A Saturday in Newfoundland

Hi there,

Last Saturday was a very special day for me.  For the first time, I felt like a true Newfoundlander, or as some might say, a true "Newfie."  On this special day, I got to experience and immerse myself in the culture like never before.  Here is how my day panned out:

1)  I woke up around 8:00 to fishcakes, some eggs, and Canadian maple syrup to go along with some Newfoundland moose sausages :)

2)  I then proceeded to head to the farmers market, where I talked and learned more about the aboriginal people from Newfoundland--the Beothuks--, looked at local art, saw some local produce, and heard the unique Newfoundland phrase-- "What are you at?".  Upon hearing the phrase, I silently thought to myself--"This is it."

3)  I then rode the bike back to the home, where Eilis and Dwight (my host parents) waited on me so that we could all head out to Middle Cove.  Middle cove represents Newfoundland to me.  I will explain more in pictures later.

4)  I went on a hike along the beach with Dwight and Eilis, which ended up with me picking wild cranberries on the side of a hill with two Newfoundlanders.  Pick one and eat two.

5)  After the beach, we headed off to Portugal Cove, and lo and behold, we almost ran into two moose crossing the street!

6)  Upon arriving at the restaurant in Portugal Cove, I sat outside and waited for Dwight to order our food.  As I sat out in the cold, shivering with my swimsuit on, I looked at the older guy next to me and said, "It's cold out, eh?".  This alone made my night.  Canadians love to use this word, and I've been wanting to use it ever since I arrived.  I couldn't help but smile after my successful use of "eh".

7)  We ate "fish and chips" as the sun settled over the harbor.  Come on.

8) I watched hockey with the host family when i got home!

What a beautiful, well rounded Newfoundland day.  I couldn't have experienced all of this if I tried.  It was a pretty divine day, I'd say.  Everything just worked out.  I was in the right place at the right time the entire day.  There was no escaping Newfoundland life on this sunny, Newfoundland day.

Some Pictures:

Middle Cove.  This is my view to the left.

This is the view to the right of Middle Cove.  

Huge waves crashed against the side of this rock all day.  The magnitude of these waves don't truly show in this picture.    So much power.

Beautifully coloured and smoothed rocks.

A nice place to hang out with "man's best friend."

Trying to capture the power of these waves.

The view from the trail.  This might of been my favourite trail of the trip.  Notice how blogger made me spell favourite--the Canadian way.

Dwight and Eilis up in front; massive waves, rock formations, and wild cranberries in the distance.

As I mentioned earlier, it was a divine day.

"The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still."

Just behind the rushing waves, I see this.  So, I head up to them and see what they are up to.  "There are loads of wild cranberries up here," she says.  "I picked 3 gallons yesterday."

Wild Cranberries.  As I sat and took this picture, I had to make sure my feet were stable underneath me so that I would not fall 15 feet into the rocks and rushing waves behind me!

Me and the bag of Cranberries that I picked.  Not sure what I was up to here...other than trying not to fall!

Heading back to middle cove.  Let the camp-fires begin.

A nice little get together on the beach.  The thought of coming to a place like this with my family and having dinner over a bonfire makes my heart full.  

"Be still, and know that I am God."  People sit and gather in awe of what is in front of them.  There are times like these when you can't help but just be still.

I hope you enjoyed the little adventure I was able to take last Saturday.  What a wonderful life it is.

Sincerely,

Benjamin

Gros Morne National Park

Hi again,

Just to update whoever is reading this, my computer that I use for school and personal use has seen its last days--the motherboard is fried :(  With that said, I will be uploading and blogging from the school computers whenever I get the chance.  It is good to get a little distance from the computer, eh?

This blog will consist of the trip that I took during fall break with 13 other international students over a week ago.  Gros Morne National Park was the destination, but a deeper understanding of love was the occasion.  I will be telling some of the story, mostly through pictures.

Here they are all.  This is the crew that we went with.  There were 13 of them, plus me.  There were 7 Germans on the trip, 2 people from The United Kingdom, 1 from Ireland, 1 from Sweden, 1 from Finland, 1 from Canada, and myself from U.S.A.

This what you would see if you turned around in the last picture.  This was the second hike of the day; the first hike was really rough for a lot of people.  It was absolutely pouring rain and so windy that the rain hurt your face when it hit.  We also went off the beaten path in that hike, straight up a mountain; a bout half of the group hated the first hike and half enjoyed it.  We had to go home afterwords and get our heads straight again.  Everyone was soaked and cold!  This hike, however, lifted everyone's spirits!

