Last day of class at UOttawa & more

So today I had the last class at the University of Ottawa!! It's crazy how fast the semester has passed by. I've had the rest of my presentations last week and handed in papers yesterday and today (including a night shift until 5am) and now there's 'only' one paper and two finals left. So the next week includes quite some studying.

I also solved the problem of not having a place to stay in January! I found a room for sublet until February 8th and then I only have one more week until I leave to Vancouver and then San Francisco!

We're still trying to do stuff together as much as possible with our busy exam schedules. We had a lovely girls sleepover party on Monday evening at our place. Lots of food and girl talk ;) I missed the movie though cause I had to get back to my paper ...
Tonight, we're making Pizza because we all LOVE to eat and eating together is more fun of course :D And we wanna celebrate the last day of class a bit :)

ICE CREAM!!!

Time flies

Christmas is only one month away which means that most of my friends here will be leaving soon :((((
I've been busy with school stuff the past weeks. I have lots of group projects which are fun but it can get really annoying when you have to get 5 people to meet at the same time. In my aboriginal studies class we had to design a center for First Nations People and specifically for Indian Residential School Survivors. If you never heard about that before you should google it. It's really upsetting that so many people don't know about what the Canadian government did to Indian people. One of my jobs for the project was to design a homepage where we put the information about the center. It's all hypothetical of course but if you're interested you can take a look: http://eas3102groupproject.webs.com/

And I've been sick. Again. I lost my voice twice in a week. Exchange life is exhausting.... ;)
But that doesn't keep me from doing stuff :D
Last weekend we went to see a Basketball game. UOttawa against McMaster University. It was nice and we won :) We're going to see a Hockey game later today. Unfortunately, due to the NHL Lockout, there are no professional Hockey games at the moment so that's the only Canadian Hockey experience we will get while we're here.

We're trying to do as much stuff as we can now because we have so little time left together. We only have two more weeks of class and then finals. Next week the International Office already has a farewell party planned. I don't want the semester to be over :((((

PS: We had the first snow today that actually stayed on the ground for a bit. 

Birthday Fun

Woohoo I'm 23!
After staying up until 3 am finishing a paper that was due on my birthday and getting up quite early, going to class, staying home for a while and going to class again the fun part of my birthday started at 9pm with a nice dinner with some friends. We went to "Royal" and most of us had burgers. Yumm Yumm :))) So that was Wednesday and then yesterday we had our big party. It was Tessie's birthday on the 6th so we celebrated together and had a houseparty at our place (Tessie lives at the residence so the "location" choice was pretty obvious"). It was FUN! Pretty crowded but FUN! And this morning a looooot of beer bottles and sticky floors.

birthday dinner

burger

Jello Shots :)

Birthday girls

Happy Halloween

We had some halloween fun on Wednesday altough there is no holiday here on Nov 1st.....Had class at 8.30am which I did not attend ;) We dressed up at our place and later went to a club at the market here in Ottawa. It was pretty fun.

Study Week Trip

Saturday morning we left to Monteal by rideshare and got there in the afternoon. Unfortunately, we had to wait for and hour until the stupid guy from the reception came back so there wasn't much time left to do sightseeing so we just got ready to go out. We were all kinda spread out through the city because some were staying with friends and the rest was staying at different hostels. Sasha, Natasha and me went to Xela and Tone's hostel (I'm just gonna mention the names now; just pretend you know them ;) ) to stay there for a while and later we wanted to go to a bar/ club but we didn't really end up anywhere nice and Natasha and me hat to walk for almost an hour to get back to the hostel :(
The next morning Sasha, Natasha and me went to the Notre Dame of Montreal and later met up with Cristian and Rodrigo (both from Chile) and their friends. We had all you can eat buffet in Chinatown and then went down to the old port and strolled through the latin quartier. There's lots of really nice houses - I liked that a lot :) Towards the evening we 'climbed' up Mont Royal from where you have an amazing view of the city. By the time we got up there it was already dark so we had a great view of Montreal with all its lights! It was Cristian's birthday the next day so we got together in the evening and made Wraps and celebrated a bit.

Notre Dame Basilica of Montreal

View Port/ Old Port

View from Mont Royal at night

 The next morning the whole road trip group met up to get into the cars and discover the magnificent country of Canada ;) We started heading to our first stop: Rivière-du-Loup. We only stopped for short lunch and bathroom breaks and got to the hostel in the early evening. We had one room booked there and a few couchsurfing places. We all stayed at the hostel for dinner and a nice night in with some drinks for Cristian's birthday before heading to Bic National Park the next morning. We hiked for around 3 hours before we reached 'Pic Champlain' where we enjoyed a breathtaking view on the park and the St. Lawrence River. After having lunch there we walked back to the cars and drove down to the water to watch the beautiful sunset. We all had couchsurfing places for that night so we split into a few groups to go to our hosts. I stayed at one place with Solenne, Cristian and Rodrigo and it was quite fun. We stayed at a student's apartment with 3 students who all study Oceanography. We all had Poutine together for dinner and went to bed quite early.

View from 'Pic Champlain' (Bic National Park)

View from 'Pic Champlain'

Let's try to get everyone on the picture :)

Sunset down by the water

beautiful sunset

 The next morning we all got together again to take a walk by the river in Rimouski (that's the city we were staying at that night). I just LOVE LOVE LOVE that river! The weather was great and the beautiful view ...ahhh :D  We left Rimouski to go to Matane where we had the next hostel booked. On the way there we stopped at Point-au-père where there's a nice lighthouse and a submarine 'memorial'. That place was a major trade point during WWII and lots of German submarines came there. I need to do some more research on that to clarify some facts ;)
We also stopped at 'Jardins de Metis' which are supposed to be amazing during spring/ summer. Most of the leaves and flowers were gone already since it's getting close to winter so we didn't stay that long. We kept driving until we reached Matane where we went to "La Fabrique" for dinner. Most of us were craving some fish so we had fish & chips and salmon burgers. We all stayed at a very nice hostel in a even smaller town just outside of Matane.

St. Lawrence River at Rimouski

Walk through Rimouski

Point-au-Père

Lighthouse at Point-au-Père

The Hostel in Matane

  The next morning we drove to Gaspésie National Park. We did a little bit of hiking there again, enjoyed yet another sandwich lunch with an amazing view before heading aaaaaall the way back to Quebec City where we stayed for two nights with lots of partying. We had a really great time and got to see a lot of Canada's beautiful nature!!!! Thanks to everyone for this awesome trip!

Gaspésie National Park

Gaspésie National Park

Quebec City

We saw Caribous!! Looks like a horse but it's not! :D

Ottawa - Montreal - Rivière du Loup - Matane - Gaspésie National Park - Quebec City - Ottawa