Nouveau calque

Good morning from the basement!

Tavalliseen tapaani aamulla kävelen salmiakkipussi kädessä ja karjalanpiirakoita eväänä sumuista katua pitkin töihin ja nousen portaita etuovea kohti kunnes…Bonjour! Janitor walks towards me and I pretend like I know what I’m doing and I casually say something in French that should remind a friendly greeting. This cumbersome pretending continues when I meet another colleague and another and another until finally I’m on my spot. All this suffering is due to the lack of interest towards languages at school – learn your languages kids!

These first few weeks I’ve been just sketching snowmobiles on paper with ballpoint pen. It’s actually quite hard to just draw something without an assignment and still make them realistic and rational and impress everybody… On the other hand why wouldn’t I just doodle all the summer without stress of project deadlines etc. Still, challenges are what internships are made for and this is the ultimate place to get some real work experience.

Just recently I got my first task where I’m designing proposals for a small part of one of BRP’s products but..ööö..TOP SECRET – I can’t tell you more… What I can tell is that I’ve also been trying to learn to use my pen display but so far it has given me a great challenge….the language is set to France. Luckily I’ve played memory games when I was younger and the Ctrl+Z command works.

Outside of work we’ve been thinking about renting a car for the duration of our stay here but in hard reality it’s really expensive and especially in Canada – in the land of the false prices. They add taxes to every price – two different ones – so in grocery store, restaurants etc. prices are actually higher than what it says elsewhere and in restaurants we have to even tip the waitresses on top of that. Back to the car - we luckily met this extremely friendly couple last weekend in Richmond – nearby town – where we took this short biking route of 25 km in Canadian forest. They promised to sometimes borrow us one of their cars.

So off we went, with old but steady Suzuki. Of course we went straight to Sherbrooke which is a bit more than 40 kilometers away behind the hilly roads. We visited Sherbrooke once already – but didn’t see anything besides one shopping center. Now we went to the city center and explored around a bit. It was so hot and sunny that my legs burned…from sitting in the car. It felt like sitting in the middle of a magnifying glass because the second we jumped to “our” Suzuki I could feel my skin frying. Suzuki did have A/C button which we left almost untouched - tried it once and it didn’t work.

Since we had borrowed car for two days we decided next day to visit Lake Brompton – nearby lake and holiday resort. Our neighbor had recommended visiting the place: amazing view and wonderful restaurant. Reality was something like it..but in a Finns eye the lake view was pretty much comparable to the thousands of lakes of Finland. Nevertheless, having a dessert in a beach-patio was really nice and who can say that there is something wrong watching calm lake view.

Driving in here was actually quite nice. Some signs were unfamiliar and in French but most of them were almost the same than in Finland. We did notice – surprise - that the speed signs go differently: 50 – 70 – 90 - 110. Sunday evening after some last moment grocery shopping we finally returned the car to its happy owners and switched to our loved vintage bicycles.

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