Briefly in English

In case some of my non-Finnish speaking friends end up here reading the blog I will update briefly what’s going on in my life. I’m currently in St. Leonard, New Brunswick, Canada doing my internship at a company called JD Irving, Ltd. If you’ve been in Canada and seen gas stations called Irving, it’s the same company. I’ve been here for two weeks now and already got a taste of life over here. St. Leonard is small town situated in North-West New Brunswick and is already French speaking place. The province is the only officially bilingual province in Canada. A town called Grand Falls (about 20km south from here) is bilingual town and everything south of that is English speaking. And closer you get to the border of Quebec, the more French speaking it gets.

I’m working with 3 Canadian students and we are doing the field work for Productivity Delineation Project. So far I haven’t found the work nice, mainly because of the heat. Since I got here, it’s been over 30 degrees daily and that’s way too much for me. Besides I think I’ve been given a task that doesn’t belong to me because I’m not Canadian and familiar with side types and things like that. Anyway, I’m having enough stress about it already so I’ll just skip it. :) The people over here are fantastic. So helpful and nice. I stay in a boarding house with one German girl (she’s also here for an internship) and one of the Canadian students I’m working with. It’s also really nice to stay with them and do things together. The only problem is that the people are French speaking and I don’t speak French. Well, most over here do speak English, too, but for example at the office I hear nothing else than French all the time. Even our supervisor gives instructions in French at first and then briefly in English which annoys me a lot. We all speak English after all!

I’ve had a bit of an action already. We got lost in the forest as the GPS and compass (yeah, apparently compasses can get broken too… and those two can broke at the same day!) broke down. We didn’t get out of the forest until late in the evening just before it was about to get dark. Man, that scared me a lot because there are bears over here. Then we’ve been having quite a lot thundering for the past few days and over the boarder in Maine, US (about 20km away from here) they’ve had tornados. Because of the rain and electricity break down on Friday (August 3), the downstairs of the house I’m staying in is a bit flooding. Well, now it’s just wet but there were about 5 cm water on the floor. It hasn’t happened before and it’s all because the pumps need electricity to work and it had break down in the middle of heavy rain. So I wonder what will happen next! :)
I’ve already had a chance to visit Quebec City which was absolutely beautiful and very French. :) Today we’re going to Edmundston which a town about 50km from here. We’re going to see if there are any New Brunswick Day (that’s on Monday) celebrations left. :) So, everything’s alright and I’ll try to make the best out of stay in Canada! :)