From Argentina to India ..while visiting Regina

Last weekend I had a great trip back to Regina. It's now been eight months since I left. It was a trip I thought about for over a month, but only really decided to go a couple days before the weekend. I went with three Regina bus tickets in my pocket and came back with them. Right now in my mind, Regina is the best city to get a ride in, and Edmonton is still the best city in which to be a pedestrian. While leaving the new, modern STC station and walking to the local city bus stop, I ran into a former work colleague and minutes later I was offered a ride.

I had just taken Ravi Khalsa's discovery tango workshop in Saskatoon the previous week, and then arrived at the New Dance Horizon dance studio to take it again (actually for the third time). It was great to see friends from Regina, to be in a delightful dance studio, and to play with the tango. It's a funny dance that is often about improvisation and always about communication. I am always intrigued about how I find myself faced with parts of my personality that are challenges in my 'real life' or non-dance relationships and communication. I had to laugh when I saw my stubborn side come out when trying to work on the Boleo. In previous classes I have often found it hard to trust my partner. I had a crazy thought this week that I should study and compare the Argentine tango and language learning. Two things I am caught up with at the moment.

Now how I managed to get to India was actually by staying at my East Indian friends' house. At one point I was told that a guest is like god and I felt very special. Jayshree prepared a delicious meal for me and then we watched an East Indian film called 'Amal'. I like East Indian films, but I never knew that when you watched one with some lively East Indians there is a delightful, shall I say 3-D experience. The film is not Bollywood, probably majoritarily in Hindi, but it has a great unexpected ending, and really brings you to live the life of a friendly rickshaw driver.

For your own East Indian experience, here are my notes on an Onion Pakora recipe, apparently a monsoon season favourite:
Finely chop with a hand mixer: 2 onions, 1 potatoe, 1 jalapeno pepper, 3 cloves of garlic, 1/3 of a fresh ginger root, and a bunch of cilantro.
Next, mix 4 cups of Chana (chickpea) flour, 1tsp curry powder & garam masala , 1/2 tsp chili powder, cumin & coriander, 1/2 tsp salt & sugar and 1 &1/2 tsps baking soda.
Add approximately 1/4-1/2 cup of water while mixing to make a cup cake-like consistency. Also add about 1 TB hot oil.
Prepare oil to deep fry small spoon fulls of dough to make small meatball like pakora. Cook for about 1 minute until a dark brown. Serve with Tamarind chutney or Mango chili sauce.
Enjoy !
P.S. If anyone has other chickpea flour recipes please share. The smallest chickpea flour bag was 2kg

Feliz Navidad a todos!

Here are some photos from my trip so far: Album link

Travelling
In about thirty hours I will be in Paris, but maybe it's best not to count the hours or the stops I will make along the way. I wonder if I have forgotten how to travel. I am trying to be very organized because I am a little scared. Where is my sense of adventure? Perhaps it's still asleep in my nice warm bed. I am excited to see my friends in Europe and to visit France, Spain, Belgium and England. One month of travel ahead to some of my favourite places. I'll try to write and share the thoughts and stories.

Daylight savings confusion

Monday I had some very mixed up students. One in fact was late for class because his cell phone had automatically adjusted to the time change on the weekend and that was his alarm clock. More confusing yet is that neither Saudi Arabia nor China change to daylight savings time yet here their electronic clocks mysteriously changed. When I started to try and explain the time change with the map I realized the late student was not yet really awake because he was looking for Saskatoon in the country of China.

I thought most of this confusion made sense in parts of the country and the world where the time is actually changed, but apparently it carries over to Saskatchewan.

My Chinese Halloween

This year my Halloween celebrations were a little Chinese. This was in part due to the fact that I was with my ESL class in which nine of the eleven students are from China, and also due to the theme we chose for our costumes. Because in all we are twelve in our class I suggested we have the costume theme of the Chinese zodiac animals. At first everyone was quite willing and enthusiastic, but then when they actually understood that they were going to have to dress up as the animals the idea was less popular. The day before Halloween to prepare them I came to class in my sheep costume. I had on my sheep sweater, my paper plate mask and an elastic at the back of my sweater to make a small tail. I told them that night they had to think of ideas for their animal.

