We arrived back on Canadian soil on December 5th, 2007. All the travel went smoothly and we were greeted with balloons and Canadian paraphernalia at the airport. The -8 degree weather was a bit of an assault on the senses when we walked out of the airport, but we managed to keep our whinging to a minimum. We had a wonderful dinner with our families that first night back before crashing into bed.
Since that day, we’ve been in the process of reacclimatizing to Canadian life. Our main focus has been to reconnect with family and friends and to ease back into life. Life in England did at times feel like some kind of extended vacation and although we were eager to get back to ‘real life’ there has certainly been some feeling of wishing the vacation did not have to end. This is inevitable. But we know that being with family and friends and a feeling of belonging are what we have been longing for and we have certainly found that again in the many gatherings and social events over the last few weeks.
The white coating of snow on everything when we arrived, and the 35 cms of snow that fell two weeks later certainly helped remind us of our former Canadian lives and of a love of the white stuff that must be deep in our bones. We would gladly take a cold, snowy, day with a crisp, bright, blue sky any winter’s day over the grey, overcast, dark days of winter in England. It is amazing what a difference that can make. Not sure our bodies can handle all the Vitamin D we must be getting from the sunshine.
Other early highlights of our adjustment back into Canadian life include our amazement at the size of the grocery store, our first taste of buttered popcorn at the movie theatre, being ‘car’ people again, eating an unlimited supply of chicken wings, drinking an unlimited supply of Canadian beer, doing the biggest grocery stock-up of the year and having it be the same price we would pay for a week of groceries in England, baking Christmas cookies and not having to ‘get creative’ with half of the ingredients, putting up our Christmas tree, reacquainting ourselves with all of our
furniture and other stuff that was in storage while we were away.
We have also accomplished a few major things in the last few weeks. We have a new car. We negotiated the lease for it on our first full day in the country. Not too shabby. Wonder what kind of a deal we could have gotten if we were actually fully awake and not jet lagged? We moved back into our house on the first weekend we were back. We’ve managed to unpack most of our boxes and are feeling pretty well settled.
So we are settling in. We are starting to understand the new ‘normal’ of life back in Canada and we are enjoying every minute of it!
