Today is the first day that we have had internet in our house, this is actually the first hour that we've had it, so I am taking advantage.
I have been in Halifax since May 2 and I have been in my house since May 3. This past week has been a whirlwind with orientation, getting to know everyone, trying to make our somewhat suitable house a little more homey and clean, learning our parish teams, and heading to our parishes on Sunday. On top of everything I have had a pretty bad cold that involved me losing my voice on the 2nd, the day before I met the other 56 fellow missionaries - it was hard not being able to talk much! My voice is pretty much back and I am only a little bit sick now, it should be gone soon :).
The morning that I left for Halifax was a lot more stressful than I had been anticipating. I had stayed up the whole night but was rushing to finish packing. Then when we were leaving for the airport my bag ripped and I had five minutes to switch into a smaller one, so I was just grabbing things and shoving them in. Needless to say, I was missing quite a few items when I got here. I have been doing fine but mom and dad are going through what I had packed and sending me some more clothing and some books as well. I got a cute care package from them yesterday with a few things I had really wanted fast like my portable hard drive, socks (yeah, I didn't have ANY), some typical headache and cold fixes, and they also included some lemon pepper and canned chicken. I giggled when I saw those. It was super lucky timing too because we had been provided groceries for the week before we started getting the gift cards and doing our own shopping and we had run out of pretty much all the food. So I turned my lovely cans of chicken into some chicken salad sandwiches for our lunch today. Since we had nothing else Marie and I headed to the store later last night after the Commissioning Mass to get a few essentials like milk and bread and we had to grab some tuna since the chicken was not enough to go around and there is also someone in our house who is a vegetarian.
As I said, our house is only somewhat suitable. There are nine of us living in a five bedroom house that at first we could not get into the basement because of wood that was throughout the stairs with the look of supporting the walls from caving in. We couldn't find any laundry machines for the first few days, but then we were informed that they were in the basement, which was blocked off. Then a day later we were told there is an outside entrance. After getting the code we went in as a group and found the laundry machines, two of which work, two of which do not, but all of them requiring $1.75 to work at all. Then we kept going through the basement and found a toilet with some friendly roommates we didn't know about (I'll leave you in the dark about that one, it adds some mystery). I really do not plan on going down there ever again, I will probably just go to one of the four other girls houses to do my laundry. All of the rooms have codes on the doors and at first we were not told what our codes were, so we were accidentally locked out of the living room from the first night and had to be SUPER careful not to close our bedroom doors if no one was in the room.
We've made our house a pretty decent place now by cleaning excessively and continually, and the basement staircase has been un-barricaded and we have been provided with all of the codes. As I get to know and love the girls that will be my family for the summer I am starting to realize that certain comforts are not necessary, especially when you have many other things to be thankful for.
We are now in the job-hunting stage of the mission and I have to admit that I have not been doing too much in this sense. I have been trying to get things in order after having a rocky start to the mission with the stress of my day of travel. Also, I just wanted to e-mail my mom when we finally had some free time instead of run all over the (VERY) rainy city of Halifax to drop off resumes right after at least ten other people on mission had been in the store, is that so bad?
This week has gone by so fast but it has been amazing. I'll post more about the specifics of the week later, but it had been such a changing experience for me, and I love it.
