Oh and this is the highlights from Vermont/Middlebury. The top one is from the Quidditch World Cup (they all run around with brooms and the snitch is a person selected from the track team, you can see him in the back).

The next is a bee that joined us for lunch. His wings were covered in ketchup so he was more of a prisoner than anything. He eventually escaped successfully.

And finally the last one is your truly hiding behind some brilliant leaves.

spotted: beautiful image

I heard the fire trucks screaming and peaked out the window of my eighth story classroom to see them zooming down Stanley street. Then as I stood there, a dancing tissue caught my eye. And not just any dancing tissue, but a tissue dancing on the same level as the 5th floor. It swooped, dove and flipped back up only to land again on a nearby roof covered in graffiti. Clearly not satisfied, it swiftly took flight again in a matter of seconds and at that point I was forced to take my seat again.

I hope all ended well for that tissue.

And yep, that's the most interesting thing that's happened to me in a while but perhaps also the most pleasant.

love love

NEIGEEEEEEEE aka SNOWWWWWWWWWW

Oh Dear, it~s been quite a while since I~ve written. Luckily for you all I~m in vermont this weekend visiting my friend who goes to Middlebury. THe lucky part is that she is taking portuguese and so her computer has some really weird settings and there are things like the apostrophe that come up as a ^ etc. Anyways, bear with me.

So yesterday as I was walking home from the grocery store it began to snow. It has already been raining quite hard so snow shouldn~t have been that big of a deal but it was because I was poorly equipped for the rain so snow was fairly deadly. I was checking out when I first saw it and I thought, oh wow that is really weird rain. Only it wasn~t rain. It was big, fat, wet pieces of snow. Like miniature frozen clouds falling down on Montreal. I zipped up my coat and extracted my umbrella, and braced myself. I was doing fairly well for the first few blocks. Then the wind picked up and blew so hard that my umbrella~s little metal arms all bent backwards. What~s worse was that I was on the phone with Nora coordinating our plans and so I wasn~t in an ideal position to care or deal with my backwards umbrella. What makes matters in worse was that as soon as I turned around to see the umbrella I hear the deep roar of a belly laugh. That was cool. That was the least of my worries though, I needed to figure out how to right my umbrella while still holding my groceries and concentrating on the conversation and keeping my body from being totally overwhelmed by snow bits all while withstanding the wind. So, what else is there to do but to stop walking and turn 180 degrees and wait for the wind to blow my umbrella back to its original form. No go.

Wind 1

Lissie 0

I ended up seeking refuge under an awning and manually fixing my umbrella. Ahh, good times.

Now though I must be off. Nora and I are going to a tap dance competition and then off to explore the Middlebury night scene.

Hope everyone is well!

xo

Around The Crowd

Yesterday I ended up having to go back to the grocery store for some forgotten ingredients. Claire and I had just returned from the gym so I was attired in my finest Bosque Volleyball t-shirt, shorts and tennis shoes and I decided I would just run to the store. FUNNEST THING EVER. Generally, I'm not a big fan of running but in the city running is less like exercise and more like a game. Honestly, I finally understand why people race cars. It's like putting together a real-life moving puzzle. As I ran in and out of people I tried to make it so that I disturbed no one, as if I didn't even exist on that street. When I got cut off, I'd have to instantly regroup and find another way around the crowd. Then when I happened upon a red light I would have to wait with everyone else at the light (people we're shocked when they saw me appear out of thin air on the corner) but as soon as it turned I would sprint ahead and once again disappear.

Needless to say, it was the most thrilling grocery store run I've ever done.

Oh so Martha...

So yesterday was a wild day in the culinary world of apartment no. 5. I went to bed shamefully early (there's little for a bum like me to do when all my studious roommates have midterms). I got up at six am and made a loaf of banana bread (to feed the bounty of people staying with us this weekend). Unfortunately though, within minutes there was smoke pouring from the oven. That is alarming in any context but at 6 in the morning it is, without a doubt, too much to handle. That's okay I thought, it must just be the fact that our oven has "super powers" as Liz puts it. That's code for we're not really sure if it's temperature is accurate. Anyways, I shook off that failure, assuming that the bread was just powercooked (the top was completely black when I went to remove it) and so I moved on to the muffins. It's a box recipe so it was supposed to be easy but it too ended in plumes of smoke and black tops. It was then that I realized I had set the oven to Grill/Gril setting instead of the Bake/Cuire setting. Oops. Let me repeat, OOPS. Thankfully though, in my anger/frustration/confusuiopn/amusement I ended up making another batch of banana bread and so was able to correct my mistake. Just in the nick of time too, since minutes later I had to run out the door to class. Those are the times I love living five minutes from school. The culinary train rode right on into the afternoon when I make a vegan lasgna to be comsumed by all six of us on Saturday night. Unfortunately, I didn't have the recipe with me so I just did it from memory. Haha, we'll see how that goes.


Now we have a coupious amounts of bakes goods, some more edible than others. That's good because Michelle's boyfriend and Claire and my's friend Emily are visiting this weekend (yay!)! Tonight Michelle has prepared Tortilla Soup and then we're going to a concert tonight. I bought my tickets in August for it so I'm pretty much so excited that I can't breath right (I'm only half joking).

