Well I possibly shouldn't be so excited about getting a credit card here but I am. With no credit rating I was pretty sure I would have to get some sort of shitty cash secured card but they have approved me for an unsecured card which is pretty sweet. Can't wait to get my hands on in and go max it out at MEC! In other bank related new Canada has unfortunately come through to prove that every banking system in the world except New Zealand is retarded. It is pretty cashless here which is good but not when you wanna give anybody else money. I have been trying to figure out how to pay my rent. There is no such thing as an automatic payment here but I got excited when I learned about a relatively new thing called "e-transfer". Apparently you just send someone an email with a security question in it and when they log on and answer the question your money gets transferred to their account. The first problem I found was it costs $1.50 per transaction. But then here's the real kicker: you can only transfer up to $1000. I mean what the hell? How is that useful to anyone? Under $1000 you may as well just give someone cash to avoid the $1.50 transaction fee. Its not like over $1000 is an uncommon amount of money in this day and age. Giving my landlord cash is also out because I can only withdraw $800 from an ATM in any 24 hour period. So what am I left with? A cheque. A BLOODY CHEQUE! I thought we phased those out 20 years ago. So now I have to order a 100 cheque book for $40 and write a cheque and somehow deliver it to my landlord every 2 weeks. If you can't already tell, I'm pretty pissed off about this. So banking in Canada joins the other banking systems I have had anything to do with in the "not-up-to-much" category.
In other news I went to the supermarket to find the appropriate ingredients for my signature dish and found this:
I almost laughed out loud in the aisle. Canadians gotta maple everything! I thought I better try it before I knocked it so I cooked em up and my taste buds were somewhat confused that I was eating sweet beans for dinner. I wasn't sure whether I should put them on toast or pancakes, I didn't have any pancakes so I ate them on toast and it certainly didn't help the situation at all. I'll just stick to the BBQ flavour that seems the closest to what I'm used to thanks.
During the week I discovered that there were a couple of groups at work that get together for beers. On Thursday the mining and environmental group (MEG) have beers and on Friday power and transportation (P&T), what I am a part of, have theirs. It seems like a pretty good system, someone stocks up a fridge and you pay $2.50 for a beer. I had a good yarn to a few people at work and look forward to the next ones. It was also pretty funny because I drank quite a few beers with a civil engineer on Friday night and then had to run home (I'm still running to and from work). I'm pretty used to running around a little bit tipsey but usually I am pretty inappropriately dressed (wearing casual shoes, jeans etc.) so don't last too long before I have to slow down or walk but this time I had my normal running gear, and most importantly my running shoes. I went sooo fast! By the time I got home I was completely gassed and had to have a wee lie down before I could build up the strength to reheat my nacho dinner. It was pretty funny.
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