Biking Victoria

Adam and I bought bikes recently at a used bike shop called Recyclistas. Besides selling bikes, they repair them and offer classes on how to repair your own bike. They're located right by the Galloping Goose Trail (fun name, right?), which is a rail trail that starts in Victoria and goes out west to what I think of as the wild part of the island (I may be wrong, but my impression is that besides Victoria, Vancouver Island all small towns or wilderness). We wandered around looking at the bikes they had outside until someone asked if we needed help, to which we answered, "We know nothing about bikes! Show us some good ones!" The guy looked at us, asked our heights, and then said, "Try that one, that one, and that one," able to tell right away what bikes would fit us even though they all looked pretty much the same to me. We rode different ones around on the trail and each found one we liked, so now we're real bike owners! (I feel like the Walmart mountain bike I got when I was 10 and had until we moved doesn't count.) 

It's easier to bike here than I expected; the streets in our neighborhood aren't busy at all, so most of the time you're not riding with cars, and when you do get to the busier streets they often have bike lanes. Some don't, but I've only had to bike on those a little bit so far; it's normally easy to avoid them and just go a different way. Yesterday I biked to the post office, and today Adam and I dropped our car off at the shop and biked home. That was great--super convenient since we only have one car now--except that it was 8:30am and raining. We were both soaked, freezing, and exhausted (it was mostly uphill) when we got back, but I was still glad we did it--cheaper than paying for the bus, and better exercise!

I'm weirdly excited about getting around by bike; I guess it's just because I've only ever biked for fun before, rather than using my bike to get somewhere I needed to go. Until I moved to Buffalo I lived in the country, so you couldn't just bike to the post office in under 10 minutes (also, my family currently lives on a mountain--biking down is great, but going back up is brutal!), and where I lived in Buffalo it was too scary to bike much; there was always so much traffic and most streets didn't have bike lanes. So it's cool to live somewhere where biking is possible and encouraged.

part of the selection at Recyclistas

Classes, church, bus fail, food

Well, classes have started...  9am every day this week we have Music with a professor from Houghton who lectures via Skype.  So far it's been about music in general rather than Australian music in particular, which I think is a little weird since it's only a week-long class.  But it's been pretty interesting.  Some of it just goes over my head, and sometimes there's this horrible echo on Skype so you can't really understand anything, but there have been a lot of YouTube clips of different types of music from around the world, so that's been cool.  In the afternoons we have another class, Engaging Australia Culture (I think...), but we don't really know what we're doing for that one yet.  Yesterday we talked about different stages of adjusting to a new culture and intro stuff like that.

Let's see... on Sunday we went to church, not the one where we had youth group but a different one, Southgate Wesleyan Methodist, I believe.  It was kind of in the middle of nowhere and was a big square building, not particularly church-like.  There was a peacock in the front when we pulled up--they're wild here.  The service was pretty normal; we sang some familiar songs and some new ones, Prof. Kettelkamp preached, and that was about it.  Afterward we had snacks and tea and chatted with the Australian people.  An older man told me about his grandsons and how to make pumpkin soup.

Back here that afternoon, we didn't have anything to do and wanted to do something exciting, so we decided to try taking a bus for the first time.  We walked to the bus stop and waited 10 minutes or so for the bus to Victoria Point, where we'd gone shopping the first day.  When the bus was in sight, we all watched and waited expectantly for it to pull up and stop.  But, as we all stood there, waiting and watching, the bus drove right by us.

Of course we were all like, "What?  What was that?" especially because the next bus wasn't for another hour (they run the least on Sundays).  Then we saw that on the sign for the bus stop, beneath a picture of someone waving to the bus, it said "Hail driver."  So, realizing our mistake, we headed back the way we'd come to the other close bus stop, deciding to take a bus in the other direction, where there's another shopping center.  When that bus came into view we all waved frantically, and were very relieved when it pulled over and stop.

But then, after talking to the driver for a minute, we realized that that bus wasn't going where we wanted to go; the bus we wanted didn't run on Sundays.  So we finally gave up and headed back to the college.  It was pretty sad.

But after a little while of sitting around in the lounge area, some people got a ride to Victoria Point with one of the Australian students here, and Adam, Nora, Bekah and I ended up biking there, led by the only American student here, who's really into biking and was happy to show us the way.  It was a nice ride there, all downhill.  We bought a few groceries--everything was closed but the grocery stores and Kmart; things shut down around 5 here, it seems like--and then we had to bike back.  All uphill, this time, with our groceries.  It was exhausting, but we made it (walking up the last hill helped).  And we'd had our adventure for the day.

Yesterday Prof. Kettelkamp drove us to Victoria Point--he'll be doing that every Monday and Thursday, which is nice because I was expecting to have to pay for the bus every time we wanted groceries--so Nora, Adam and I went and got even more food.  The three of us have decided to cook together, and now we should be set for a while with food.  There was a community dinner last night for everyone at the college, and we ate burgers with fried egg and beetroot.  It was different, but good.

Class time... more soon.

Sunday = church and the sabbath

Today I went with Laura, my FYI leader (First-Year Introduction -- it's a class all freshmen have to take; we're split into small groups with upperclassmen as leaders) to her church. It's a Mennonite church, like my church at home, but it's quite different. For one thing, it's in the afternoon. Today they met outside someone's house, although they do have a building where they usually meet. We all (under 50 people) sat in a circle around a fire, and whoever wanted to could call out a song, provided it was in the blue hymnals we all had, and the two guitarists would play it and we would all sing. It was an interesting way of doing worship, letting the congregation choose the music.

After that there was not a sermon, as you would expect -- they don't even have a pastor, but rather there's a man who directs things, who I believe is a professor here. Anyway, we broke up into small groups and discussed forgiveness, specifically the movie series they had been watching on forgiveness, which meant I didn't always know what they were talking about. After that we sang one last song, and then we ate dinner; it was their monthly potluck. It was nice to eat homecooked food instead of cafeteria stuff.

So it was quite different, but I did like it. Houghton's church fair is tomorrow, so I'll look around there and see what other churches I'd like to visit.

~~~

Today was also my first attempt at keeping the sabbath. It was so nice to have a day with no homework. I slept in really late, made yogurt-bran muffins with Laura for the potluck (the muffins sound really weird, but they were actually quite good), and went for a short bike ride. And am now doing computer stuff, obviously. So it was a good day.