That day after class we carved our pumpkins. Amongst the designs we had a couple of more traditional faces, a bat, a spider, a skeleton, a mummy and a vampire. All these were carved in under an hour. The next day they learned how to make paper plate masks.

See if you can recognize the animals in the photo below from left to right starting with the front row: ox, dog, snake, dragon, rat, (back row) tiger, rooster, monkey, rabbit, horse and sheep.

Teaching, marking, sleeping, more marking, more teaching

Learning to teach is a lot of work and often overwhelming. I spent a lot of time on the weekend trying to figure out how to grade some assignments and then on Monday I learned I hadn't done the marking right. Sometimes I wonder if it's me or the students who are learning more right now.

Every so often there are a few entertaining language moments when I am listening to the students' recorded oral presentations and I hear 'she rubbes her ears' and I look at a picture of a woman rubbing her eyes as she wakes up. Or when I read an assignment describing one guy's weekend activities and it ends with the phrase 'I fell down my dream's river' which I find is an interesting idea. Then when I was asked what the word scrapbook meant and a student asked me if it had anything to do with garbage and I had to smile. Sure scraps could mean garbage, but then I imagined a book of garbage souvenirs and tried to explain that idea to the students and they didn't really understand.

My teaching learning experiences are probably not so entertaining for students like when a bad photocopy job cut off three letters of every word on the right hand side of the page on their reading exam or when I used another teacher's grammar review in class and confused myself.

I guess I didn't work the entire weekend because I managed to get away to see my friend Alexis Normand perform at Café Vivant Friday night and then I caught the Troupe du Jour's production of the translation of Kevin Kerr's play called Unity on Saturday.

Me and my grandmother (this is a version of the text I wrote for my grandma Ethel's 90th birthday memory book and I meant to post it on her birthday October 9th)

We met for the first in England when I was three. I was still quite small and shy. At that time I looked up to Christopher Robin and had never tasted orange pop. I was really confused when I was told instead of having supper we were going to have Tea and I didn’t even drink tea. Now I mostly remember the photos and the stories more than actually being there, but it was a great visit.

The next time I saw her was when she and Grandpa Willis came to visit us in Canada. They were the busiest guests that have ever stayed at our house because they were always trying to do something to help us. They did things like cooking us delicious meals with Yorkshire pudding, digging up tree roots in the garden and building us our picnic table. It was sad to see them go.

We never really felt she was far because of her faithful correspondence. Thanks to grandma we have an impressive collection of Blue British Airletter envelopes. I think she could win an award for having written the most amount of letters in our family.

The next time we saw each other was in England just after I turned eighteen. We had the best guide in all of Sheffield. Not only were our bus trips planned and often paid for, but sometime strangers would come up to us with a question and it seemed like she always knew how to tell them what bus they should take. When she told us stories about the past I would imagine her training as a nurse in Leeds, working in hospitals during the Second World War and running a hospital in Delisle. I am very proud of everything my grandmother has done.

I wonder what it’s like to turn ninety, to have so many memories and to have collected such a large family. For me the best I can do is to imagine three times my life at this point. Is today what you once imagined what the future would be like? What was the best moment of all those years?

Whenever I have gone to Sheffield my visit is filled with bus trips, Scrabble games, art galleries, British telly, shows in the theatre, meals of fish & chips at the pub and so much more. My grandmother and my British family are tireless hosts.

I feel special to have such an amazing grandmother. She is a brave, adventurous, independent, caring, open minded, fun-loving, super-organized, cheerful, wonderful person. I can only hope to live as long and rich a life to be more like her.

Return to Saskatoon

After just over ten months in Regina I am back up in Saskatoon. I was offered a position as an ESL teacher with the Language Centre at the University of Saskatchewan and decided it was time for a change. Since working for the ACF there's been a turnover of about half of the staff so it wasn't too strange that I was leaving. It was sad to say good bye to my new friends, but it all went by so fast. In just a week I had packed up my things and moved back to my parent's house.

