Day 1 in Ottawa

First of all, i arrived safely yesterday evening. I had a great flight including an own screen to watch movies, TV or everything else I wanted. I was so happy about that, that I didn't sleep..I had to find out all the different functions^^ The heat here right now is tremendous, it's more than 30 degrees and I am so happy after the long and shitty weeks of rain we had in central Europe. It finally feels like vacation...

Second, I found a hostel and luckily I don't have to sleep under any bridge here. I'm at "The Barefoot Hostel" a small and chilled hostel that has only 4 rooms with 4 beds each. It has a living room, kitchen and garden, it's a kind of relaxed place to stay. If you want you can check it out: http://www.barefoothostel.com/ . There is one big rule in here, it's more important than no smoking, drugs, noise or anything else: Take off your shoes when you get in! Kind of weird but fits to the atmosphere, it's like a big family.
The only reason I have to stay in a hostel is that the uni doesn't allow access to our rooms until the 4th of September. It just doesn't make any sense since they require us to be here from the 1st on. I wished they would have dealt with it differently.

I am surprised by the hospitality and generosity of the people here in Canada. They are so open and the people I met so far always tried to help me.
Today I was in the mall with Fatima, the girl who is here on exchange with me, trying to find an ATM and an exchange bureau. We had no clue where we were, got lost after a while since the map there was pretty crappy. An old guy noticed that we were searching for something, because other people we talked to didn't know the way either, and asked if we would need help. I told him what we were looking for. I didn't expect his answer: "I can tell you where it is but I prefer showing you. I have nothing else to do", and he started smiling. He walked with us through the whole mall to the ATM and back to the other corner on the next floor to the exchange bureau. Something I never experienced in for example Germany or Holland so far. It's just an example of how nice people were so far.

Back to the hostel; here are a lot of French people. One of the few non-French is Sean, an Aussie from Sydney. He is traveling around and couldn't believe my reaction when I told him about the screen in the economy class of the plane. He's like: "Are you serious? I have never flown a plane without personal TV. I actually didn't know that they still have some without". Well, that's an experience most of the economy passengers in Europe might envy.

I guess that's it for today. I hope I didn't bore you too much with these stories, it just showed me other interesting attitudes and ways of life. I promise there will be some more exciting in future. The post got actually pretty long, apparently I didn't have anything else to do ;) cheers

Update

In 10 days I will sit in a plane direction North America. I realised today that it´s really cloooooose and I still don´t have a place to stay for the first 6 nights. No need to freak out yet but would be nice if I can settle things within a few days^^

Besides that not much to tell. You´ll know soon about my failure or (hopefully) success in finding a room. Talk to you later, Brau

Welcome, Bienvenidos, Willkommen, Bienvenue

Hello everybody,

this is just a first short test to see how this thing works. In 3 weeks I will leave to Ottawa, Canada what means that I still have a lot of stuff to plan and organize. I will update you in a few days^^

Take care and talk to you soon!

Brau