The volunteer workshop and some much needed sleep

As I was working until 11 PM yesterday and consequently only went to sleep around 1 AM, getting up at 6:30 AM was pretty tough this morning. Nevertheless, I had to get up since I wanted to go to the volunteer workshop at the Beacon Hill Farm.
I managed to be there at 8:30 AM. The workshop was mostly just a short explanation of all the important buildings and tools on the farm as well as the rules we need to follow. After that, we visited all of the animals and signed up for our first real shift. The most interesting fact I learned was that the peacocks which you can find all over the farm and Beacon Hill Park actually don't belong to the farm - they are considered wild animals and just take shelter in the farm grounds.
I also met and taked a lot with Xue (which means Snow) from Shanghai, who moved here a bit more than a year ago to live with her Canadian husband. After the workshop had ended at 10 AM, I walked to the bus station together with Xue and then took the next bus home. Since I was out of bread, I also made a quick stop at the bakery.
After arriving home I went straight to bed to sleep some more. I actually slept until 3 PM which was probably a good thing since work was quite exhausting again tonight. After I got up from my nap, I only took a shower and cooked some dinner before I got ready to take the bus to Downtown once again in order to go to work.
We were quite busy at work tonight, which was nice because it made the time go by faster. As I had to wait 20 minutes for my bus home, I walked to the harbour and took a nice picture of the Parliament Buildings by night.

Dim Sum

Today I met with Kathy, my coworker, and Robert, a friend of hers, in order to eat some chinese lunch. We ate 'Dim Sum',  an array of Cantonese style snacks, at the 'Don Mee Restaurant' in China Town. The food was quite good, we tried a lot of different dishes like ribs, spring rolls, rice with chicken, preserved egg congee (rice soup), egg tart and more. It was all quite tasty and the way they served the food was quite unique: Instead of ordering your dishes, you could just choose any dish from a trolley cart brought by your table by a waitress. So you could actually see your food before choosing it - although seeing your food didn't guarantee that you actually knew what kind of food you had chosen.
After we finished eating, we decided to walk to Beacon Hill Park. As we walked past one of the little statues of hands that I had found earlier, I told Robert and Kathy about them. They were intrigued and I ended up showing 8 of those statues to Kathy and Robert on the way to the park. Even though both of them have been living in Victoria a lot longer than me, they hadn't known about the hands before. As I was showing them around most of the time, they joked that I should become a tour guide.
We also had a really nice time at the park, Robert was telling us a bit about the local trees. You can find a lot of Garry Oak trees which preferably grow in dry areas in the Beacon Hill park.

As I still wanted to relax a bit at home before working the late shift again, we took a bus back to Downtown around 3 PM. I bought some milk and a few raspberries at the local grocery store before taking another bus to bring me straight home. As I arrived around 4 PM, I still had about two hours to relax and eat some dinner before I had to leave again for work.

Mount Tolmie and the Finnerty Gardens

As I didn't have to work before 6:30 PM today, I decided to go out and do something in the afternoon. The weather wasn't too good, even though the sun was sometimes showing, it was also raining a little every few minutes. Nevertheless, I left around 1 PM and took a bus that brought me close to Mount Tolmie. Mount Tolmie isn't much more than a big hill, but as it is rather close to where I live, it seemed like a good option. After walking uphill through a quiet neighborhood for about 15 minutes, I already reached the top, which offered me a nice view of Victoria, the ocean and Mount Doug. I wasn't too impressed though, so I started to hike down after a few minutes. The walk down was a bit more interesting since I could take some more remote hiking routes. The landscape looked rather dry and there wasn't too much too see.
When I arrived at the bottom, I crossed a street to get to a park area adjacent to the University of Victoria. After walking a few metres, I spotted two deers, one of them was male and the second one seemed to be rather young. There were several people walking past the deers but no one seemed to notice them - maybe they are just a very common sight for Canadians. I still enjoyed watching them for a while until they fled because of a dog walking nearby.
The Finnerty Gardens were my next stop: A nicely designed university garden with a huge diversity of beautiful plants and flowers. Walking through the garden really lifted my spirits up, which had been down due to the weather today. Apart from all the flowers, I also saw a small, cute rabbit and several birds and butterflies. I guess this garden might become one of my favourite places here in Victoria!

As the weather was still rather changeable, I decided to leave for now and took the next bus back home.
I spent the late afternoon relaxing at home before having to go to work in the evening.

The Shaw Centre for the Salish Sea

Today I took a bus to Sidney, a little town north of Victoria. I was meeting Pam, Dave's wife whom I had met shortly a few weeks ago, and together we wanted to check out the Shaw Centre for the Salish Sea, an aquarium featuring local species.
The setup of the aquarium was really cool, they made you think that you were going underwater in some kind of submarine. There were many different kinds of jellyfish, sea stars, sea urchins, crabs, prawns, anemones, shells, fish and so much more. Even though the aquarium wasn't too big, we spent a few hours there watching and marvelling at all the diversity of the marine animals.
Afterwards, we walked a bit through Sidney. Sidney is a really small town and you can walk from one end of the town to the other end in just a few minutes. At least Sidney is a little bigger than Tofino and has more different things to offer.
We shared a spinach, feta and chicken pizza for 'lunch' (well it was already around 4 PM so we had missed lunchtime due to our visit to the aquarium).

Soon after that I took the bus back to Victoria and made a short stop in Downtown Victoria to buy some bread and vegetables before going home.
I spent the evening at home taking a shower, cooking rice with vegetables for dinner and watching two more episodes of 'White Collar' with Katrina.

'Sorry, we don't sell children...'

Today was just another day of work - I had to work from 1 PM to 9:30 PM, so there wasn't much time to do anything interesting before or after work except for watching an episode of White Collar with Katrina before going to bed.
Work itself was pretty exhausting again, especially since it was the third day in a row of working a long shift. I had several tasks to do (restocking and sorting name pens, checking zippers and hangers, tidying up the store) and was running half the store on my own for the last four hours, so at least work wasn't boring today.
There was one funny incident when a woman asked me if we also had children. I knew what she was actually looking for - clothes for children - but I couldn't help but answer 'Well we don't have children, but we do have clothes for children, if that is what you're looking for'. The customer found it quite funny herself and remarked that I had been listening well.

The little differences

After work, I wasn't really up to doing anything anymore - I had to work the early shift starting at 9 AM after having worked until 9:30 PM yesterday, so I was quite exhausted.
As I  still wanted to write about something today, I decided to write a little article on the little differences between life in Canada and in Germany instead of going out.

Let's start with the appearance of the cities here in Canada - and the US for that matter. Most streets are organised in some kind of grid and they are all very long - it is not unusual to have street numbers going up to 2000 and higher. If you need to go somewhere, all you need to now is the crossing, for example 'Douglas at Fort Street' in order to find the place you are looking for. Since all the streets are quite long and have memorable names, most people can also tell you how to get to your sought crossing.

If you are a pedestrian, the traffic lights are not red and green for you - they are red and white.

Taking the bus is also a little different. First of all, you need exact change in order to buy bus tickets. While riding the bus, there are usually no stops announced but you could ask the driver to let you off at a certain place. Apart from that, you can just try to orientate yourself on the different streets you cross - most busses stay on one street for a long time, so you only need to know what the streets parallel to you desired crossing are called. When you want to get off the bus, there are not always stop buttons. However, you can find a yellow line that runs along the sides of the bus. If you pull the line, the bus will stop at the next bus stop. When leaving the bus, you say 'Thank you' to the driver.

You can find public toilets in many places, expecially close to parks and other places of interest. In contrast to Germany, all public toilets are for free and there is no one expecting to get change for it. The toilet seats are also often shaped differentl. Instead of the round or oval 'O' shape, the seat is often more like a 'u' with the opening at the front.

When you go shopping, you have to consider that the taxes are usually not included in the prices. Consequently, you always have to pay a price higher than the price on the price tags at the check-out. Furthermore, there are no 1 or 2 cent pieces in Canada. Consequently, all prices are rounded up or down when paying with cash.
When buying groceries at the supermarket, you don't have to pack them into your bag yourself - the cashier will do it for you.

If you go into a fast food restaurant like for example Mc Donalds and order food, you don't get it right away at the cashier. Instead, you get a number and then have to wait for a few minutes. Your meal will be prepared and when your number gets called, you can collect it. Even if you just want one little cheeseburger, you usually have to wait for a while.

Beds are also made a little differently. There are not always bed linen for the comforter. Instead, there is always a so called flat sheet, which is just one big sheet that you put in between yourself and the comforter.

There are many more little differences but those are the ones that caught my eye the most so far.

Food and fruit

This morning Katrina was trying to help me work on my accent: According to her, my way of pronouncing 'fruit' sounds like 'food', which already lead to some confusion. I really tried my best to pronounce the 'r' the way it's supposed to sound but so far I haven't really succeeded.
My bus to work let me off at another bus stop today since Douglas Street was closed to all motorized vehicles due to the 'Car Free Day' in Victoria. Instead of cars, you could find a lot of booths all over the street. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to check all of them out before work.

I had a long 8 hours shift today but it wasn't too bad since I had several little cleaning projects to keep me busy. While cleaning I was a bit clumsy and broke a shot glass but according to Shirley it's not so bad and just happens sometimes. We also got some free snacks which I could eat in my dinner break. I especially enjoyed some kind of fudge brownie.
It was already 10 PM when I arrived back home so I didn't do too much anymore.