two-weeks-report

After arriving in Kingston Barbara and I took a look at the city, but although it is said to be one of the nicest cities in Canada, the weather just didn't make it look like that at all. Therefore we were not really doing much this week, but it was nice to just relax and do nothing. What we did though, was cooking. Canada is a lot more European than the US when it comes to groceries, so Barbara enjoyed to have 'real' bread again and to go just foodseeing instead of sightseeing. We also managed to take some pictures and I finally have some pictures of my new home.
Unfortunately Barbara had to go back to the US after what seemed to be just too short a week. A day after that it started snowing heavily and we got 15 cm of snow over night. This made even Canadians freak out. They assured me that this is actually not supposed to be the weather for April. Anyway, I did take some pictures of 'my' house in the snow. The crazy thing about this, two days later we had beautiful weather with 15 degrees Celsius and sun, and the weather has been like that for almost a week now. Finally spring has arrived in Kingston and I'm telling you it is really nice outside and if you walk around you'll see almost everybody barbecuing or just sitting on the porches or roofs and relax/study in the sun and enjoy the nice weather.
That's basically what we (my housemates and I) did last week, barbecuing almost every day and do some activities outside like playing football, soccer or throwing a frisbee. Unfortunately this is the last week of exams here at Queen's and almost all of my housemates are going to leave Kingston at the end of the week. Malcolm is already leaving tomorrow and Julian and Will will be gone by Friday or Saturday. Only David will stay some more weeks maybe even some more months but even with two guys the house will be like a deserted place. Nonetheless I don't think it will get boring over here, since I have enough things to do and there are still some guys in Kingston to have fun with.

On Friday last week Janine visited Kingston for a few hours. She was on holiday, traveling around in the States and Canada with friend of hers. Since her friend's sister lives in Ottawa and since Ottawa is only 180 km away from Kingston she just hopped on a bus and I picked her up at the bus station. Then we were just walking around in Kingston, went down to Lake Ontario, to University, had a coffee and a cone of icecream and then she had to head back to Ottawa. It was a really short stay, but it was really nice having her over here and talking to her. By this time I think she's in Germany again and I hope she'll send me the photos she took soon, so I can share them with you.

Besides that there hasn't happened a whole lot here in Kingston.
Worth mentioning might be the sudden death of my laptop, which just stopped working on a rainy day a week and a half ago. The thing that drove me crazy was that Windows as well as Linux just died, so I figured it had to be something with the hardware and it just turned out to be the case. Fortunately Ben, the husband of Sarah (Ph.D.-candidate in my group), is a computer administrator at Queen's so I just went to their house and we found a bad stick of RAM, causing the problems. Now my laptop works again even though a little slower, but I'll get a new stick of RAM sometime this or next week.

That's all that happened within the last weeks that's worth telling you. I uploaded some pictures of the week after easter and you can take a look at them if you want.
I hope you have a great week and hope this finds you in good spirit!
Cheers!

easter in kingston