Canada--1 month in

Today marks 1 month since the kids and I arrived in Edmonton. In some ways it feels like we've been here way longer and in other ways it has flown by! Here's a quick post about things I've noticed/things that are different, etc. since I've been here....

I'm starting to get used to the metric system and using celsius instead of fahrenheit. I basically know that 20 is roughly 70 and I go from there. The weather here has been nice, but not very hot. I think there has been one day that we could have gone swimming since we've been here. We have no air conditioning in our house and none of our neighbors do either. Apparently it will be something we want for about 3 weeks a year so it's not worth the cost. This week it is supposed to get hot so we may be sleeping in the basement! As far as grocery shopping with the metric system....it has been pretty easy. Most of the produce has price per kg and also price per pound. Meat is the only thing that doesn't, but I can generally tell how much meat there is with some simple calculations. The only time I was caught off guard was when I was getting my license and they wanted my height in cm and my weight in kg. I had to use a converter on my phone for that! The highways are all pretty much 100 kilometers per hour which is about 60 and around town it's about 60 kilometers per hour which is about 35. I have adjusted my eyes to look on the inside ring of my speedometer instead of the outside where they normally look for mph.

(this week's forecast is gorgeous! notice it has the temps converted underneath so I can always cheat if I need to!)


The whole money thing is proving to be a little bit more of a pain than I was hoping. Chris is still being paid in the US so we have to get money to our Canadian account and we have to try to do that as cheap as possible. A previous ex-pat who was here with John Deere a few years ago was here a couple weeks ago visiting. He told us that he used to take his US Bank card, withdraw a bunch of cash from the ATM, Then turn around and deposit it into his Canadaian bank account at the same machine! Seems like there should be a better way, but we're not sure! We had a babysitter last week for a few hours. She was traveling to states with her family for a few weeks once school got out, so she asked if we had any US Dollars to pay her with so she didn't have to convert as much money! For a night away without the kids, we were willing to do just about anything, so paying her in American money was perfect! I have run into a few problems with paying for things online because my credit cards are going to a US Address and when they asked for the postal code for billing, they wanted a Canadian address. I suspect we will figure this stuff out the more we're here.

Growing up, we called dinner "supper". I think it's a small town, rural Iowa thing because when I met Chris, he called it dinner and I made the switch. Now, we're back to calling it supper here in Canada! I asked my neighbors about it and they basically said dinner is a nice lunch, but they knew what we were talking about. According to some neighbors, the garbage business in Edmonton is one of the best in the world. Thankfully for us, we can put out as much garbage and recycling as we want each week. Garbage goes in black bags and recycling in blue bags. Pop/Beer cans and bottles have a $.05 deposit which is normal for us, but what's very different is water bottles have a deposit. A 24 pack of the regular Nestle water bottles that we have at home cost $4.97 here. Then, they add on $2.40 for deposit! $.10 per bottle...we will be returning those out of principle!

We have Canadian nextflix here so they don't have the same shows as we do with American Netflix. We were in the middle of Revenge and they don't have that here. We're going to try to trick our TV into thinking we're in America somehow, but we haven't had time. I guess people do it all the time. For those of you that I text regularly, I'm done correcting the autocorrect. If you see that a word is spelled wrong, it's probably because that's the way they spell it here! I have been going back and changing it, but I'm going to just let it go because it's a bit of a pain to do that all the time:)
(a text conversation between Tara and me. She has only been a mom for less than a week and she already knows the importance of baby poop:)


Grocery shopping has gone pretty well. Most of the stuff I can buy the same as I buy it at home. There are a few things we can't get. Jif peanut butter is not here, so we had to switch to Skippy. Also, I can't get orange juice that has calcium and vitamin D AND is pulp free. I can get pulp free, but that doesn't have the added calcium that I like to buy for Ivy. They don't have the brand juicy juice so Mya is really missing her strawberry banana juice! Some other differences besides the prices...ritz crackers come in one bag instead of the 4 individual packs. And of course since Canada has two official languages, everything is labeled in English as well as French. We bought the kids Monopoly Junior the other day and even the properties, the Chance cards, etc. were labeled with both. Also, we're not mountain dew drinkers, but here the only mountain dew you can buy is caffeine free!

The Canadian post (mail service) has been sketchy on how fast we get things. One letter we got in 6 business days and another we got in 11! My mom sent a package to us and it got here in 10 days. She can ship things to my sister in Japan faster than that! (btw...jif peanut butter was in the package:) It costs $.83 per stamp to mail within Canada so I suspect when I get home in a few yers I won't mind paying $.49/stamp or whatever it is by then.

I'm sure there's plenty more I'm forgetting right now! I will try to keep track and do a regular post on how things are different here. Hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the summer!