The Government House

This morning, I joined a tour of the Government House. They offered this tour only once a month, so I had really been looking forward to it for quite a while. Katrina joined me although she was a bit skeptical as she is not really interested in history.
The tour was really interesting, we got to see several fancy rooms of the building as well as learn a bit about the history of the building as well as the political system in Canada and the lieutenant governors, who represent the Crown in British Columbia, in general. Even Katrina thought that the tour was quite interesting.
Afterwards, we still walked a bit in the garden surrounding the Government house. Apart from a lot of beautiful roses and other flowers, there was also a small museum of fancy dresses of the 19th and 20th century of former lieutenant governors and their wives.
On the way home, Katrina made a short stop at the bakery for me to get some fresh bread.
After eating a snack for lunch, Katrina dropped me off at Walmart, where I did some more shopping for groceries.
When I came home, Katrina was just about to go for a walk with Jakki. Due to the nice weather, I decided to join them. An ice cream truck drove past us on our walk, which caught my attention due to a melody it was playing. I had only seen them on TV before and it reminded me of an episode of Charmed.
We ended up eating some ice cream from 'Dairy Queen' and shared some of the waffle cone with Jakki.

Canada Day

July 1st is Canada Day, a national holiday in Canada. I had been looking forward to joining the festivities this afternoon. However, when I got up this morning the sky looked so grey and uninvitng that I didn't feel like going out to the harbour. Consequently, I stayed home until 4 PM. I didn't really do anything except for talking with Katrina, Rebecca (my roommate who was moving out today and feeling a bit sick from drinking too much yesterday), and my mum.
I had to start working at 5:30 PM but since I did want to see what was going on in the harbour, I left a bit earlier. There was a choir singing in front of the parliament building and a lot of booths with food and more. You could smell maple and poutine in the air, which seemed typically Canadian to me. Since I had to work, I didn't settle down.
We were quite busy at work today due to all the people coming Downtown to celebrate. It was almost hard to close the shop at 9:30 as there were still so many potential customers around.
I went right back to the harbour to see the band currently playing there. It was a rock band called 'Mother Mother' and I really enjoyed its exceptional sound, which is why I bought their CD at the end of the evening.
The fireworks were really pretty but only lasted for 10 minutes. Consequently, I felt like they were not worth the one hour walk home - I couln't take any buses due to the bus stops being overcrowded and the buses not stopping at most of the stops along the way.
I was glad when I arrived hoe just past 11:30 PM and quickly ate a few 'Cheerios' as a night snack.

Votunteering at the Beacon Hill Children's Farm

This morning, I had my first volunteer shift at the petting zoo. I started at 10 AM, just when the 'goat stampede' was about to start. I didn't know what a goat stampede was before but now I've experienced it first hand: All goats were let out of their barn at the same time and then ran together as a big herd to the petting area while all the volunteers and staff members were trying to chase after them. It was kind of fun.
After that, I ended up cleaning the goat barn. As a child, I had always wanted to have my own farm, so it was quite interesting to experience farm work now. I had to remove all the dirty saw dust, hay, and poo from the barn before scattering the new clean saw dust on the floor.
I spent the last 20 minutes of my two-hour-shift in the petting area, making sure the children were being nice to the goats, removing all goat poo from the floor, and petting the goats.
To sum up, working at the petting zoo farm was maybe a bit exhausting but still a rather fun; I love spending time with the animals. I also got a Beacon Hill Children's Farm T-shirt for volunteering, which was pretty cool. Furthermore, I got to see several peacock babies, which were really cute.

I made a short stop at work and my bank since today was pay day and I needed to get the money for my rent. When I got home, I ate some leftover dumplings from yesterday, which were stil eally good. I spent the afternoon shopping for groceries at Save-On-Foods. Katrina was so kind to drive me to the store and bring the water I had bought back to the house so that I didn't have to carry it home.

I had to work again this eveing, even though it was only for 4.5 hours. We had some trouble with our credit card machines today: Most credit card transactions were declined due to some system error and the customers were not happy at all that they had to pay cash. Some customers didn't min but some others were actually just leaving because of it. In addition to that, we had so many T-shirts to fold today that I spent the whole evening just collecting, folding and sorting T-shirts. Nevertheless it kept me busy and let the time fly by fast.

Even though I was home by 11 PM, I still watched an episode of 'White Collar' with Katrina after giving her my rent for the next month.

Making dumplings with Xue

I had to get up pretty early for my first shift at the warehouse today. I only had to work for 4 hours and since I had started at 8 AM, I got off at noon. I went straight home after work to take a shower and eat a small snack.

Later in the afternoon I took to bus to visit Xue. Even though she had given me her adress, it was quite hard to get to her place. She was living in an apartment together with her husband in a big apartment complex and in order to get in, you needed to know the last name of the owner of the apartment or some particular number to buzz them. I only knew the apartment number, which didn't help me at all. Consequently, I wasted about 10 minutes in front of the building trying to find a way to contact Xue. In the end, a nice lady on the balcon above the main entrance buzzed me in.
We spent the afternoon making dumplings, which wasn't too hard but took a lot of time. The dumplings just consisted of a flour and water dough, which we filled with a pork and onion filling. While we were working on the dumplings, Xue was using some live cam app that seemed to be quite popular in China. It was pretty fun and I felt like the main attraction as all of the chinese people watching the live stream weren't used to white people with blond hair. I got a lot of compliments so Xue taught me how to say 'Thank you' in Chinese - it's 'xie xie', which is pretty hard to pronounce.
It took more than 3 hours until the dumplings were completey done, although we also spent a lot of that time just chatting and having fun. It was my first time eating dumplings like this and I thought they were really tasty.
After we had finished eating, Xue showed me some of her wedding pictures. Her husband Charles still wanted to go out and so we went to a bar called Moon, where I had a cider once again. Charles had some chicken wings. I tried one of them and then wished that I hadn't tried it because it was way too spicy, even though I had only had a tiny bite. 

The three of us still chatted for a while. I thought it was quite interesting that the two of them would describe me as very open and easy going, since I never thought of me that way. It reminded me of an article I had read about how your personality might be different when speaking a different language. I guess I am also changing a bit due to all of my experiences here...

Multilinguality at work

I had a long eight hour work shift today. Work was exhausting but not too boring today and I actually had to speak three different languages: English, German, and French. However, the French part was only due to some customers who couldn't speak any English. My French is quite rusty - I could understand what the customers wanted to tell but but I couldn't answer them properly. I just ended up telling them the prices in French. All things considered, there were an unusually high number of tourists from France and Germany today, but it was kind of fun.
After work, I went straight home. I was not up for going out anymore tonight, so I just prepared a quick dinner.
Later in the evening, I watched some 'White Collar' with Katrina while enjoying some popcorn she had made, chips, and grapes.

Relaxing at Willows Beach after work

Before I went to work this morning, I had a text message from Sara asking if I wanted to go to the beach. Since the weather was just as good as yesterday, I liked the idea. However, after I was done with work around 4 PM, Sara was too exhausted to go. Consequently, I decided to go by myself. Just when I wanted to leave, Katrina offered to drive me to the beach. Since I felt lazy, I gladly accepted her kind offer.
I spent about 1.5 hours at Willows beach, enjoying the sun, the sound of the ocean and the feel of the sand on my skin. I was still a bit too lazy to walk home all the way, thus I took a bus which brought me halfway home. I still had to walk a little but it wasn't too bad anymore.

I spent the evening taking a shower, cooking and watching some more 'White Collar' with Katrina. 

Witty's Lagoon

The weather today was just perfect, we had a clear blue sky and the temperature was not too hot and not too cold. So I was very glad that I had planned a hike - I wanted to check out Witty's Lagoon together with Xue. We met in Downtown around noon and then took the bus together, which only leaves every 2 hours so it was important for us to be on time. We barely managed to catch to 50 to Langford at 12:14 since we hadn't been aware that it was necessary to wink so that the bus driver would know that we wanted to board the bus. Luckily it all worked out and we transfered to the 54 somewhere in Langford. Thanks to the GPS on my phone, we managed to get off at the right bus stop each time.
After arriving, we checked out the nature house, where two older people chatted with us and gave us some hiking advice.
We started by taking the beach trail, which was just about 1.1 km long. Due to the path being mountainous, it took us a bit longer (than Xue had expected) to get there. When we arrived at the beach, the view was magnificient and we enjoyed sitting there and eating a small snack.
Afterwards, we walked back the way we had come from. Just before coming back to the nature house, we took another turn to take the lagoon trail. It was a more remote and vegetated path, which we prefered to the more populated beach trail. We heard several noises made by animals all around us and managed to spot a small rabbit.
At the end of the trail there was a road and we met with Xue's husband at a parking lot just past that road. The three of us took another short walk to the beach close to that parking lot, where Xue's husband showed us some crab in the mudflat. On the way back to his car, we saw several small rabbits, which were really cute.
Since Xue's husband had come with his car, he was driving us home after that.