Home Sweet Home

We came down here with only 3 suitcases and 3 boxes. Most things in our apartment now are newly acquired. It took us a couple of weeks to slowly get furniture, supplies, etc. After a sizeable dent in our wallet, our place finally feel a bit more homey and we no longer need to sit on the floor and sleep on an air mattress. We're still slowly trying to put up pictures and decorations to personalize our place, but here are a couple of pictures:


Our comfy couch and Dennis' favorite chair!


The dining area looks a bit bare right now, but we'll try to spice it up with some pictures on the wall.

A dilemma

On Thursday night, we will be faced with a dilemma: (1) Watch the Canadian election leader's debate, or (2) Watch the VP candidates duke it out in the U.S. Now normally, this wouldn't be such a tough choice - we're Canadian and the Canadian election is coming up, so we need to be informed to help us make up our minds. But then there's Sarah Palin... To say that there is little expectation that she will do well in the VP debate is an understatement. I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of gibberish will come out of her mouth in this debate format, since answering questions isn't exactly her forte. There are gaffes, and then there are Palin gaffes:

On foreign policy

On the bailout... or healthcare?... or job creation?

How is it that there are still people in the U.S. that aren't scared of her potentially becoming one step from the presidency? The rest of the world is screaming... Nevertheless she is great fodder for the comedians - I love these skits on Saturday night live:

Hillary / Palin spoof

Palin-Couric interview

Got a cell phone for -$25 (yes, that's MINUS $25)

Janice and I just got our new cell phone - a pay-as-you-go phone under T-Mobile. They essentially give you the phone for free (after mail-in rebate), and plus it comes with a $25 prepaid card.

http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/phones/prepaid.aspx

(See Nokia 2610 Prepaid.) Under the pay-as-you-go plan, it'll be 10 cents / min. Not too bad, eh?

We got Ike'd... not really

Hurricane Ike hit Texas last weekend. Houston and Galveston got pounded last Friday, but since B/CS is about 2 hours inland, we were fortunate that we only got a bit of wind and some rain on Saturday morning. We were reasonably prepared in the event it were worse - had candles, flashlights, several jugs of water, and some extra non-perishable foods. But the storm wasn't bad here at all - didn't even lose any power!

If there's one thing good that Ike brought, it's that the weather is now COOLER. It's about 16 C in the mornings and 25 C at midday, which is AWESOME. Reminds me of home. :-)


Hurricane party the night before the storm



A small tree in front of our place got slightly rooted

The Mini Mini Mini Mart

Ok, so we were expecting that B/CS wasn't going to exactly have the diversity of food that Montreal has... Two types of food that are definitely up to snuff: steak and Mexican food. Absolutely love them. But seeing as we're paranoid about gaining weight down here, we can't eat that stuff all the time. Asian food is so far pretty poor or barely passable - the Vietnamese place just down the street was a big disappointment, and the sushi places are mediocre.

Variety for groceries is somewhat lacking in B/CS, though we did find an Indian grocery stored tucked in the back room of a gas station convenience store called the Mini Mini Mini Mart. It's a 5 min bike ride from our place and I heard about it from my supervisor. It's funny how they don't really advertise it outside, but they have a really good variety of stuff in there!


This was our first attempt at making Indian curry. We bought most of the ingredients from Mini Mini Mini Mart, and turned them into a delicious Saag Paneer & Butter Chicken. Yummmmmm... :-)

The Brazos Valley Chorale

Janice and I had a lot of fun singing with the Yellow Door Choir in Montreal, so we were eager to join a choir again down here. After a bit of online searching, we found a choir - or rather, a chorale (say it with a Texas twang :-) - the Brazos Valley Chorale.

It's a massive group - I think we're about 125 people. The choir has been around for about 35 years and it's a really eclectic group of people. There are 4 large concerts during the year, the first being on Nov.2. For our first concert, we're doing Carmina Burana by Orff. You might not recognize it by name, but you'll probably recognize the first piece, "O Fortuna".

According to our director, "It's not a sacred piece..." - apparently, it was written by a bunch of monks that were having a lot of fun. For our Christmas concert on Dec.6, we're doing a *beautiful* suite of Christmas carols arranged by John Rutter. I've heard all the usual Christmas carols, but Rutter's arrangement of them is just so incredible and breathes new life into them for me. After Christmas, there will be an "On Broadway" themed concert as well as an "Opera and Oratoria" concert. The music so far is challenging and fun - should make for a great season.

