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OK, so the whole customs, visa thing pretty much went off without hitch. US customs were predictably surly and fairly unhelpful: they thrust a piece of paper in my face, opened their back door, pointed across the highway and said "take this to the Canadians". Oki doki. So I dodged cars back across the border, was whisked through Canadian customs in no time and avoided the 3 hour wait for the next Greyhound bus when I nice bus drive from another offered me a spot on his bus, free of charge. I got back into JL's that night and left temporarily to do some study in a little café up on Main St before having a mini meltdown when I realised my brain quite simply will never truly get statistics, dragging my sorry little self back to JL's and having dinner with her and some friends of hers. They're a truly lovely couple, Cathy and Martin, who have five recently adopted children from the Ukraine, all of whom were there for dinner too. Suffice it to say it was a little bit of a tight squeeze in JL's apartment (including Cathy's giant dog, Hemingway) but it was a really nice way to get my mind off study for the evening, and the young girls (7 and 8) delighted in showing me their maths and spelling homework. I was like, "Hey, you wanna swap homework with me??" haha wishful thinking…but hey, I figured it was worth a shot!
And as it turned out I didn't have to worry about my statistics exam being little more than 24 hours away because in fact…it wasn't! A fun fact about Vancouver my friends, is that, despite that fact that it snows here every year (usually much earlier, in November) BUT people are never, ever prepared for it. The first day or snow, people barrel out of their driveways in their cars without snow tires on, despite knowing the snow will come roughly the same time every year, despite having been warned the previous night on the forecast, and evidently it's mayhem. Cars slide, public transport has a meltdown AND…exams get cancelled. Now, there's only so many times a gal can get herself geared up to sit 6 hours worth of exams straight in one day, and at 10:45, just an hour and fifteen minutes before I was due to start the hellish little escapade, when the news reached me - I was not a happy chappy. I had woken up early that morning and gone down to put some laundry on and thought "what the…!?". The snowflakes had just started to fall then despite my assuring Veronique the day before that there was NO WAY it would snow because it just wasn't anywhere near cold enough. And it hadn't been. But some crazy arctic winds and a lighting quick change in the weather brought quite a bit of snow indeed. It was bitter sweet, because it really was quite gorgeous, and certainly very exciting to have our first snow fall in Van…I just would really have appreciated it not being on the day of my first exam!!
Anyway, eventually it turned out that they probably shouldn't have cancelled the exams because buses were still running up the hill that day, but I organised to sit my stats exam early the next morning, my cognitive neuropsych exam went ahead that arvo and then I took my adolescent development exam yesterday (the same say I moved out, said goodbye to all my friends, and had barely slept the night before…yeah, it was a long day!). Shortly after the whole snow, exam crisis Jessie, Helle and Monica got back from their skiing trip to Whistler and we all spent a lovely evening in with sushi town sushi and The Holiday (again! Haha No I don't care how may times I see that movie, I still love it!).
LIVxo
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