I've been teaching classes for a week now. I like my students a lot. I teach level 20 English to a small group of eleven from China and Saudi Arabia. The preparation and correcting are a lot of work and I am always learning new things. Once I am a little more settled with the classes my next project will be to find another appartment and then maybe think about planning a holiday.

Sunshine and summer celebrations

It's time to start writing again, but where to start since there's been at least one exciting adventure each week. Lots of volunteering and summer festivals have been keeping me busy.

My summer started with a bit of Caribbean flavour that first arrived in a cookbook, then carried over to a birthday meal, a potluck and then finally to the Carisask festival in Wascana park. If you haven't tried my papaya recipe yet then you'll have to make up an excuse to come over.

This year I managed to volunteer for both the Regina and the Saskatoon Fringe Festivals and probably snuck in about half a dozen plays. I'll probably stick with 'La Mexicaine de Perforation' as my favourite because of it's zany plot and characters. The night my parents were here for a visit we went to see the long time running stage show of the Trial of Louis Riel. Half of the entertainment was watching my father on stage as a jury member. The other big art event this summer was the Regina Folk Festival which drew an impressive crowd to the city and literally transformed Victoria park to another place. My favourite moment there was dancing in the rain to some lively Spanish bands.

The summer has also been full of a lot of biking as my means of transportation and also as a source of adventure. As I embarked on the Secret Garden tour by bike I discovered some impressive trails travelling West along the creek. The first day I was volunteering at the Native prairie gardens outside of the impressive First Nations University campus and then the next day I explored the gardens all over the city. The following cycling experience was on the M.S. Bike tour, something I've always wanted to do, which took me out to Rouleau (a.k.a Dog River on the Corner Gas set) over to the 15 Wing Moose Jaw air base and back again. It was a total of 120km over two days accross the prairies with a fun group of people and for a good cause.

Then next you would have seen me dressed as a Devil wandering through Wascana park with wild group of people from the Regina Delta hotel. As an adopted member of the team I raced with the Delta Devils in the Regina Dragon Boat Festival. An experience I highly reccommend to others with or without a Devil costume.

During the last few days of August I went out East to attend my good friends' Ana and Edgar's wedding in Ottawa and then the Vimy guide reunion in Granby, Quebec. Eight years later 'la crème de la crème' as we liked to call ourselves, met to relive stories, songs and comraderie from our unforgetable experience in France.

I don't really want the summer to end...

Tired thoughts

Yesterday was my eight month anniversary in Regina and to be honest I am still not sure what exactly I am doing here. This morning I grumpily caught a bedbug biting my foot. It was very cleverly hidden in the fold of my sandal strap. I can only conclude that it came from my appartment even though I found it at work. Unfortunately it seems the bug saga may not yet be over. My building right now is on its third owner as of June and this one cares the least. The housing market in Saskatchewan right now means landlords can get away with less and less responsibility. On top of the landlord, my accross -the-hall neighbours' antics have added stress and tension to the appartment. I am not bad at dealing with their wierdness, i.e. various attempts to get me to move, but their loudness mainly from Karaoke parties going on past 11pm is getting less and less tolerable. On the up side to all this I have a new roommate and she is very sweet.

The next question I usually get asked is how is work and to be honest not great, but was it ever? It seems each week there is a new frustration and I am beginning to wonder if it is just me. The miscommunications, poor decsion making and overall disorganization is starting to drive me crazy. As much as possible I try to laugh about the day a colleague brought her dying dog to spend the day in the office and the disagreement it caused between my supervisor and I.

The weather this summer has been pretty nice. I definitely enjoy the lack of humidity. Well right nowI think it is time for me to go to bed and to think about my Spanish friend Maria saying 'mañana is otro día y no pasa nada '

Happy International Women's Day !

