I made the TEAM

Monday 28th was a rainy and cold start to the week. McGill displayed its general lack of students due to rain. I had my usual history-chemistry-environmental systems combo. I tried to crack down on my many assignments in the afternoon until it was time for my gym class with Sara, Sarah and Catherine. I am trying to think what else happened to me on Monday but it seems such a distant memory – I am going to be more faithful to my blog from now on! I hope. I cooked some dinner with Annabel, we made an amazing couscous, tomato, lentil, eggplant, sweet potato, zucchini and onion combination type thing. And this yielded enough left overs for lunches for half the week. I am always quite pleased about left over lunches.

Tuesday 29th went down well. All I have today is geology classes, but the friendship status of this class is skyrocketing. Whoever I sit next to always makes jokes with me about the pronunciation of my name by Willy, and then further wants to bond, as I am an Australian exchange student. Yay! The best accomplishment was making friends with the question time of geology. It was so exciting, as he looks like Harry Potter. He has for real circular Harry Potter glasses, and shaggy black hair. But he did scare me a little when recounting a power-outage that lasted somewhere in the vicinity of weeks. They had telephone at least he reassured me. At first I thought this was a “hilarious” joke, but then his other friend from Montreal confirmed - Yikes! I hope I don’t have to experience one of these ‘freak’ winters. In the middle of my day I came home to try and achieve some progress on my many assignments and have lunch with Lucy. We are going to Ottawa, and so needed to book a hostel. Lucy’s friend had a bike accident, so half-way through lunch, we had to help this girl out, by offering her tea to sooth her nerves, or a carton of milk (which was our alternative to frozen peas – of which we had none) for the bump on her head. She sat around at our place for a while, as we kept on urging her to seek some better medical assistance than us. Finally she agreed to our demands and left in a taxi. Even if she went home, at least she would have frozen goods to put on her head. This girl had hit an old lady while riding her bike, and the old lady had come off seemingly well – while this Dutch girl totalled her bike and bruised herself something chronic. My afternoon geology lab ran late, so I had to race back home, get ready for quidditch and race back to McGill. It was raining, it was freezing and yet still enough people turned up for a game! Crazy! But it was fun, we were all about ankle deep in mud, everyone was super un-coordinated due to how wet and slippery it was. We could barely throw, catch or even pick up the balls, but somehow we managed to play quidditch until about 9:00. I went to show my dedicated enthusiasm for the team, as this week was judgment week for the world cup. Anyways one of the girls there took some photos of the end result of the mess;
It was a rough walk home not only looking terrible but feeling and smelling gross and muddy. The original plan for Tuesday night was to watch cheap movie at the cinema with Lucy, Annabel and some of her engineering friends, but due to the lengthy quidditch practise I didn’t end up making it. But Annabel had left me some soup and sweet potato fries for dinner. Oh, it was so lovely! I put my disgustingly muddy clothes in the washing machine, and then some of my normal dirty clothes in too - to fill it up. My muddy clothes exited clean, and my less muddy clothes exited muddy and stained a bit brown. Who would of thought something like that would happen in a WASHING machine. Oh, dear.


Wednesday 30th had a MAXIMUM temperature of 8 degrees. When you think about it, that is not a lot of degrees! To get into the winter mood Sara and I were going to go ice-skating for free at the McGill ice-skating rink. I can’t even imagine how glorious this rink must be, as I didn’t get to see it. We rocked up, and asked about renting ice-skates, and the deal is you can’t. Its BYOI-S. Dam, Sara is a figure skater so she had a pair, but oddly enough I didn’t bring mine over from Australia. So we didn’t end up going skating. We met up with Catherine from her rez and went shopping instead. We were hunting for gumboots, an impossible task I have now decided! You can’t get a nice pair of wellies for under $100. That is a lot of money for a bit of rubber. There was one pair for $40 but they were plain black. Mmmm. I wasn’t interested. We got depressed with the search and ended up clothes shopping instead. We went to some American stores, and the sizes are so funny - I am a size zero. Ha ha! Imagine my delight. AND the sizes go all the way up to 24 or something ridiculous! Oh man some Americans must just be so fat. So today I didn’t go to my gym class and outdoors club meeting as usual as I had agreed to go on …. A date! WOO! With one of my fellow chasers from quidditch! We went out for some dinner and it was really good - he is a vego too! (but for financial reasons). Anyways this was all pretty exciting and I had fun. I even got to master the metro to make it to and from said date.

