"Are you the people from Canadian?"

5 Boys, 1 Girl, 2 Bathrooms, and a few Cockroaches.

We moved into our new place on July 24th, after spending a few hours on saturday cleaning the place up. Our landlord usually does the cleaning, but he was busy and offered a discounted rent if we would do it. Why not. How bad could it be? right? uhmmm... wrong. It was real bad. I don't think the guy living here before us had cleaned the place for months. There were more spiders in the 2 rooms than you can imagine. And I don't think Scott has ever jumped so high when he came upon this by the window....

A Praying Mantis!

I think I want to live in a van down by the river instead! But, after googling to make sure these weird bugs weren't poisonous or going to bite me, but that they actually eat other bugs, I figured I should give it another shot. So.... we go on with the cleaning/debugging. (no wonder this insect was in here... it had an all day buffet).

Then... things got a little more serious. I don't think Nikki has ever squealed so loud. While cleaning the curtains, Nikki was attacked (yes...attacked) by....

A COCKROACH!
Ok... maybe it didn't attack me, but those things are GROSS and they can move fast. After a tough chase, Scott had him cornered... and then he was done. (ewww...I'm itchy just remembering that incident).

After some of the major cleaning, we went to K-mart to get a few needed supplies...

Nikki went a little nuts with spraying every nook and cranny of the room. It obviously worked because a few minutes later we found 2 more cockroaches that came out from their hiding places and were moving a lot slower. Our first night in the place, Nikki didn't sleep very well because she thought that any sensation or itch was a cockroach crawling on her. But when we got up in the morning, the first thing we did was do a bug hunt and we didn't see any bugs. Thank you Raid! I admit, I might have gone a little overboard with spraying the room, but we've only seen 1 spider since! We still keep in handy at all times... just in case.

Anyways... we moved into a house with 4 other guys. 2 Kiwis, 1 Irishman, and 1 Finn. When we first met one of the guys, we walked in and he said "Oh, are you the people from Canadian?" uh... yes we are. And don't you forget it. Maybe he should come visit Canadian someday.

We have the 2 rooms in the basement of the house to ourselves, and share the kitchen, living room, and bathrooms with the other guys. One of our rooms is just a typical bedroom, and the other is a little living area with a couple couches. We also have a great big window looking out onto the pool. Too bad it is winter while we are living here and we probably won't get to use it at all. We are just happy to have a little more room now and the people in this house seem to be a lot more friendly than the last house. 

Since we moved into our new place last weekend, we didn't have time to take Bertie on another adventure. So, instead, we decided we should actually check out what there is to do in Hamilton.

We asked some local Kiwis what people do here, and we got the same response from everyone of them. "There's really not a whole lot to do". We found out how true that was. It is a little bit of a sleepy city.  On friday afternoon, we walked the main street downtown.

We stopped at a patio for some appitizers, then walked along the rivervalley. We thought we'd walk back and check out some of the shops, but by the time we were done dinner, it was 5:30pm. Pretty much everything except pubs and restaurants closes on weekdays at 4:30 or 5pm and even earlier on weekends. Added to the sleepiness is that the sun sets here at about 5:30pm. So it actually feels like the city shuts down. Such a different feeling than a big city.



We heard about a town just south of Hamilton that had a Saturday farmer's market, and with nothing else to do in Hamilton we went for a drive. Cambridge is about 20 minutes away, and is just as sleepy and chilled as Hamilton.

The farmer's market there was way more farmer-y than in Calgary or Edmonton, here it's actually a bunch of farmers who back their pick-up trucks into a field. It was small but had some great stuff. After Cambridge we kept driving south for a little ways, and found ourselves at a resevoir and a scenic reserve (think mini national park).

The scenic reserve started out in farmland but quickly turned into heavy forest and an inactive volcano. There's all kinds of walking/hiking trails around the area and some great views.

We weren't planning on going for a hike that day and we didn't have any gear, plus the weather started moving in so we decided to come back another weekend and explore the place. The rest of the weekend was packing, moving, unpacking, and pest control.

This week's 7-day forecast: school, job hunting (1 good lead so far), baking Scott's birthday cake, and skiing on Mt. Doom... oh yeah.