I'm not sure what the pose was about, but here we are about 1/4th of the way through the same hike seen above.  The cool thing about this hike is that the terrain changed drastically 4 times.  Right after this shot, we entered into what felt like a jungle with loads of beautiful ferns. 

Our first close up view of the ocean!  "This is way better than this morning" some said.  This is Holly from U.K. in the picture.  It was great to have her on the trip.  She helped people stay positive whenever the weather made some feel miserable.

On the edge of a cliff.

So romantic and picturesque.  How great would it be to sit in one of these chairs with the person that you care most about in the world.  So peaceful :)   

Down on the beach.  I've said it before in other blogs, but I'll say it again-- something about the ocean makes me feel so alive.  It was so great to get down on to the beach.  I ended up getting in the water with a few of the other guys.  It was extremely refreshing.  That is Holly again in the picture, so excited to be here.

Moose shoulder blade?  

Part of a moose leg?  No one knew on the trip.

Day Number 2.  Well It is actually Day number 3.  The first day was spent driving the entire day, which is another blog in and of itself.

Some of the crew.  If you type in Gros Morne National Park in google, a lot of the pictures you see are of this fjord.  The most beautiful spot is at the other end, but that is a 3-5 day hike.  Also, the boat tours in the fjord are supposedly great, but we just missed the season for that!  Beautiful, nonetheless...

Here I am.

Okay, so here it is.  The talk of the trip ever since we left was that  we wanted to see a moose.  We didn't see any on the drive up, or the first day, so we were especially desperate to see a moose.  While we were hiking, we kept seeing moose poop everywhere, and ran into some people that said they saw some.  Then, as we were walking, everyone got extremely quiet.  There was absolute silence.  It felt like the world stopped for a second.  When a couple of us guys in the back caught up to everyone, they were all looking in the woods.  I looked along, as I knew they were looking at a moose, but I didn't see it.  Well, I was looking to low!  Moose are absolutely huge!  This things leg is about as tall as me.  A moose makes a horse look small and makes a deer look like a little stuffed animal.  We got to see two more moose on the hike, not as close up, but we got to see faces.  Amazing.

(We all ate moose burgers before this hike.  Poor moose!)

When we first hiked in you could barely see the fjord.  Here is a clearer shot.

The houses

This is where 8 of us stayed.  We joked all weekend about the name of the place--efficiency suite.  I stayed in the room that has the two people standing outside of it, which consisted of the two Scandinavian girls and my friend from Germany.  The efficiency suites were the calm residences.  The other place, which you will see later, was the party house lol.

The view from our kitchen table.  The efficiency unit was quite small, but it got the job done.  I really liked the set up.  Sharing a bed with Jan wasn't the best, but we made it work.

The view from the deck of our place.

No one stayed in this place.  It was at the bottom of the hill from where I stayed.  I really like this house, and the apple tree in the yard, so I took a picture.

Here is the party house!  From the outside, this place looks to be very small.  It looks like a little cube, but the inside was nearly ideal.  I think this house was such a great size.  I took some video of the inside, so i'll show you it when I get home Mom.  You would have gone crazy over how quaint the inside of this place was.

The back of the house.  The little addition there is the coatroom.

Here is the other side.  You can't really see the main porch, but it's behind the tree.   This house was about a 10 minute walk from the efficiency suite.  After a long day of hiking and exploring, we would all go to our places, shower up and what not, then head over to this little house.  We had so much fun every night.  The nights were probably a lot of peoples favourite times.  I definitely enjoyed them.

There was an apple tree in the back yard of the party house.  I'm not sure if this tree was wild or what, but all of the apples looked great and tasted even better.  It's very rare that apples look like this without use of pesticides.  I picked about 15 apples this day ;)

The view from the party house.  The little white house down below with the blue outline was amazing.  I would move into that house in a second.  It also had a massive apple tree in the front yard.

 The Last day

On the last morning the crew finally split.  The entire trip, we all did absolutely everything together.  If someone wanted to do something, we all did it.  While this way of doing things was great, it's hard to satisfy 14 people.  Anyhow, some people wanted to go shop in the town on Tuesday morning, some wanted to sleep, and some wanted to hike.  Here we are at the tablelands.  We tried to hike up a mountain to the right of this that you can't see on the first day.  We didn't realize that the best hike was to follow the trail.  Tuesday was a beautiful day, unlike the morning of the first day when we hiked here.   

Here is the crew that went hiking the last day.  Gosh, I wish we had more time in this place.  This little adventure was a beautiful one.  We all kinda recapped the trip and just enjoyed our last hike in Gros Morne.  

