Readjustments

Oh Canada, my home and native land...it's nice to be home but at the same time very strange. I had a few side knocks today from things I had forgotten about in good ol'
Canada.

When Ann came to pick us up from the airport I immedietly went to the left hand side of the car to get in but over here that's the drivers side. Ann just laughed and said "you're not in England anymore Jenny"

Crossing the road is throwing me off. I've gotten so used to having to look right first because the oncomming traffic comes from that direction in England. Also I walked to the local corner store to rent a film - oh by the way, Steve and Heather you can rest assured that your debt for Hoodwinked has now been payed off! Thanks for thinking of me and leaving me a wondeful welcome home present in advance!! ;) lol - and I counted out the change I needed for the film and some water and got to the counter only to find my total wasn't correct. I'd forgotten about tax!! Grrrr.

Lastly I didn't know which mail box was ours. We have to collect the mail from a collection of post boxes at the end of the street. Each person has a key for their box and I went to collect the mail and had no idea which one was ours. I started randomly sticking the key in trying to guess at which one it would be but decided I should stop when people nearby started giving me strange looks.

It's great to be home but still very weird. I was saying to someone today that it's very surreal because everything immedietly comes back to you as the natural (aside from crossing the road and tax) but driving on the right side and the way houses look and which direction lights switch and stuff. But at the same time it feels like a bit of a jolt to the system. I've had two years of learning to undo these natural tendancies and when they just re-emerge like nothing's happened it makes me feel slightly disjointed.

I had an interesting night last night. I tried to stay awake as long as I could and made it until about 9. I decided that I couldn't stay up any longer as I wasn't fully aware of what I was doing anymore. I ended up passing out on my bed and was jolted awake about midnight by my cats crawling around on my bed. Then I heard the loudest sound I'd heard in a long time...thunder! There was so much of it and lightening too! Because I was so tired I had myself convinced there was a tornado coming! I then decided that if there was one there was nothing I could do about it so I crawled back into bed and figured that God would take care of it if there was one!

I woke up this morning about 6 and couldn't fall back asleep because I was paranoid that Stephen would sleep in and be late for his day camp. All the clocks had reset during the night because of the storm so I lied in bed trying to work out the time difference with my phone from England and then set the alarm to wake me up at what I had worked out to be 7 our time. Jet-lag does strange things to you!

After I dropped Stephen off I went for a run, I hadn't gone for almost 2 weeks so was starting to feel a bit lethargic. I then showered and got ready for the day and cleaned the kitchen. I had this all accomplished by about 11 and wasn't sure what to do with myself!! I'm never up early enough to accomplish that much in a morning and if I am I usually just lie around being lazy. I think I'll have to make sure I do more of that tomorrow.

I got roped into speaking at the day camp at Trinity Bible Church next week. The age group is 10 -14 year olds and the ladies asking me said they figured I was the expert in youth and thought they'd ask me to share about England. I'm doing that next Thursday so I'll have to prepare something for that.

Hmmm what else can I talk about...OH! How about wasabi ice cream. Just a little story for you from last week.

My last night in England Tim and Anna took me, Steve and Heather, Stephen, Lisa and Francesca to this amazing Japanese restaurant in Newcastle. It was fantastic! You ordered what you wanted to eat before you sat at the table and then when you sat down it was around this massive hot plate where the chef brought your uncooked food and prepared it for you right before your eyes. It was great! I had the fillet steak and Anna had a duck breast and we shared the two. YUMMY!

For dessert they had a selection of rather interesting ice creams. Black sesame seed ice cream, green tea ice cream and wasabi ice cream. I'd had green tea ice cream before so I thought that I'd try something new being the adventurous person that I am. I asked what wasabi was and our server said she couldn't describe it for us in English but that it was nice and not too sweet. I decided to give it a go. This massive dish of yellowish ice cream came out and I took a good size spoonful and tasted it. It was DISGUSTING! It tasted like horseradish. Not too sweet was an understatement. It burned up my nose!! Everyone else gave it a try and the combination we came up with was English mustard and horseradish. I ended up having the green tea ice cream instead.

When we got back home Heather and I looked up wasabi on google and found that it is one of the hardest plants to grow. It is a plant used to spice asian foods and has a very distinct flavour. Because it is so hard to grow, many people have started substituting horseradish and mustard because they are very similar in flavour. We hit the nail on the head with our descriptions of it! Not something I'll be ordering again!