Thursday 1st was similar to Wednesday, in that the maximum temperature achieved was 8. It rained and was 8 degrees! In fact, I would even go so far as to say the day got colder as it went on. I didn’t mind my walk to school, but by the middle of the day I was quite cold. This gave me a good excuse to seek refuge in the library and to crack down on my ever-looming history essay. I then went to a GIS lab, which ceased to exist. But I got to hang out with my GIS friends instead. They showed me the geography lounge (not as nice as the geology lounge), and the microwave that doesn’t rotate, but will still heat (a bit). This was pretty cool, and not my essay. We bopped around until it was time for the GIS class, in which I learnt that a feature of a map is a title. I have been here an entire month, and we have only reached title and legend complexity. This is not entirely unpleasing, although it is boring. After this I went home to get ready for the final quidditch practise before the team would be announced. To be honest I was a little bit nervous! The nerves continued to mount as they said we would have to stay through the entire practise, as they would call out the team at the end of the training. So there would be no early exit to my essay. It was SO cold during practise, and being subbed off was tough as not moving made things worse. I took a bludger to the face! But it was right in front of the selection committee so I played on to show how hardcore I was - despite my internal pain. Anyway my efforts must have impressed as I MADE THE TEAM!!!!!!!! The excitement and tension beforehand was almost too much. at the end of practise, the quidditch committee decided that it would be a bit weird if they just called out peoples names in front of everyone, so they said to go home and if you made the team you would receive a facebook notification. Oh the integration of facebook in my everyday necessities. I walked home past a huge street celebration for the first hockey game of the season. On Crescent Street there were live performers, an ice skating rink, advertisers, cars, balloons, food stalls and bars. All sorts of exciting hockey related glory. The game wasn’t over so there were no fights or riots (as I imagine happens) so I could safely pass on by. If I didn’t have an essay to write and mud to wash off my body, I happily would have stayed or dragged the girls back to the street party. I nervously worked on my essay while manically re-freshing my facebook homepage. AND THEN finally the good news came on through! OH my goodness, I am going to Vermont to play in the quidditch world cup as a chaser! Oh my goodness, my life is complete!!!!! I raced and banged on Lucy and Annabel’s doors and we all had a bit of a scream and a jump around in excitement!!!!! But then they both confessed how home sick and sad they were. So instead of dutifully working on this essay (due in less than 12 hours) I went out to starbucks with them for a comforting hot chocolate. Also I wanted to buy Annabel the hot chocolate as I would be printing off my many assignments due this week and next from her colour printer. I couldn’t leave her in her hour of need (especially considering my upcoming hour of printing need).

(this is me and date (Eric) sucks that I am pulling a stupid face - curses)

Friday 2nd was a glorious 14 degrees max. I was so happy, I had finished two assignments, and there was no rain. I wore tights and a skirt to celebrate. In history as a reward for writing our essays we got to go on a walking tour of Montreal. So we looked at the McGill gates, then made our way east along St. Catherine looked at a square and a statue. The tour ended by looking at some dense residential areas. Oh the historical significance! The teacher was so sly. She said that she would personally collect our history essays when we met her at the McGill gates at 9:30 in the morning. If we didn’t make it, she would have physically left and started the mystery tour. So, we had to be on time and have our essays ready to submit! i walked quickly back from the tour to make it to chemistry and environmental systems. I had an assignment due in for environmental systems as well, and the system was the same. Rock up with your paper and GIVE it to the lecturer. It’s so different to the ANU assignment box approach - I don’t think I am comfortable with how these Canadians do things. Anyway after class strutting around campus I run into fellow members of the quidditch team and we have crazy-dramatic hugs and hollers of joy at making the team! I am so happy right now. After my afternoon Pilates I did some shopping with Annabel. There are so many cute boutiques near our place. I bought a fall coat. Not a winter coat yet, as you need to hold off wearing the winter coat until its at least snowing or something. I’ll take some photos of the coat soon! But it is very cute and makes me quite happy. We made some stirfry for dinner and then went out to Blues Bar. This is an engineering bar, which does cheap beers and spirits on Friday nights (Annabel is an engineer by the way). We arrived at 6:30 and that was fashionably late, as the bar opens at 4:30 and many engineers get stuck into it on the dot. I met her engineering friends and generally enjoyed the engineering society. When the bar closed at 9:00 we went onto a house party at Annabel’s friend Colleen’s house. This was pretty cool, so we partied on into the night (12:30) before heading home.