Saving While Away

Travel is expensive not just because of the expenses associated directly with the travel itself: transportation, food, accommodation -- living away, basically. It is also expensive because I still have to pay what I used to pay when I was not traveling for stuff that I won't be using while away.
 
I still have to pay my monthly rent even though I am not using my place, still have to pay my gym membership because I had agreed to do so for at least a year, still have to pay for my office space because that's what the agreement says, and I still have to pay for my phone for little to no use (for fear of not being charged long distance, I hardly make any calls while away).  

Trying to maintain your regular lifestyle is what makes my travels even more expensive. Gym, for example. These days visiting a fitness centre at least twice a week is a habit as essential as getting a cup of coffee every day. So that's the first thing I wanted to do on my second day of my stay in Edmonton. I look up the gym that I have a membership for, and it turns out that they have two locations: both within 10 minutes drive of each other, but so far away from where I stayed that it would take me 3-4 buses plus a train ride and more than an hour to get there. Not workable. I only have access to a car for a few days and I like my gyms walking distance to my place.

After going to my gym for a day, I quickly started to look for closer alternatives. I was very attentive to my surroundings as I walked around town in the next few days (I had done hours and hours of walks during my stay).  There was a YMCA in downtown, within walking distance from my place. But I know YMCA is pricy for short-term purposes. I ran into a massive city-run fitness facility during one of my long walks. I walk-in and ask for rates. That's not any better than YMCA. Lots more fitness, location and activity options than any gym I had seen before, but too expensive for my purposes. It was a bit of a walking distance for me to visit regularly.

I left the facility reconsidering my fitness options: either make fewer, 2+ hours trips to my regular gym, or find some other non-gym exercise alternatives. I had almost settled on my plan when I passed a university fitness centre. I decide to walk in and check what their rates were. They had summer specials! I could pay $20 for two remaining weeks of the month. That's almost the same as their daily rate. So I had a gym within a few minutes of my place for a reasonable pay.

When my two weeks were over, I found myself wanting to go to the gym again. I only have a week of stay to go, and it didn't make sense to do daily visits to my now former gym -- too expensive -- so I considered to make my 2 hour minimum trip to my regular gym.  I decided to do some more searches for closer facilities to see if I can avoid the travel. I search Google Maps for fitness centres in my neighborhood and call one that I found not very far...their rates are $9 per day, but why don't I visit and see if I can get a complementary free day pass? Visit I do, and I was presented with a 3-day free pass. Exactly what I needed. This being a neighborhood small, somewhat aged fitness centre, the facilities weren't as great as my pricy regular centre nor the university one, but it was good for my purposes.

And cheap enough that I felt like I saved some money during my otherwise expensive travel time.

Thinking in the Language You're Writing

Perhaps the most useful information I've extracted from U of T's career manual titled "keys to your future: a powerful resume and cover letter" (2006):

Each language has its own internal logic and structure. What is correct in one may not be necessarily correct in another. Avoid unnecessary errors by thinking in the same language in which you are writing.

I have had errors that are direct results of failing to follow the above advise (in addition to my struggle with my ongoing struggle with prepositions). I am fairly accustomed to thinking in English by now. In fact, I've been doing that since my early days of my Canadian life. But I still find myself falling into the trap of making English statements that can only be understood if one also understood Tigrigna. This may even be apparent in some of my writings on this blog.

I noticed during my stay in Quebec that, even though many of the tourist information materials there were printed in French and English, the English part was not readily understandable. Here is a classic example from a French-langauge offering university in Quebec:

Our summer intensive 3 and 5 - week programs begin in July. Those programs are offered to 18-year old, and older, and are opened to university students, teachers, business people, retired people or anyone wishing to improve his-her proficiency in French. Since all levels are offered from real beginners to very advanced, you will find a class corresponding to your proficiency in French.

For a more complete learning of French, in addition to the 20 hours spent in classroom every week, you will participate in a wide variety of socio-cultural activities. There are also tourist activities on weekends which will be offered on an optional basis.

Besides classes and extracurricular activities, you will live in French with a francophone host family (or on campus at the university residence) where you will experiment some aspects about the culture of Quebec. This will make your immersion a total immersion.

I think how you communicate in one language is a lot more than in what language you "think." A friend, who was at that time new to Canada, once told me that his native English speaking classmates remarked that he "speaks as if he is reading a book." We agreed then that it was because he speaks as if reading a book because he learned English through reading books. He comes from a school system that emphasizes a lot on the grammar and structure of English, but does little to encourage spoking in English. Missing from his (and my) vocabulary were the words and phrases that are the most often used in everyday Canadian English (I remember realizing how important it was to practice common words and phrases in my Early Canadian days, when I had emails to my cousins with as many of the new words as possible -- one email had most of its sentences ending with "and stuff", another was littered with "you guys".)

Paper Dollars

It was a rip-off.

That's how it felt when I paid what I always have paid for my grande (yes, I upgraded from tall) Starbucks coffee. I paid in U.S. dollars. The adjusted price was the two dollar bills plus 24 Canadian cents. It is not that I paid more for it that makes a rip-off (the regular Canadian dollar price is $2.10), but the fact that I paid in PAPER bills. The money felt to have had more value than, say, when I would have to pay using a two dollar Canadian coin plus a dime. Two (or even ten, depending how much change I happen to carry) COINS versus two dollar BILLS makes a huge difference on how I perceived my expense.

Well, that's what I heard is partly why there doesn't exist Canadian dollar bills; just coins.

Animals, Water and Nature

Citizenship

I don't remember attending a major political event, except at very local levels like campus student bodies, or speakers on campus. In the just finalized federal elections, I was involved with Elections Canada as an employee.

More than being a very shot term employment opportunity, what I've found is that the experience of getting involved has given me a sense of citizenship that no other events have.

It is common for politicians in campaigns or speeches to claim how being in campaign tours had brought them close to the voters - that they have seen and heard voters and have come to understand their concerns first hand.

There may be some truth to it, aside from it being a campaign cliche...

What impressed me during the training day was the diversity of the trainees. Our age ranged from a girl who I would say is just out of high school or even still in high school, to a man who must have voted in the last seven elections. I don't know if that were the shared sense of responsibility in understanding well and following the electoral rules or the interactive nature of the training that gives one a sense of citizenship for being part of the process.

On election day, I had a glimpse of what politicians may call the "fabric of the society." The voter turnout (which I thought was descent, given the number of polls in our location), the order of the process and great discipline that everyone involved showed. There were the elderly voter, the first time voter who needed to register just because she turned 18 last week, the pregnant woman, the dad with twins in a stroller, the businesspeople who just got out of work and came in rushing to vote before it was over, and there was the lady in a wheelchair who knew exactly which station she was going to vote in. From my observation, it was by no means a fully representative voting crowd (college-aged young people were not as visible, for example), but it were representative enough for one to see what the society is made of.

And then there was the voter who drove back to her house and dutifully brought her proper identity, and the other voter who was very insistent in voting and having her voice heard and made two trips to another voting location that the records showed she was eligible to vote in, only to come back to our location because she "lives next door."

It is easy enough to see that outside this particular event, these people are businesspeople, dads, moms, doctors, retirees, nurses, caretakers, customer servers, TV show hosts, and so on. But on this particular day, they were all citizens who wanted to make their voice heard, who wanted to make sure that the voting process was fair and error free, and that the rules were followed and respected -- the latter often enforced passionately and forcefully.

What I've been up to

Inside the Mind of a Third-Grader

I asked a grade 3 student to draw anything that comes to his mind so we can describe it in Tigrigna, as part of a Tigrigna lesson; and this is what he got: