My four weeks of „Digby working-holiday 2011“

So, once again in beautiful Digby:

Of course, time flew by again, especially since the hostel was much livelier than we had all expected. “We” in this case were Saskia and Claude, the hostel owners, who were on vacation in Ottawa and Montreal from the beginning of October, Robbie, the volunteer from Australia, and his girlfriend Conny from Germany.
In the mornings, we usually cleaned the bathrooms, vacuumed (Robbie’s domain), stripped the beds (of the leaving guests), did the laundry, and made up the beds with fresh sheets, and in the afternoons, starting at 4 p.m., the new guests arrived.
You wouldn’t believe how quickly a day like that always goes by. In between, of course, there was shopping and cooking to do. But there was still time for short trips: I cycled with Conny to Bear River and with Florie to Point Prim, where the lighthouse is. I also found my very first geocaches in Digby and met lots of interesting people.

Highlights were:

The group of (mostly German) exchange students from Halifax who were there on my first weekend: in the evening, I was invited to join them for their BBQ, and afterwards we sat around the fire for a long time.

Florie’s birthday, which we spent in the hostel kitchen with Cameron from Vancouver, out of laziness and because of an offer of free alcohol. He seemed to have enjoyed it, because his review on TripAdvisor was excellent 🙂

Hanne from Norway, Jeannie from Australia, and the girl with the complicated name from Estonia were there for a total of four days and were a really good bunch who didn’t let the lousy weather get them down.

Of course, there was our Thanksgiving turkey dinner, where four more or less inexperienced turkey cooks conjured up a delicious meal with turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green beans, and pumpkin pie.

Paul and Greg from the States, who had cycled from Boston to Digby and ended up in the hostel garage under confusing circumstances and in pouring rain.
We had a super fun and totally crazy evening, during which we almost finished off a (small) bottle of Bombay Sapphire.

Our evening “IT Crowd” sessions.

During my last week: Walk to Walmart together with Florie and bought a 400 g (!!!) bar of Belgian chocolate (milk chocolate and almonds) for just $3.75.

And, of course, my last evening, where we had apple crumble and pecan pie from Sobeys with ice cream and watched “Soul Kitchen” with English subtitles.

We also had two ladies from Austria, two sisters from Canada who were terribly stressed and visiting their sister in Halifax, an architect and a teacher from Berlin, a couple from near Cape Breton, a Swiss couple, three storytellers from Canada, a terrible trio from Germany, a Dutchman with bedbug bites (not from our hostel!!!!), a terribly nice French woman, two German girls who showed up at half past eleven at night and were lucky that Robbie heard the doorbell, a Japanese man who unfortunately couldn’t stay because our rooms can’t be locked and he is suffering from trauma after being mugged in a (non-Canadian) hotel, and a few more who probably didn’t stay long enough 😉

Where there are highlights, there are of course also lowlights.

October 8, 2011, was absolutely the darkest day of the year.

For many others, however, it was a day when a long-held dream came true, as the Schwaebisch Hall Unicorns won the German Bowl for the first time in their 28-year team history, becoming German champions in American football.

I sat down at my computer at 12:30 p.m. sharp, allowing myself a little extra time to find a livestream or deal with any technical issues with the web radio. But I searched and searched: no livestream, no matter which sites I looked at. Even Eurosport’s Europlayer cannot be received in Canada. The only stream I could get from Eurosport was a rally from Scotland. Not a single football club, not even the GFL itself, had any kind of internet broadcast (outside Europe) of the most important game of the year – unbelievable. Even the regular season games had at least been broadcasted on web radio, but for the German Bowl: NIENTE.
With great difficulty, I found the GFL live ticker 10 minutes after kickoff, so I could at least follow the plays and the current score, completely in bare numbers and without any atmosphere.
But after halftime, unfortunately, that was over too, so I gave up at the beginning of the third quarter and went for a walk, completely frustrated.

Only to find out later that I had actually missed the game of the century. To “celebrate” the day, I watched “A Little Bit of Heaven,” which had me bawling like a baby, which is usually really not my style.
The good news is that this day was actually the lowest point of the year and that things finally got better after that.

On October 20, those wonderful weeks came to an end. I took the Acadian to Halifax, where I spent six endless hours at the airport before the plane to Montreal took off at 7 p.m.