What a Day..

Well this has been yet another eventful week. I hardly remember what all has happened since Friday!

We spent all of Saturday afternoon with our host family, walking up and down the streets of old Quebec.

I think we could spend the entire summer walking around down there and we would still find new things!

Sunday we got such an overload of the language that by mid-day I think that both of our brains literally hurt from thinking so much. Ryan put it pretty well by saying, “I think that was the first time I have ever had to use my brain as a muscle.” He said that until that day he had never tried to think or understand so hard that it made his head hurt. ;)

We went to a long church service that morning. I couldn’t help but think of what it is going to be like going to 2-3 hour long services each Sunday in Haiti. After a while we will be able to understand the language so we will actually understand what is going on, so I’m not worried about that. However, I cannot even fathom what it will be like to be under a 100-degree tarp completely filled sweaty, joyous, Christ-loving with people. Here in North America many people dread sitting through 1-1.5 hour long services in nice, air-conditioned churches where everyone keeps their distance. Even though I read the Ayar’s blog a lot and “know” what to expect, I am going to be in for one hot, sweaty shock when we get there!

After church, we then spent the afternoon at one of the malls near where we are staying. We met a few new people that go to the university here and who we look forward to getting to know better!  Not only do we hope to build new friendships with them, but by spending time with them we hope to really improve our French! J

Afterward, we went to see the new Superman in theaters. Marie surprised us with the tickets because we had stayed home with the kids a few nights last week while her and Yan went out. It was, um, interesting? To be honest – I had no idea what was going on the entire time. Oh well! Either way, in English or not, I don’t think I’ll be watching that movie again.

Since we got here, we have had a hard time staying on the weekly budget that we made previous to arrival. Little did we know beforehand, we have to pay for hourly parking 5 days a week since our school is in the heart of the downtown. And the parking here is NOT cheap.

So… Yesterday we (or Ryan will say “I”) came up with the brilliant idea of riding bikes to school. Not only is the traffic horrible here, but also paying for parking and gas was costing us upwards of $65 each week, which is over half of the budget we made (which includes money to pay for food!). And on top of that, it would take us anywhere from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours each way, depending on how the traffic was each day.

And those reasons are why we rode our bikes somewhere between 10-15 18 miles today. It was insane. And I am sore. This morning we decided we would take a new route to school because we thought there would be less traffic and that it would be easier to get there. We gave ourselves 50 minutes from the time we left our house to get there. At church on Sunday someone had told us it used to take him 30 minutes to get downtown from where we are living, so we thought that would be plenty of time. Boy, were we wrong!

Not only did we get lost on the way there, which resulted in us finding this (above) cool little garden, but it took us 1.5 hours to get to class! So, inevitably, we were late to class.

Our way back home was even WORSE. We decided to take the route back home that we used to drive. It has a bike trail where you ride right alongside the river, which is really pretty! But after a few miles we basically had to ride our bikes up a cliff. Well.. let me rephrase: We had to walk our bikes up a cliff. J

I thought that once we got to the top of that horrible, treacherous cliff, the hard part would be over. And for the most part it was! But it turns out that the entire rest of the way (which was at least 4-5 miles) was a slight but steady incline.

Ah – it was horrible. And I am sore. And then since we didn’t drive our car today, we left our keys inside the house – which meant we were locked out for 45 minutes until the family arrived! Oh, what a day…

Now to rest for a day or so and see if we are up to doing it all over again. I’d like to think that it will get easier with time, but I have a pretty strong feeling that in two days or so the ride is going to feel even worse since we will really feel the soreness then! And no matter what we will have to face that horrible hill on our way home! 

Oh, boy. This was kind of a pointless entry. Now it's time to study and then get some sleep! To end on the same pointless theme I have going here, I'll leave you something we saw over the weekend that might make you giggle: