Oh, Canada

Time for a bit more lighthearted post. We've been (pronounced like bean in Canada) for almost a week now, and we've actually had some good times despite all our housing woes.

To start off, our housing woes are actually over! We found out today that the possibility we talked about in one of the previous posts is going to work out. We'll be living in what we're being told is a "granny suite" in the basement of the home of an occupational therapist from the hospital we're working at. It's about a 20 minute walk from our building, and we're actually going to be living in it for FREE! It is so amazing how God just gives us so much more than we could have expected. Tonight will be the last night with the Gravelines (the family we've been living with), and we're actually a bit sad about that, but we are excited to be in our "own" place and to be downtown near the university. Thank you all for your prayers about this issue. God is good. He definitely made it so that this gift was obviously from him and not out of our hard work.

We've had some good times laughing about some things that are (or actually aren't...oops) Canadian. Our first (what we thought was) Canadian experience was right after we got off the ferry and stopped at an A&W for lunch. We got our food and noticed that our drinks didn't have ice in them. We proceeded to discuss for at least 10 minutes why Canadian fast food restaurants wouldn't serve ice in their beverages until I (C.J.) noticed a little note on the cup. Apparently A&W (all A&W's) do not serve ice in their beverages because they want to preserve the taste of their quality beverages and not let the ice dilute them. We totally thought we had it figured out though...

The speed limits in Kilometers have taken a little getting used to. As much as I'd love to test the handling of our new Accord at 110 miles per hour...just kidding, Mom. What's a little factor of 1.6?

The gas is sold in dollars per liter. Much to our disappointment, the exchange rate is about even right now (gone are the glory days of a Canadian dollar being worth 69 cents US), so $1.07 per liter adds up quite quickly when our tank is almost 60 liters.

Celsius is still taking some getting used to. (9/5)C + 32F = Temperature in Fahrenheit is just a bit tough to do in the head.

Green lights and arrows sometimes blink here. We're still not sure what that means, but we should probably get to that...

$1 coins (loonies) and $2 coins (toonies) are a bit strange. It's easy to spend more than you think when it feels like you're putting a quarter in a parking meter. Their paper money is all different colors too. I'm sure that would be nice if we actually knew what color went with which denomination.
The Graveline kids have a "Dance Dance Revolution" type game that is made by Veggie Tales. Let's just say the hard setting is appropriately named--nothing like sweating to the "I Love My Lips" song.

We made reference to our bug-infested hotel room (which was actually a really nice, but way too expensive room). Let's just say "Don't let the bedbugs bite" has a whole knew meaning to us. Apparently they're real and bite they do. Nine loads of laundry and black garbage bags around all of our stuff later, we are sure that they haven't made the trip out of the hotel with us. I'm sure we'll be able to laugh about this one later.

Canadians actually surf around here. Kannon Beach is about 10 minutes from the Graveline's house. We were told that it is a pretty good surf beach, and being from SoCal, we had to witness this for ourselves. The waves were actually decent, definitely better than Lake Michigan, but at 10 degrees Celsius (Americans, see the above formula), I don't think I'll be joining them any time soon. Thick wetsuits with hoods and booties were definitely standard apparel. I can wait until we get to Peru.

Again, thanks for all your continued prayers. Things are definitely looking up around here now that we know where we'll be living. Since this post is plenty long, we'll update about what we're actually working on here in another post. Enjoy the surfing pictures below!