Canadaland

To be honest, as soon as I arrived in Canada I forgot about my blog. It seems that the busyness of my life before I left was just put on hold and ready to bombard me as soon as I got home again. But it has been fun too.

In the end, Jess and I never made it to Marrakech which was (more than) thoroughly dissapointing for me. I was soooo excited to check out the "riads", maybe go to a spa, go 4x4ing, take a camel ride and be in a warm climate before heading back to frigid Canada. We left Grenoble, France at 5am on Friday December 17, 2010 after an evening of celebrating. Unfortunately, we missed our flight at 7am due to circumstances that were out of our control but also due to the lack of organization and communication on the part of the airport storage staff. We then decided to shell out the extra 200 euro to pay for a new flight to Morocco later that evening. We waited around the airport in Lyon all day and evening because our flight was delayed and eventually cancelled and not because of the weather (like many other flights) but because there was no crew to fly our plane. This left us a bit in despair seeing as all the hotels around the airport were now booked and no taxis were willing to drive into town because of the "horrific weather" (a little snow) that they were experiencing.Luckily Jess and I were able to book a hotel in Lyon on an airport computer and caught the last Rhone Express train to town. We had to stay at a hotel for 3 nights, basically waiting until our flight home to Canada was to depart on Tuesday December 21, 2010. We decided just to relax, watch movies, re-packing, eat macaroons and pain au chocolat and try to dissolve our bitterness over Morocco.

The weather was not letting up and we had read on Facebook that many of our other classmates were stuck in Lyon or in other parts of Europe during their attempts to get home for the holidays. London Heathrow and Paris Charles de Gaulle were essentially closed due to large snowfall and the airports unpreparedness for handling this type of weather. The other regional airports such as Frankfurt and Lyon were having issues flying since the snow would fall, melt (because weather sat around zero degrees) and then would freeze again and all the runways could not be cleared or it was not safe to fly. Needless to say, Jess and I started getting concerned about making it to Frankfurt on Tuesday (the first leg of our flight home). In the end we switched that flight to Monday and spend a solid 22 hours in the Frankfurt airport, overnight, until our flight to Calgary left the next afternoon.

If you look close this picture is of the departure monitors in Frankfurt and you can see that over 90% of the flights the day we left Europe were cancelled.

Either way both us and our luggage made it home to Canada, eventually, and after some stressing and large amounts of frustration. I've got to say though that when I took my first breath as I walked off the plane in Canada, the air was so cold I started coughing because my lungs couldn't take it. Not a pleasant welcome.

Best part about being home was that I got to see my friends and family and that I was home for Christmas, especially when I knew there were so many people that were still stuck in airports and didn't make it home for the holidays.

EE-KAY-UH

And I'm back. Yes, I might be posting one after another today and tomorrow just to catch you all up. Don't worry, you'll have less and less to read as time goes on.

My second day in Grenoble started with an early morning wake up to meet my landlord at the school and sign my lease (yes, it was in French, and yes, I understood almost all of it). He took me and my luggage to MY apartment** to get settled in but realized he had left his key at his house, up a mountain. Jess and Kathi (another student from Germany) met up with me as I waited for my landlord and we managed to stumble across a patisserie for lunch. Once I got my luggage inside we decided to head downtown to “centre-ville” to take care of some things and look into heading to Egypt for the next week (since international orientation doesn’t start until September 9).

**In actuality I am living in Fontaine, France. Its basically right across one of the rivers that runs through Grenoble and feels just like a different neighborhood rather than a different town. Really it's so close that it still only takes me 15 mintues to walk to Grenoble Ecole de Management/school/GEM.

Once downtown, the girls and I started with getting cell phones, so we could be connected to the real world again, and stopped at the bank (LCL) to confirm my housing insurance (1 Euro per year for students) by providing my new address. Might I add this was the second time we had been to the bank since they all close, and at random times, for lunch. This isn’t just banks but stores and restaurants as well. Jess and I were disappointed to find out from the travel agents that tours to Egypt only leave Lyon (the main airport for us that is actually situated almost an hour away) on Sundays and Mondays which would mean we wouldn’t get back in time for school orientation. Thus, Egypt became a NO GO and I was thoroughly dissapointed.

After buying a few things from a drug store (Schlekers) we hopped on a tram to IKEA, which I discovered is pronounced EE-KAY-UH and if you don’t say it that way then the French will have no idea what you are talking about. We got a ride from the metro to IKEA by some random lady we had asked for directions whose motivation seemed to be that maybe we would then believe that “the French are sympatic (ie. the French are nice people)." The IKEA trip left us with heavy bags of dishes, pillows, sheets and floor mats and a sad Dania who discovered that they only serve Swedish meatballs for dinner on Thursdays and Fridays. This has been noted for next time we make a trip to IKEA.

Well, after IKEA we were hungry so of course we decided it was a good idea to stop at the Géant Casino(a superstore/Wal-Mart type thing) for some food for dinner…WITH our IKEA bags. We were wrong. This trip was followed by much complaining, hunger and impatience as we worked out our shoulders and biceps like never before whilst carrying our massive and heavy bags all the way home. In the end Jess and I arrived at my new apartment and enjoyed a meal of Swedish meatballs, salad, fruit and a fresh baguette.