What a Weekend!

Paty and our Classic Christmas Turkey: It Was Delicious!

Although we missed our family, friends, and the Brazilian Sun last weekend, our first Canadian Christmas was stuffed by too much fun.

We got started with our traditional dinner at December 24th midnight. We had a wonderful stuffed turkey with pasta. A Canadian red wine joined us. Great stuff! You can check some pictures from our dinner at Christmas Eve here: http://tinyurl.com/2dusomw

Besides our traditional dinner at midnight, we had planned to have another Christmas dinner. Now, invited by the the Mejiholm family and respecting the Canadian tradition, we would eat on December 25th. However, our host was not feeling well, so our dinner was postponed to December 26th, the Boxing Day.  No problem in waiting, we were rewarded with good conversations, lobster, beef, potatoes, vegetables and Canadian red wine! Again: wonderful! Pictures from our second Christmas dinner are here: http://tinyurl.com/27vsg2y

Moreover, Mejiholms gave me the book “How to be a Canadian”. According to them, I will naturally become a Canadian after reading that. They also gave the cuisine book “Make It Tonight” to Paty: wow, more food! Also, they gave us the tickets to watch our city hockey team live on January 1st!!! On ice level.

During our waiting for the December 26th dinner, we discovered that Canada celebrates the Boxing Day. First of all we thought that it was a day with some Boxing fights, but it is not. It is not a violent day; it is just the day after Christmas, when the stores offer great deals to their customers! We mean… very good deals! But, you know how students live, right? Tight budget, so we did not enjoy 2010 Boxing Day. We are already looking forward to the next one.

Also, we are looking forward to our first New Year’s holiday in Canada. Can you find out what are we going to do on that day? Guess what… Eat, drink, and party with our friends! On the first 2011 post we will tell you how it was!

We will finish this post thanking you for following us all this time. To be continued next year! We hope you all have a wonderful 2011, like our 2010!

Having Fun with Almost no Money!

Sunset at Neck Point Park last Thursday

This post is to our readers who are like us: students with no car who are sticking around here for the holidays and who have a few bucks to spend with leisure. We prepared some tips about what to do in Nanaimo with no huge spendings.

First and foremost, this city has amazing parks that should not be visited only in the summer. Last week, on Thursday, the weather was awesome: a nice sun in the sky and it was not so cold.  So, we took the bus number 2 (at downtown) to Pipers Lagoon & Neck Point Parks.  And who said that we would not go to the beach in December? We heard the sound of the waves and felt the sea breeze at both parks. Pipers Lagoon is an 8 hectare hiking recreation park for sightseeing, the waterfront park trail follows a rocky coastline. The Neck Point Park is a lighter version of Pipers Lagoon to the south. A developed trail runs through most of the park, with boardwalks and lookouts. Better than describe the parks is to invite you to see how the scenery was sensational last week: http://tinyurl.com/2bperuq.

After a long hike the hunger comes, so we took the bus 2 again in front of Neck Point Park to Woodgrove Centre. In front of the shopping mall, there is an Italian restaurant named Milano's. They have a great promotion. For CAD 17.77 (HST already included) you can dine and win a ticket to watch some movie at Avalon Cinema. It is necessary to choose the dinner from a specific menu, but there are several choices of pastas, pizzas and sandwiches. A good deal, especially considering the good movies playing now. We watched “Conviction”, with Hillary Swank. The movie is based on an interesting true story. A good choice. 

About the restaurants, another tip is to pay attention to the coupons. Nanaimo News Bulletin always brings a coupon from MGM, a restaurant located at Nicol St, downtown. The December special is “Dinner for 2 only $12.95”. We did not use our coupon yet but we should use it soon. It is a great deal, is not it?

About other attractions, we also loved the Westwood Lake. We lived near there when we arrived here. We shall visit the lake this week to check if the edges of the lake have already begun to freeze. Well, those are our tips for this week. We would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas. And enjoy Nanaimo, our Harbour City.

Top 5 Oddities

Does anyone watch this channel?

Uhuuu, the semester is over! And it was great to finish that with the exams at… the gym! Yeah, at the gym! It sounds weird for our Brazilian friends, but here in the University is normal. The instructors book the gym and run the exams right there. It means, it is possible to calculate the return on initial investments of a particular project right on the goal line… 

For sure that was one of the weirdest things we have experienced in Canada. But there were others and we would like to share with you the top five so far. Number one, as we already wrote: exams at the gym!
Number two: educative cartoons. We know that children should watch educative cartoons and series. In Brazil we have good ones. However, in Canada we saw the most intellectual children targeted TV series ever: “Dino Dan”, a series combining cartoon and live action. “Dino Dan” follows the adventures of a ten years old palaeontologist-in-training... This little guy does not spend his childhood playing hockey in the streets or playing with his friends. He spends his time talking to his friends about dinosaurs… Ok, nice, but… but our son will watch Spongebob.

Number three is about Canadian customs. Why there is nobody in the streets at 5 PM during the Fall? OK, it is dark and cold, but strange. It is also interesting to notice that the restaurants usually are crowded this time. Our stomachs are still getting accustomed with this. In Brazil: we used to have lunch at 1PM, 2PM. Our dinner? Between 9:30PM and 10PM! 

Number four is about a Nanaimo-ite tradition running over the summer. Every single day, during the summer, some guys wearing 1920’s clothes and moustaches prepare cannon and shot it. At noon. Why? No idea… 

Back to the TV “shows”. Number five. By far, the weirdest thing we have seen here in Canada and in our lives. I do not know if you readers will believe, but here we go: there is a TV channel called The Frame (# 165) that has only one show. We can describe to you the "show" called  Shaw Firelog. It is an active fireplace. Yes, that is it: some wood burning in a fireplace. Sometimes it appears a man putting more wood in to burn. What else? That is it. All days, all evenings, all the time! Unbelievable! We laughed so hard when we saw that! This is the top five so far. If we find out some new thing, for sure we will let you know!

Oh, and for those readers who are writing their final exams this week: make sure you are taking care of you! Study hard, but have lunch, have dinner, sleep well, have a chat with your friends… Have some fun watching the Fireplace Channel!

Countdown to Winter Break

Mount Washington: here we go!

First and foremost, we would like to say: thank you very much, anonymous! Unfortunately we do not know the name of our attentive reader who answered the question that we posted last week about the fights during hockey games. Now we understand more about the rules of the game and we sincerely thank your attention!

This post will be short. Why? We spent the last week and this whole weekend preparing for the final exams, which begin this week. Talking about week of final exams, this is one of the things that we have to adapt here. In Brazil, there is no final exams week. Generally we have a hard end of semester, but professors use to schedule the exams in the last few weeks, not only one. This week we have two tests on Thursday... Six hours taking tests are very exciting, aren't it? But let's stop complaining because after final exams, the well deserved holiday starts.

Three weeks to rest and enjoy the Canadian winter... We are very anxious to experience our first Christmas with cold and snow. In Brazil, people grow up watching movies that always associate Christmas with low temperatures and snowmen and now we will live this reality, impossible to be experienced in our country, since there, temperatures can reach 30 to 40 °C in December. Certainly we will miss our families, but it would be a nice experience.

It will be my first time cooking Christmas dinner. In Brazil we celebrate the Christmas Eve by staying up until midnight. At midnight, gifts and presents are opened and the Christmas dinner is eaten by the whole family. We will keep the tradition, opening our gifts and eating our Christmas turkey at midnight! We have learned that Canadians sleep early. ZZzzzzzzzz So I think that our neighbours will not be awake to smell our Christmas turkey that will be ready at midnight. 

Beyond our first Christmas dinner for two, we are also looking forward to enjoy the winter at Mount Washington, a ski resort just about 100 kilometres of Nanaimo. It will be one of our Christmas gifts!

I already wrote too much. I will stop here because I still have to study a little bit today... See you!

Big Change

Hockey: as Canadian as the maple leaf

One of the first things we tried to figure out when we were moving to Canada was: how would we watch soccer games in a country people play hockey, curling, whatever, except soccer? As we already told you in another post, we could watch the World Cup because our first landlord was great and selected the cabin with the soccer channels for us. It was better not to watch the World Cup L but, anyways, as soon as the tournament ended, we thought: now, how could we watch the games of the team we cheer for?  

Not a big problem… We figured out a way to do that, but as long as our team was not doing well (actually they were and are doing horrible), we started looking for other sports! Curling, football, basketball, baseball… So boring! Hockey? So weird. But, as long as our Brazilian soccer team was becoming worse every single day, we decided to give up of soccer and give that weird and frozen hockey a chance! And, hey, what a nice sport! And: soooo Canadian!

We have looked for historical information about the sport and have talked to our Canadian friends to know more about the best player ever, the best team ever, and so on. Also, we selected our NHL team to cheer for: Vancouver Canucks, of course! This week, after the installation of our cable TV, Patricia and I watched our first game live: Vancouver Canucks vs San Jose Sharks. They did great: 6 x 1!

Unfortunately, it is impossible to watch Luongo and his teammates live at the arena in Vancouver because it is so expensive. However, we are planning to watch our first game on the rink this week, when Nanaimo Clippers will play. Affordable and pleasant!

Oh, before finish this post I would ask some hockey expert to answer a question that nobody could answer us so far: when can the players fight and when should the referees depart the fray?

Let It Snow

It's impossible not to smile 

On today’s post, beforehand, we would like to say sorry. Why? Because we wrote about the weather last post and today we are writing again! But it would be impossible not to write about that today, since this weekend we have had our first snow days in our lives!

Last Friday was magic. Both of us were working on an assignment when, suddenly, it started to snow around 7 PM. Of course, we went down to take some pictures and play a little bit. It was great and we were so happy that we called our friend Karl to share our happiness with him. After spending more than 30 minutes in the snow, we went up because we had an assignment to work on! Before, we posted the pictures on Facebook (you can see these photos here: http://tinyurl.com/2ajc8nj) and what a surprise: all of our classmates were enjoying the snow, posting their pictures and commenting about each minute of snow!! In some minutes we became experts on Nanaimo snowing! Unforgettable night that November 19th… That was so beautiful. We were feeling like we were inside a Christmas movie.

Oh, the assignment that we were working on: of course, we could not concentrate on that again and you know what? We gave up!

Saturday morning came with more wonderful snowflakes and we saw from our balcony that there was a white place close to our home where we could play with snow and take some nice pictures. That place was Nanaimo Cemetery… However, it was so beautiful that we needed to spend some minutes playing there. We did and we think that everybody there was happy, because the view was wonderful and it was impossible not to be happy that moment. The pictures are here: http://tinyurl.com/25loaxv

Then we went back home. Real life: International Marketing assignment. But, each two or three minutes, one of us went to the balcony to admire our beautiful view.

Autumn: what a pleasant surprise

Snow on Mount Benson, Nanaimo...winter is coming on fast!

Hey everybody! We are in the middle of the fall but we decided to write about the low temperatures that we are already having here. We lived during almost 30 years in a tropical country, so we are not accustomed with abrupt changes in the time of sunrise and sunset. When we arrived here, it was fantastic. Sunrise at 5:30 AM and sunset at 9:30 PM, but now… Sunrise at 7:30 AM and sunset at 4:30 PM.

In spite of few hours of sunlight, low temperatures and rain all the time, the autumn has been a pleasant surprise for us. In our city in Brazil, we had only summer and summer, with 10 days with low temperatures. Here, in the fall, we had beautiful scenery. Now some trees are totally red, some are just turning yellow to orange, and others have lost their leafs, which decorate the ground. We took some cool pictures: http://tinyurl.com/2ekum8d and http://tinyurl.com/2fwj5me.

Temperature has begun to fall. During the day we are having constantly 7 degrees Celsius and when it gets dark the thermometers have marked between 1 and 3 degrees Celsius. Newspapers are reporting that this will be the worst winter in 55 years. What a nice reception! But we are looking forward to creating our first snow doll, playing snow-war and going to ski in Mount Washington.

Our Brazilian friends and family are already starting to make their plans to enjoy a nice beach and 40 degrees Celsius during the summer holiday season and we'll be here… freezing. But we are happy and anxious ... And for sure, we thank every day for our apartment heater which keep our homes warm and cozy!

Do you wanna know people from everywhere? Come to Canada!

 People from all around the world

One of the things Canadians are proud of is their mixed population. And they are right, all peoples are here -- First Nations, Asians, Latin Americans, Europeans, Africans -- and everybody has a good chemistry with each other. 

We are enjoying this great chemistry in our classes. One of the richest experiences of doing this MBA program is that we have been studying with people from everywhere: North America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. This is excellent because we can learn a lot about their cultures, ways of life, ways of studying and so on.

Also, another interesting thing is that our professors come from all around the world. During the Pre MBA, we had classes with a two Canadians, an Haitian, and a Scottish, who is one of the funniest Professors ever. Now, on our first semester, we are taking courses with three Professors from Canada, one from Finland, one from Thailand and another funny and excelent Professor from Ghana.

This great mix Canada offers is so rich, since we are not only learning Economics, Accounting, or Marketing, but we are also learning about different ways of teaching, different ways of dealing with cultural differences, different ways of supporting the students, and, of course, different ways of marking!  

Besides, studying with classmates and professors from everywhere is the best method of understand about some countries and delete some stereotypes. Now we know that there are some warm places in Russia, there are beautiful beaches in Canada, there are more Lebanese people -- taking into account Brazilian-Lebanese -- living in Brazil than in Lebanon.

Also, it is a good opportunity to share with our friends a little bit about our country. Now, our friends know that we are not late all the time, that we "speak" with our hands more than we do with our mouth, some of our friends also know that we have an American Football league where teams play on the beach, that we have snow in some Brazilian regions and that we have one of the best hockey teams in the world called Rio Heat... We are kidding about the hockey team, but all the other ones are true. We swear!   

See you in the next post! 

Making a fool of ourselves!

Living and Learning

As any person abroad, we have been facing some differences. In Brazil, for example, it is not common to use coin operated clothes dryer machine like here in North America. Because of that, we have an interesting story to tell you about our broad understanding of those machines. 

In the cottage that we initially were, there were two very similar machines, one with the lid on top, as we have in Brazil, and one with the lid on the front part. I chose the second one. I did not find the place to put the powder soap, but I thought the machine was so powerful that would wash and dry without powder soap. Sixty minutes later, I picked the clothes up. And all of them were warm. Perfect! I told my husband: "this machine is practical, but it does not wash very well, the clothes are not smelling good". And he said: "Maybe you should put the powder soap directly in the clothes". 

In the second use, I followed his advice and throw soap on top. But, again, I did not like the result... Week three: I selected the other machine. Sixty minutes later, clothes were washed and smelling good, but… still wet. So in that moment, finally, we had the great insight! We figured out that during our first two weeks we were “washing” the clothes in the clothes dryer machine!!! Of course the clothes did not smell good in the first two weeks… We laughed a lot and sometimes we remember how smart we were washing our clothes in the dryer.

Other funny story, now it happens at the gym. I was picking the weights gym up to work out and I thought that all the weights were weightless, so I chose the number “6” and said to myself: "Wow, I'm stronger here, working out with 6 Kg weight for each arm”. So, I was finding myself stronger during some weeks. Some weeks later, I was in a store that sells the same gym weights when I noticed that the weights were in pounds, not in kilograms. It means, I was working out with 2.73 kg.

The last one! The first time Renato and I went to the grocery store we did not have our own recyclable bags. And when we arrived at the cashier to pay, where are the plastic bags to put our purchase? There were no plastic bags with handles, only paper bags without handles. As a result, we walked back home (5 km) hugging the paper bags. Lesson learned. Now we always carry our recyclable bags and even earn cents off because of it.

Living and learning. See you!

Slowing down!

Kayaking class at Westwood Lake

As soon as we arrived in Nanaimo, we separated a day to go to VIU. Of course that every people we met asked us: which program will you guys take? And when we said “MBA”, everybody said with a grimaced face: “wow, it is a tough program, be prepared”. 

Well, the MBA started and we realized those guys were right… Tons of texts, assignments, tests, team projects and so on. Maybe this is the reason why VIU Campus Rec offers several outdoor and indoor activities to the students: not to allow them to become crazy!

We do not think the program is driving us crazy so far, however, just in case (!!) we thought that some different activities would be excellent to meet people and help us to be in shape! As a traditional Brazilian guy, I registered myself to play indoor soccer every Tuesday. Some minutes later, our Mexican friend Luis invited me to join the MBA All Stars team and play VIU’s Intramurals. Before he finished the invitation…I was already registering myself to the league and, thank God, now I am playing twice a week! My Brazilian friends do not believe me, because this situation is something like playing hockey twice a week in Brazil!

Of course Paty also should do something and she chose something that she was not so familiar: river kayaking! Brave girl… Although the Fall with its falling degrees was coming, she said, “I will”! The first class was taken in a typical British Columbian place: the Westwood Lake. The temperature was about 15 degrees (which for us is cold!), but she took the class and she entered the water. The best part is that she enjoyed that! The other classes were taken at Nanaimo River. The course was done and she learned how to kayak in different situations, had good times, made some new friends and the best part: left behind the stress! See you!

A day to say thanks...

Traditional Thanksgiving dinner

We are enjoying our first Canadian Fall. The temperature is dropping every day, as well as the leaves, that already adorn streets. In the beginning of autumn, specifically on the second Monday in October, Canada also celebrates Thanksgiving Day or Jour de l'Action de Grace in the Province of Quebec.

Weeks before the special day, we saw a different movement at the supermarkets. Everybody wants to buy turkey, the main dish of Thanksgiving, and the traditional pumpkin pie. There are all sizes of pumpkins to be purchased as well; some are already sold with decorative faces. They are being used in home decorating.

The central idea behind Thanksgiving is to be thankful for the past harvest and express gratitude in general. We received a very special invitation from our friend Karl to celebrate the day with his family.

It was a very nice night. House decorated with pumpkins, all family together (including the dogs: sweet Raffi and agitated Luca), games, good music and good drink (akavit, beer and wine) and, for sure, a delicious dinner. Traditional menu for the celebration: roast turkey and bread stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, sugar-beet and sweet potato pie. For dessert: pumpkin pie with ice cream. Hummmm... yummy!

Before dinner, Mary, Karl’s mother, talked a bit about Thanksgiving and invited Karl to express his gratitude. It was a beautiful moment in family. Our first celebration was really special and the family atmosphere made us feel closer to home. You can check some pictures here: http://tinyurl.com/233sjtl.

A special THANKS to all our readers this week. See you soon!

Where all the good people go?

With our friends Karl and Mariel, at The Butchart Gardens, in Victoria, BC

As we said and as everybody knows: this is a frozen land! Maybe, that is why Canadian people love to break the ice, start a conversation and be nice with people they have never seen before! It looks like we are still in Brazil, since people here are so receptive and solicitous. 

And we have lots of examples to prove it: Niki – a lovely VIU employee who answered patiently tons of e-mails we sent her asking for information about the University, about the city, about the weather, about places to watch the World Cup of Soccer; Ronda – owner of the place we stayed in our first two months in Nanaimo, who offered us a cabin with cable TV so we could watch Brazil’s World Cup games; Sterling – a bank account manager who, while we opened our student account, told us all his history in a funny way and recommended us to look for a bachelor in the building we are living today (now, he is also our neighbour!); Karl – our classmate and a brother: a former baseball player who is like a comedian, making us laugh all the time and also a person who is always offering help, tours, dinners...

If we will write about each nice Canadian we met and each interesting experience we had here in three months, nobody would read this post because it would be enormous! It has been a pleasant surprise and the point is that all of those good people and excellent feelings have helped us not to miss so much our country and family. Now, when Jack Johnson ask in that song “where all the good people go?”, we think with ourselves: all of them we do not know, but we are sure that some of them come to Canada!

As we met so many cool people here, it was impossible to write about other things now. So, on the next post, we will we share our first experiences at the land of maple leaf. See you soon!

Starting from the beginning

When we were invited to join VIU institutional blogging team, we felt honoured and very happy. There are lots of nice stories to be told. We are very excited to share our experience and maybe encourage people who are willing to study outside their countries. 

To start this blog we will share with you a little bit about us. Our project to take a MBA (Master of Business Administration) abroad started on September 2007. Yes... A long time ago. As it was an important project, we decided to do things calmly. We needed to study to make some tests, like TOEFL and GMAT; to save money; to dispose our belongings and also to plan our weeding. Our goal was to start the MBA as a married couple!

The first important thing was to choose the country. We picked Canada because it is a country with many foreigners, so we believed that we would be well received here (and we really were). After it, we chose some Canadian universities to apply for the MBA program. On December 2009, we sent our application packages to some universities and we were accepted in 6 Business Schools. But, since the beginning our relationship with VIU was very positive. We received the full support from the University. VIU gave us the confidence we needed to leave our work, families and friends behind. And we arrived here on June 21 at this charming town called Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada.

So, just married, just enrolled. We got married on April 10 and on June 20 we moved to Canada. As you know, the classes here start in September, but we came two months earlier to take the Pre MBA.

In the next post, we will share with you how was our arrival in this frozen land, how was the Canadians' receptiveness and also we will tell you about our first adventures here. See you soon!