Right now that's about it. With so many visitors here this weekend will be a grand tour of Montreal.

xo

so many adventures, so little time

Sorry all that I have not written more regularly but things have been very busy. This weekend was Thanksgiving in Canada which was very pleasant to have early but fairly disorienting because now all I can think about is Christmas and Halloween hasn't even happened yet! On that subject though, I'm pleased to report, that we have settled on being Mounties for Halloween. It's going to be epic. As for this weekend though, we went to Michelle's grandparents house in Toronto. It was an 8 hour bus ride there which was too loong but a much more manageable five on the way back. We got in late Friday night, subwayed to the burbs, and then her aunt picked us up at the end of the line and drove us home. We then proceeded to binge on all of the goodies Michelle's grandparents bought to spoil us with (like all good grandparents should). It was pretty thrilling considering how little we eat junk food. After that, we rented "Adventureland" which was a very awkward but well done comedy that we all throughly enjoyed. I highly recommened it. Then, on Saturday, we ventured into the city and explored. There were copious amounts of fur-lined jackets bussling through the city in and around us. The highlight of the afternoon was when we went to the harbor. We were admiring the birds (malards, seagulls, etc.) when a fellow admirer gave us each a piece of bread to through at them. What ensued what nothing short of brilliant madness (see photos). After that, we realized we were freezing and quickly rushed to find a place to each. Michelle's grandparents treated us to a delicious meal and afterwards we explored College Street which is one of the main bar streets in Toronto. It was nice but nothing thrilling. On Sunday we went to the Art Gallery of Toronto which is a museum desgined by Frank Gerhy, the same man who built the Guggenheim. It was spectacular. What was even more spectaular was the exhibit on Edward Steichen during the years when he did fashion photography for Vogue and Vanity Fair. His photos literally took my breath away. After seeing that I want to become a professional photographer and/or be him. If you can look up his portraits of Amelia Earhart or Sylvia Sydney (my favorites) or really anything he has done. Then, after that life changing experience, we came home and feasted. Her grandmother even made me fake chicken to eat and butterless mashed potatoes. Yum!

The weekend was quite an adventure and I'm very grateful to Michelle's family for putting us up and putting up with us. T'was a lovely weekend.

bilingual living

So yesterday was lovely. I woke up fairly early for the weekend and tinkered around a bit. Then I met my friend Pamela (from Mexico City) and we went to Mont Royal Park, which is this huge park in Montreal. It is more on scale with Central Park than anything else we have in ABQ. It's crazy because there are always so many people there! Walking, running, playing frisbee, smoking, making music and a bunch of other cool stuff. Anyways, every Sunday during the summer they have something called TamTams which is where people come and play drums. So there we roughly thirty people druming and then another 75 or so watching them. There are also street vendors who come. I wish we could have seen it during the summer when it was really nice but there was still a fair amount of peope there despite the rain.

While we were there listening to the music, Pamela and I were approached by these two guys carrying a sign. At first they started speaking to us in French but we were very clearly lost. They told us though that they were doing a project and they wanted to take a picture with 250 women and one man to show the absurdity of the French language (since in French even though there's only one guy there, it would still be a masculine grouping "ils"). We told them we weren't sure what our plans were but if we were free at four thirty we would check it out. When we got there, we were two of six girls, a far cry from 250 women. All in all there ended up being only about thirty women and they took pictures of us in a group looking at each other, looking at the camera, and then looking at the one guy. Pamela and I were the only ones who didn't speak French and I could understand some of it but it was a very strange language experience. It took about a half hour and by the end neither Pamela nor I could feel our toes and so we ran/hobbled to a cafe. I'm still not quite sure how I feel about the whole photo shoot concept but I talked to one of the photographers and she said that they were going to try and put the series in a magazine or something but who knows?

Then we went to a going away dinner for our German friend Milena at an Irish pub. I was telling her that I was planning on being in Europe a bit next summer and she invited me to stay with her in Germany or she said she would come meet me anywhere because she loves to travel. Then she said she would love to travel with me because she can tell that I'm very mature and content with myself. It was a very sweet compliment and it just makes me even more grateful that I get to meet all these wonderful people from all over the world.

Alrighty well I'm off to meet some friends at school to study,

much love
xo
Lissie

Rain Rain Go Away...

Even though I should be used to non-stop rain, I am still disappointed at the ten day forecast that predicts nearly ten full days of rain. Booooo. Our activity has decreased somewhat since it's gotten colder but we're still having a good time. Last night we went to Matias's apartment. He's one of the girl's friends from school and he, coincidentally, lives in the apartment next to ours. We thought that since it's part of the same building as ours he would have the same layout. It turns out though that their apartment has a much better setup than ours. Needless to say we were bummed out. Our apartment is set up so that the kitchen is at one end and then there is a long hall that has our three bedrooms coming off of it and at the end there is the living room. We all really like it but his apartment was much more centralized and communal. Plus he has a door to his fire escape, whereas we just have a window that we climb through. Alas! In this instance ignorance would have been bliss.

Generally things here are continuing to go well. This week I start my fourth week of French classes. They're going really well, although so far what we've been doing has mostly just been reviewing what I learned last year. I'm thankful for that though because I forgot so much over the summer. This week I have a long this of things to accomplish. I want to make dinner for my roomates, use our old bananas to make banana bread, visit the museum by our house, try out a yoga class at the Y, finish my book, and stop by the market in our neighborhood. It should be a full week!

I hope you're doing well!

xo
Lissie