it. This was an international conference featuring a recent Nobel prize-winner from Bangladesh. It was discussed on the news worldwide. In Halifax, I picked up a newspaper on the day of the conference and the main article on the front page read something like "Digby Man gets Lost in the Woods" and had a picture of a crying woman... That's all people want to read about here, and maybe that's ok.

Although the pace of life here is slow, the weather moves extraordinarily fast and makes it feel like time is flying by. I arrived in the depths of the chilly autumn nights, saw the leaves turn colours, fall out of the trees and disappear. I saw the weather continue to get colder, freezing rain turn into snow and the city turn white. I saw ice cover the roads, and cars and busses that didn't have their snowtires on crash into each other. Then, I saw it warm up again, saw the snow melt away, and I could once again go jogging without mittens. And that was all just in the first couple of weeks.

So, I spent my first month here unemployed. After a few months of seven-day workweeks in Japan, I was happy to take some time to relax. Everyday, my routine went like so:
-Get woken up by my mother at 8:30am.
-Go jogging.
-Eat fresh fruit, granola, yogurt and honey for breakfast.
-Make my way downtown to get some coffee (Starbucks opened here while I was gone, though I'm already sick of it from Japan).
-Eat more delicious Canadian food.
-Study for a few hours.
-Eat more food.
-Join my family for supper.
-Eat dessert.
-Meet some friends for socializing.
-Check my e-mail.
-Go to sleep.
Then it started all over again. It was great. I have since joined the gym and am trying to cut down on the eating, but it's tough. Canadian food is just so delicious... Have I ever told you about cookies?

But that was November. Now that we've gotten into December, life has changed. The week before last, I started going for job interviews. I was offered the first one I went to and accepted. On Monday, I started my new career as... an English teacher! I think it's a great career change. Actually, things are quite different from Japan. I teach the same seven students everyday. Wait, I'm going to start a new paragraph about this.

I have seven students: three Koreans, three Mexicans and one Saudi Arabian girl. As it turns out, Koreans are the same as Japanese people, so I had nothing to worry about with them. They kept asking me if I'd tried different kinds of Korean food and the answer was always no. I laughed since it was the same thing Japanese people would do, but more ridiculous because no one eats Korean food. My only problem with them is that I can't pronounce or remember their names. Oh, and I also don't like their names.

I was a little bit scared of the Saudi Arabian girl for two reasons. First of all, she was wearing a burqa, the kind for which you can only see her eyes and the bridge of her nose. Secondly, they warned me that I have to avoid partnering her up with the three male students, that I have to avoid inappropriate subjects around her, and that I have to avoid any close contact with her whatsoever (because of my gender). After teaching her, though, she was pretty good. She participated in class and I think I may have even sensed a smile out of her (though I can't confirm without peeking into her burqa).

So the Koreans and the Saudi Arabian were fine. But who were the trouble-makers? You guessed it, the Mexican girls. Mexicans. They spoke in Spanish to each other and heckled throughout class, even though there are only seven people there. Sometimes it was funny, but with all the other serious students in class, it was just inappropriate. They were each instructed to ask me one question. The good students asked me about things like my age, where I was born, etc. One of the Mexican girls, for her question, shouted out "Erica wants to know what is your phone number!" as the other girl smacked her in the stomach. Haha, so spirited. All in all, I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with this kind of diversity.

December, as I told you last year, is the most exciting month of the year. It involves the coming of winter, New Years Eve, my birthday, Christmas, and, even better, the coming of Christmas. This past weekend the Christmas festivities started off when my mother, brother and I drove out to the countryside to cut down a Christmas tree. We may have cut down nature's most elegant pine. Not really, but it's fine. Later that day, I went to a friend's house to keep up a five-year-old tradition of building gingerbread houses. We cover gingerbread with icing, plaster it with candy, eat too much sugar, listen to Christmas music and drink hot apple cider. I usually pass out on the couch by the end of the evening. The design gets more elaborate each year and this year we pushed for the house to be surrounded by a "graham cracker village", including a graham cracker pet shop and a graham cracker skyscraper of three stories called "Christmas Towers". What a town.

This Saturday I turn 24. As a friend of mine pointed out on her blog, this heaves me into my unsettling, yet respectable, mid-twenties. Uh oh, my biological clock is ticking. Should I start having children?

Finally, I convinced my family, this year, to celebrate Hanukkah. Hanukkah is an age-old tradition, I'm told, that is celebrated by... Jewish people? Anyway, it goes for something like eight or nine days and starts on Friday the 15th. My family doesn't seem very excited about it yet, but they haven't received their yarmakas yet. I hear Santa may be shopping for a special dreidel for a special brother of mine this week.

Well, it's 11am and I have to get up to go to work. You will hear from me once more for my Japan Summary post. It might be a while, but continue what you've been doing and keep checking in numerous times per day.

Ryan