canadia and cold

oooh, the cold is setting in :)
i'll begin at the beginning, though.
james and i drove to canada. :) yes, DROVE, because you can do that here - drive to another country. and it's fun! i can't say the landscape changed dramatically as we crossed the border/bridge, but i felt different. perhaps it was the canadian flags, or the road signs shaped like royal crowns...or maybe it was because i think of it differently. i wonder why you would live so close to the border in michigan when you can move across the border to a land with cadbury dream, crunchies and meat pies (inferior ones, but meat pies none the less)...why would you settle in Ann Arbor and complain about the war, when you could move to Niagara on the lake and mingle with citizens of a nation that refused to join the war? it baffles me.
canada is ...peaceful. i felt the peace and beauty that washes over me when i drive through the Barossa valley in SA. even as we zoomed down busy highways, i felt life go slower than it had in the states.
the english style houses and 'Provincial Routes' instead of highways constantly reminded me that we share a common queen. it may not mean much, and she may not do much, but it was nice to know that their government is overseen by the same lady (and her 100 clever men) who oversee ours. it was nice to gauge distance in kilometres, nice to stay with an Australian (Lisa Stapleton - from my church and school back home :D) and nice to be (no not just 'be', but to 'be above') the legal drinking age again. it was just...nice.
we got in to waterloo (where lisa lives) late, like 12.30am. after a while of giggles and excitement with lisa, we made ourselves hush so we could hop into bed and save our excitement for the morning. well, weren't we spoilt the next morning with bacon, eggs, fresh fruit, orange juice, pancakes and homemade maple syrup! since there were ten of us in the house, we had a buffet feast and a few laughs together.
soon after we got ourselves organised and then james and lisa placed themselves at my mercy as we drove to niagara :) (my driving is shocking. windscreen wipers going off all over the place between me asking 'oooh! which lane do i turn into?!' and chants of 'keep right. stay right.' - hey, it's been a while!)
niagara was stunning. God put on a rainbow for us, and we enjoyed every minute of it! lisa and i even got happy snaps of the end of it, but we couldn't climb down to it to start digging, because we'd left our harnesses at home. hehe... so yes, it was stunning, but, like all national monuments and attractions i've seen so far (sydney opera house, harbour bridge, miami beach, the memorials in washington, the empire state and lady liberty) it just wasn't as 'WOW' as the movies make them. these are all just things, and the more of them i see, the more i realise how much i just miss the simple things of Aus...red dirt, little scrubby bushes, vineyards in the Adelaide hills and cliff faces along the Murray. 'big things' just blur into one...these things are important to me...and as the rest of the world is slowly dwarfed, i realise that i will always love a sunburnt country more :)
needless to say, lisa and i had some fun chats reminiscing about high school and other fun things. we played dj (much to james' disgust...hehe) and listened to such old school classics as 'bring it all back' (s club 7), 'if you had my love' (yup, the one that started it all for j-lo), 'big big world' (dunno, that chick...beautiful song) and - now i nearly wet my pants when she told me she had this - 'i still call australia home'...it was cool for lisa and i, and i thought about marth, nicole, me, lisa (and soon danny, anisia, kizzy, cristie and jordan) and yeh, it was cool:

All the sons and daughters spinning 'round the world
Away from their families and friends
Ah, but as the world gets older and colder
It's good to know where your journey ends

And someday we'll all be together once more
When all the ships come back to the shore
Then I realize something I've always known
I still call Australia home

No matter how far
Or how wide I roam
I still call Australia home

And for when we get home:

I've been to cities that never close down
From New York to Rio and old London town
But no matter how far
Or how wide I roam
I still call Australia home

I'm always travelin'
And I love bein' free
So I keep leavin' the sun and the sea
But my heart lies waiting over the foam
I still call Australia home

sad admission: two ads have caused me to cry before: the QANTAS ad (haha...it's beautiful! 'one day we'll all be together once more?' come on, that's cool!) and the goodyear ad ('if it only saves you once a year, it's a good year'...okay, so i was a little emotional at the time- it was ANZAC day!)
so yeah, after niagara and fun times, music and chats in the car, we wound up at Niagara on the Lake, this BEAUTIFUL little town like Tambo or Montville...(you know, the kinda town that's like 'Spectre' (big fish), where everyone takes their shoes off at the town entrance and sits around writing poetry? (Roses are red, violets are blue...Spectre is really great - haha by the 'poet' Norther Winslow - hehe cracks me up every time.) anyway, the town was beautiful, with lots of little boutiques, bakeries and unique shops. that's where we found our MEAT PIES!
anyway, then we headed out to Jackson Triggs, where they make ICEWINE! ice wine is able to be made when it drops below -8 degrees celsius for three consecutive nights, thus freezing the grapes...THEN they squeeze them (it can't get below -22 or it's just too cold)! because they're frozen, they only get 1/6 of the juice they'd get outta normal grapes (thus making it super expensive) but it's SOOOO yummy and sweet (making it totally worth it). it's like a dessert wine...SO GOOD.
so after we'd had some icewine we headed back to andrew's house (lisa's boyfriend), where we played fusball with his housemate (an aussie from BrisVegas and Toowoomba) and then zonked out on couches and beanbags, tired after a long and exciting day.
the next morning we headed off to church with lisa, which was super similar to SNL. they had some very cool elements to the service, such as READING the prayer silently before praying it so you'd know what you were praying, and a few other things i'd like to see us do!
we had to leave early from the church service, so we did, then pulled into a service station to eat our pies, and then headed off on the 4.5 hour drive home. i'd tell you abou tthe trip home, except that the only exciting thing that happened was a very intense rendition of bohemian rhapsody by yours truly.
well, that was canada. a whirlwind of fun!
if i come back to north america, i know where i'm going...
love you all!
smelly
p.s. i forgot to mention the cold. yes, it's getting cold. apparently - but (now this is exciting) i've acclimatised! WOHOO! i think...at least i'm not as cold as i should be when it's 2 degrees outside. thank God. and layering. :)