The choir itself is extremely well-organized - I'm really impressed. We had auditions on Aug.23 (two days after we got here), and we've hit the ground running with Carmina and Rutter at our Monday rehearsals. Every other week is a half hour men's sectional immediately preceding the rehearsal and on alternate weeks it's a women's sectional. The choir director is very focused (there's no "break" in the middle of our rehearsals to socialize), but he manages to keep the mood light throughout the rehearsal with jokes. Not to mention a couple of rowdy tenors sitting beside me that are the clowns of the entire choir.

The three seasons

In Texas, they say there are 3 seasons: Spring, Summer, and Hell. I think we landed in the middle of Hell. The heat at midday is absolutely scorching. Mornings and evenings are actually quite nice though. Fortunately, we do have A/C at our apartment... Of course, to (over-)compensate for the heat outside, many buildings blast up the A/C indoors which means it's freezing inside.

First impressions

Texas is a bit of a surprise in some ways, and in other ways it's exactly what we expected. People are very friendly, and the Texan accent is pretty cute (though sometimes very hard to understand). Cowboy hats are not as common as we expected where we are, and horses have been replaced by SUV's and big pickup trucks everywhere. Everyone drives here - the town is just so spread out and public transportation is pretty crappy. B/CS has no bus service offered by the city, but there is a handful of shuttles operated by Texas A&M University (TAMU) which will for the most part get you to where you want to go. The bad part is that a lot of these stop at 6pm. Yes, we're attempting to survive on bikes, and we're resisting the temptation to buy a car. Instead, we'll just rent a car every other weekend to do groceries and go out of town on little adventures.

Probably half of Bryan / College Station at any given time is wearing some maroon-colored outfit (the TAMU school colour) in support of the Fighting Aggies. A&M stands for "Agricultural and Mechanical" and TAMU students are called "Aggies", which I guess sounds better than "Mechies". The football stadium here is absolutely massive, and "tailgate parties" in the parking lot before a game are extremely popular.

The water sucks here - it's soft, i.e. has this soapy feel, so I can never tell whether my hands are clean or not, and the taste is horrible (salty at home; metallic at the school). So we've resigned ourselves for the first time in our lives to buying water jugs and bottled water.

Texas is much greener than we expected - we were expecting desert country close by, but that's quite a bit further west. It's actually quite pretty here. On the other hand, Texas is definitely NOT green: there's no regular pick-up for recycling in Bryan. We have to bring our recyclables to a center 5 miles away, located behind the Walmart in Bryan.

Enter the U.S.

Our adventure started at Pearson international airport in Toronto on Aug.21, 2008. Waiting in line for the U.S. customs officer, we overheard a mother tell her (probably 6 year old) son the hard fact of life:

"You're going to be waiting in lines all your life, buddy."

to which the son protested

"But I HATE this line!"

An omen for things to come... 

We got to the airport 3 hours early to apply for Janice's visa. (I already got mine two weeks earlier at the Niagara-Buffalo border.) Ample time? Think again. We waited... and waited... and waited. Boarding time for our flight (bound for Houston) was 8:20am, and by 8:10am the customs officers hadn't called Janice up to look at her file yet. In all likelihood, it was looking like she was going to miss the flight, so we made the decision that I was going to go first, take the shuttle that we had booked up to B/CS to check into our apartment, rent a car and then drive back to Houston to pick her up the next day (assuming she would get on the same flight the next day).  Sound complicated?  Indeed - this wasn't going to be easy to coordinate, considering that we had no phone number in the U.S. yet. But we parted ways, and hoped for the best. I passed through security and then booted it over to the flight gate. Boarding time was scheduled to be 8:20am and it was 8:25am now. The gate for this flight appeared to have moved?!  I check the flight status and... our flight was delayed!  I couldn't believe this stroke of luck. Turns out Janice got out of the holding room 30 min later - I can't tell you how happy I was to see her at the gate!

Welcome to our blog!

Howdy y'all - Janice and I are now in Bryan / College Station, Texas.  We got here on Aug.21, 2008 and I'm at Texas A&M doing a postdoc.  Hurricane Ike is pounding Texas right now (today is Sept.13), so what better way to spend a Saturday all holed up at home than setting up a blog and catching people up on what's happening down south.