I wasn't able to make it to the middle of the "bowl", but I did make it to this point.  We all wanted to keep hiking and make it to the waterfall at the end of the bowl.  How was there a waterfall coming from the top of this thing?  Where was the water coming from? 

About to leave the parking log.  The road that you see in the distance was one of the more beautiful drives of the trip.  I didn't get a picture, though.  Some things are too beautiful to get distracted by a camera.

One last view of the town of Woody Point in Gros Morne National Park.

I saw this when we were all getting our food and preparing to hit the road.  I figure that Dad might like this.  

This cat jumped in the car outside of Pete's One Stop Shop.  This is by far the prettiest cat I've ever seen, and I have never been into cats.  This cat was unbelievable.  It was so strong and reminded me of a puma.  You can't really see the eyes here, but they were ice blue with a squiggly line going around the outside of the eye.  Maybe cats aren't so bad after all.

The drive back home.  Pretty much the entire drive (8-12 hours) looked like this.  There seems to be no one on the island of Newfoundland.  Anyways, I drove back with a different group of people that I came up with.  I was with all Germans on the way up.  The ride back was one of the most fun parts of the trip.  We were all so tired and had gotten so close over the few days that we spent together.  We laughed almost the entire trip home.

Of course, I only grazed the surface of the trip.  Some things, well, most things, can't be put into words.  When I look back on this in a couple of months or a couple of years, I will remember how special it was to share this wonderful experience with all of the amazing people that I went with.

Sincerely,

Benjamin

Lying Down in Green Pastures

Hi All,

I am back from an amazing trip to Gros Morne National Park.  As much as I want to talk about this exceptional trip, I currently don't have the time or the computer to journal about this trip in the way that I would like :(  My computer crashed shortly after arriving back in St. John's on Tuesday night, so until I get it fixed, I do not think that I will be able to share my experience of Gros Morne or anything else that is going on up here in Newfoundland.  I hope to get my computer up and running within the next week!

Until next time,

Benjamin 

The Best Curler in the World

Hello Everyone,

Tonight was a special night.  In Canada, and especially Newfoundland, Curling is a pretty big deal.  Canada consistently has the best team in the Olympics when it comes to curling, and the Canadians make sure that they have a free spot in there schedule when curling comes on the television during the Olympics.

Tonight was special for a couple of reasons:

1) I had the opportunity to get curling lessons at the local curling facility, which was amazing.  Next time curling is on in the Olympics and everyone is wandering what the heck the sport is and why it is considered an Olympic game, I will know why.  I'll know that everyone with a television up in Canada is passionately watching their team go for the gold.

2) I was able to meet one of the gold medalists on the 2006 Olympic Curling Team, Jamie Korab.  I've never even heard of the guy before, but everyone in Canada has!  He gave me a couple of pointers while I was "throwing the rock" and also let me hold his gold medal!

3) After my group had been practicing for a while, we challenged another team to a game and won.  To have the experience of curling is awesome to begin with, but to be able to win a game was the icing on the cake.

4) After the 2 hour session was over, I ended up sitting down and eating with Jamie's wife, and next thing I knew, she was asking me if I wanted a picture with the gold medal on!  This was so amazing.  The coolest part of it all is that when I first saw that Jamie would be there with his gold medal, I thought to myself, "how cool would that be if I could try it on."  I never would have thought that I'd actually get to wear it, and especially not without my asking.  Crazy.

                                                                

During our game, one of the opponents was talking to me and our coach about how he remembers exactly where he was when the 2006 Olympic  Curling Team won gold.  He said, "not to compare it's importance with 9/11, but  just like 9/11, I remember exactly what I was doing when..."  A couple of other people kind of jumped in and agreed with him.  This doesn't down play how the Canadians viewed 9/11, though.  They act as if 9/11 happened in their own country, to their friends and family, which is a good window into how caring the Canadians truly are.  Canadians were a huge help to many of the people on flights that had to get redirected because of what happened in New York.  Many Canadians opened the doors of their homes to let people stay with them that unexpectedly had no where to go.

On a side note:

Fall break is upon us here in Newfoundland, which means a break from school and a celebration of thanksgiving.  For the next few days, I, along with 13 other people will be heading out to Gros Morne National Park, which is on the west coast of Newfoundland.  Ever since I arrived here, people have been telling me that I must go out to Gros Morne, so I'm super excited to see this national park that people say is so beautiful. We will be renting a few cars, driving 8-9 hours across the island, arriving at our beach home for the break, and keeping our eyes peeled for the abundant and out of control moose population.

It's time to drop all of the stress of school and get back into the present moment again.  I can hardly wait!

When thoughts become reality.  Haha!

Resting with thanksgiving,

Benjamin