Today I found out that you don't need to have any money whatsoever in order to truly experience Canadian culture.
This morning Stu and I spent nearly 2 hours hollowing out the insides of 15 rather large pumpkins at work. By hand. Halloween is next Friday, and the owners/ directors of our hotel chain are in town checking in on their investment and some clever fellow decided it would "look nice" to use jack-o-lanterns as table centre-pieces for their rather exclusive dinner. We hollowed out 15 pumpkins with little more than a paring knife and two soup spoons. And no, I'm not even kidding.
It's been nearly 7 hours now and every now and then I can still smell it or I'll find a piece of pumpkin in my hair.
Stu is only too happy to never see another pumpkin again. I on the other hand, am now craving pumpkin soup, promptly followed by a big warm slice of pumpkin pie. :oP We had pou-getti for dinner though. It's a variation of a Canadian dish called Poutine. Poutine is french fries covered in gravy and cheese curds. Don't knock it till you try it. Pou-getti is fries covered in meat sauce and cheese. A single serving of Poutine at KFC here is 970 calories. Yep.
Tomorrow we will engage in another cultural activity... driving on the right hand side of the road. We will be driving to a nearby small town named Hinton, where we will witness and indulge in the great North American tradition of shopping at Walmart. (**I will try to act like I'm not excited because that would make me such a tourist, but secretly I'm stoked and can't wait**) We are hoping to see some bears on the drive... hopefully not ON the road and definitely not ON our car.
We are definitely feeling more comfortable in the culture here now, unfortunately it's becoming an inevitable fact that our accents are going to change eventually, even if only slightly, but to be understood by a lot of Canadians here you really have to emphasize your R's... which obviously goes against all Australian accent-isms. C'est la Vie....
Anyway, This was only meant to be a short blog.... so I'll go now.
So in the words of our friendly Can-eh-dians, See ya later eh?
This morning Stu and I spent nearly 2 hours hollowing out the insides of 15 rather large pumpkins at work. By hand. Halloween is next Friday, and the owners/ directors of our hotel chain are in town checking in on their investment and some clever fellow decided it would "look nice" to use jack-o-lanterns as table centre-pieces for their rather exclusive dinner. We hollowed out 15 pumpkins with little more than a paring knife and two soup spoons. And no, I'm not even kidding.
It's been nearly 7 hours now and every now and then I can still smell it or I'll find a piece of pumpkin in my hair.
Stu is only too happy to never see another pumpkin again. I on the other hand, am now craving pumpkin soup, promptly followed by a big warm slice of pumpkin pie. :oP We had pou-getti for dinner though. It's a variation of a Canadian dish called Poutine. Poutine is french fries covered in gravy and cheese curds. Don't knock it till you try it. Pou-getti is fries covered in meat sauce and cheese. A single serving of Poutine at KFC here is 970 calories. Yep.
Tomorrow we will engage in another cultural activity... driving on the right hand side of the road. We will be driving to a nearby small town named Hinton, where we will witness and indulge in the great North American tradition of shopping at Walmart. (**I will try to act like I'm not excited because that would make me such a tourist, but secretly I'm stoked and can't wait**) We are hoping to see some bears on the drive... hopefully not ON the road and definitely not ON our car.
We are definitely feeling more comfortable in the culture here now, unfortunately it's becoming an inevitable fact that our accents are going to change eventually, even if only slightly, but to be understood by a lot of Canadians here you really have to emphasize your R's... which obviously goes against all Australian accent-isms. C'est la Vie....
Anyway, This was only meant to be a short blog.... so I'll go now.
So in the words of our friendly Can-eh-dians, See ya later eh?
1 comment:
I totally agree with the accent thing! Having been in Kansas for just under 7 months now, parts of my accent have undergone a forceful change. I now introduce myself as 'Wes' with an accent on the sssss, (instead of the all-to-familiar Australian version of 'Wez'). My 'r's have become american-ized, and I find myself needing to speak in a US accent purely so the nice mexican person at McDonalds drive-thru can understand my order and get it right! Even my "yeah"'s have transformed.
Furthermore, whenever I'm on the phone to friends or relo's back home, Laura notices a thicker Australian accent. Also, when my mate Josh from Oz was visiting, nobody could understand us, as we both spoke 'Australian' ie ran all our sentences together.
"Howyagoin?"
"Whaddaya reckon?"
"Lets grabbacoldy!"
etc
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