Today I traveled from Ukraine to Africa while going first to an art exhibit and then later to a potluck supper. The exhibit 'Baba Yaga, Bread, Bunnies and Other Subversions' by Chris Reid opened at the Dunlop Art Gallery today. It was roomful of contemporary Pysanky or ukranian easter eggs along with stuffed sock bunnies suspended from the ceiling. As well there were stuffed sock cats posed on shelves around large colourful drawings of buildings with chicken legs and screaming slices of bread. At the back of the room some of the eggs could be picked up and you could see the details of almost creepy scenes of characters invented by Mrs. Reid. It was different and fun. Because it was opening of the exhibit along with the art there was also a short ukranian dance performance and a few dishes to try.

The perogies tasted so good that following the visit to the art gallery was a visit to the Ukrainian Co-op a delightful store full of unique Ukrainian and Polish products. I bought some Saskatoon berry perogies and some Mint apple juice to try.

This evening there was a special women's potluck supper at the fransaskois church in Regina. Following the meal we got to try on African dresses brought by African immigrants in the community and we had a small fashion show. I think I will have to start wearing more colourful clothing.

Elephant Wake

It was a treat to take in some theatre last night. Joey Tremblay gave an amazing performance of his play Elephant Wake at the Globe theatre. Walking into the building I was immediately charmed by the intriguing design of the theatre and then of the set. I really liked the hanging lanterns and I think they could also create a delightful effect suspended in my house. The main character Jean Claude, the last resident of a small Saskatchewan town called Sainte Vierge, was very endearing and wonderfully eccentric. The audience was carried into his world and nostalgia through intricate stories, lively songs and elaborate re-enactments. The intimate setting of the theatre in the round and the playful interactions with the audience made it real. For the evening of March 7th I was a part of that small francophone community re-living masses in latin, christmas parties, school bus rides, funerals, roadside pranks and more. I loved the twisted prairie rendition of Edith Piaf''s song Milord and the inventive papier maché creations that were continually being described. I wanted his family, childhood and town to come back to life as much as Jean Claude. Joey Tremblay is an excellent actor and should you ever have the chance I highly recommend going to see him perform.

I am not sure how long it will last, but there is a short web trailer on the website that will give you a glimpse of the performance: Regina Globe Theatre

La vida es un carnavalMore carnival, this time brazilian style with friends in Saskatoon.

Chinese New Years party. After making dumplings we made dragon masks.

Jazz night at Casino Regina - My friend Li and I pose with jazz singer.

Celebrating winter
Today I am tired of winter and cold, but that doesn't mean I haven't been enjoying it. Here are some photos and there are more to come...

Snow creatures in Wascana park

Crêpe making at my parent's house in Saskatoon for ChandeleurDressed in my buffalo costume for the Ice and Fire Carnival procession in Victoria Park on February 16th in Regina. To see the more exciting photos from that day check out my dad's on-line photo album

Good night, sleep tight, don't let the ...
The exterminators have come and gone twice. Since February 1st I have been living out of garbage bags because everything washable had to be laundered and dried on a high heat and then put into bags. For a while I even thought about sleeping in a garbage bag because it occurred to me that it would be easier than washing my sheets every day. Along with my new intimate relationship with the washer and dryer was a deeper acquaintance with Mr. Dirtdevil, the vacuum. Everyday we spent at least an hour or so together going over the carpets, the baseboards, inside the couches and cupboards. I thought we went everywhere the bugs might be hiding, but then just one week later I saw not one, but three bed bugs. One in the main closet, another in the bathroom and the third on my arm taking a bite. During this time my roommate went to stay at her brother's house and then part way into the second week my friend Li invited me over to help me keep my sanity. Spray number two was Saturday and then on Sunday we started moving back in. All of the furniture was moved back into place and all of the cupboards and the dishes were washed. I really hope this is the end.

Here are some photos of the furniture piled in the living room and the first bug we caught.

It's freezing...

A bit of winter excitement for us right now as the temperature has dropped to around -50 C with the wind chill. This morning I wore two pairs of socks, long underwear plus two pairs of pants, a t-shirt, a sweater, a polar fleece and then my winter jacket, two pairs of mitts, two scarves, two hoods and a tuque. I left only the smallest crack around my eyes so I could see. In fact I don't think it was so much the cold that threatened my walk to work as my lack of vision.

Because of the blizzard yesterday there were a lot of deep snow drifts, so I sort of stumbled down the side walk. I felt safe though because I put on special ice grips over my boots before I left my house. I had been given these ice grips to test them for the Ice and Fire carnival I will be dancing in on the 16th. When I finally got to work with really only one minor delay caused by man with his snow blower on the sidewalk the walk had seemed pretty uneventful. However just after stepping inside I realized the ice grips were missing. My first thought was they did not pass the test for the carnival dancing and then because they weren't actually mine I decided I should do some back tracking and look for them. The sun then was much brighter and since they were black I figured it wouldn't take too long. That is until I realized that I had lost them just outside of my house about when I had been hurdling through a series of knee deep snow drifts. Perhaps it isn't fair to judge their inefficiency on the deep snow. In any case I got my fair share of exercise and cold weather this morning as I ended up having to walk to work twice.

In some ways the blizzard wind was actually much colder last night when I went to my dance class. While waiting at the bus stop I sort of hid in some bushes to stay out the wind. Then when I got downtown I walked down the street with my scarf covering my entire face and my mitts over top. I walked close to the buildings to stay in a straight line and moved quite quickly so as not to get too cold. Maybe I should have stayed home, but it seems much more exciting to be out in a storm.

Having finally caught some bugs on the weekend they have officially been identified today by the exterminator as bed bugs, so the next fun step is having the apartment exterminated.

Detective work

My roommate has now gotten two bites during the past week so the battle continues. I have to say the situation is really starting to bug me. I feel antsy all the time and am taking on strange habits like:

- spending hours vacuuming all the corners and crevices of the apartment,
- avoiding touching the floor with socks or bare feet at all times,
- wearing 'bug fighting shoes' (crocs from the dollar store) when walking around the apartment,
- vacuuming my sheets before going to bed,
- collecting small black dots and pieces of lint as specimens,
- hanging my pyjamas in my closet during the day,
- keeping a chair for my backpack so it doesn't come in contact with the floor,
-spraying on bug spray before going to bed ( actually that has only been my roommate so far),
- taping the legs of the bed and putting them in tin cans,
-sprinkling Borax in the carpet and on the mattresses,
-spraying Raid around the edges of the rooms and on the mattresses
- and most importantly developing a close relationship with the washer and the dryer

We'll see how long my sanity lasts :)If we can find and an identify the bug the the landlord will get exterminators until then we will have to find inventive ways to catch some.

Bailando

On s’était dit beaucoup sans avoir dit un mot.
Ses gestes me racontaient l’histoire.
Mes oreilles étaient devenues sourds.
C’était l’odeur du passé et du présent

Je m’imaginais dans un pays inventé
Mes pas me donnaient cette vie
Je faisais l’écho du chant
En évoquant la langue de la danse

Petit á petit il ne fallait presque plus toucher
L’équilibre se sentait dans chaque respiration
C’était un jeu ouvert et croisé
Au sol se traçait la carte des sons et des émotions
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Last Thursday I discovered free Argentina tango lessons downtown Regina once a week until mid-February. It was like winning the lottery because that night not only did I get a chance to learn a dance I have been dreaming about for years, but I also learned about an opportunity to take part in a procession at Regina's Ice and Fire Carnival. Then I was invited to attend a weekend workshop put on by New Dance Horizons with the guest artist Ravi Khalsa.

Everyone is invited to the Carnival on February 16th in Victoria Park, Regina !

Friday became a little more exciting when Jocelyn Frenette and the Grey cup arrived at the school next to my office building. Vive les Roughriders !

!Ha llegado los reyes a Regina, Saskatchewan! Yesterday we had a Spanish supper to celebrate Epiphany. There was lots to eat from Paella to hot peppers, a tortilla de patata (Spanish omelette)with some ensaladilla rusa (similar to potatoe salad), cured ham, olives, corn nuts, pineapple juice, wine and an attempted Roscon de reyes. !Feliz día de los reyes!