Tag: Canada

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Prairie Rainstorms

Lately I seem to go for bike rides at the strangest times. I find with the long summer days, when daylight lasts until 10:30 at night, my perception of the day is often different than it would be normally. Instead I find myself setting out on a bike ride at 10 pm, thinking to enjoy a quick half hour of sunlight with some twilight as well. But, what would have appalled my grandparents more than the lateness of my trip would probably be the fact that I left the house in a black t-shirt and shorts with no helmet as well. It struck me as funny that I had just happened to be wearing all black when I left, but being too lazy to go back and change, I set out all the same.

As I left, dark thunderclouds loomed over the West side of town, bursting with brilliant flashes of lighting. I could feel the winds picking up, blowing the cool night air past me, as the smell of oncoming rain filled the air. It reminded me of Murree and the nights when I would lie awake watching the clouds pour over the hilltops as they boomed and crashed, shaking the windows in their frames. This night, as I rode, gazing at the sky beside me I just wanted the sky to break loose. “Give me a real good storm”, I prayed, as I caught myself again spending too much time looking at the sky and not enough looking at the path below me that was getting darker by the minute.

Our town was wrapping up the week of its annual Westerner Days fair, and as I rode past the park where the events had been held for the day, I was met by all kinds of people walking back to the cars, or getting on buses, hurrying to beat the darkness and the oncoming rain. Then, turning back toward town I coasted through quiet neighborhoods and shut up houses, as the sky threw a bluish-purple light over the streets with its streaks of lightning. Only as I started to turn home did the drops of rain begin to fall, slow and scattered at first, but building in time. Thankfully I wasn’t far from home, as very quickly the rain grew harder and harder, though still sparse. In fact, I had reached my neighborhood with little more than a drop on myself, though I could hear them landing all around me on the road and roofs of the houses. Then, just before my street I had the pleasure of having a marble size drop of hail hit me right on my head, stinging like a rock. I made it the rest of the way, holding one hand over head and eyes as I pulled into the driveway, moments before the clouds burst.

By the time I had gotten inside after leaving my bike in the garage, rain was showering down from above. I kept all the house lights off. I could see the sky better that way, and I watched as huge trees nearby bent over in the wind. Occasional lightning would light up the whole backyard to reveal the thousands of drops that filled the sky and the grass that that glistened in the dark.

A prairie storm isn’t quite the same as a monsoon storm in Pakistan, but I felt that night that God made sure it got pretty close – close enough enough for me. And that evening I lay in my bed and listened the the rain continue to drench the earth below, and fell asleep happy.

hail

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The Worst Airport in the World

I believe I truly have found the worst airport in the world. No, it’s not Karachi, or Islamabad, or even the intense security checks of Kabul International Airport. The worst airport in the world is in Toronto Pearson International Airport.

On the way to Canada from Pakistan, I explained to my brother Stephen how I couldn’t understand the baggage carousels in Canada. In Pakistan the luggage comes in on belted conveyors that loop back and forth throughout the room. These, to me, are obviously much lighter and therefore cheaper to run as well. In Canada however, the luggage drops down onto a small carousel with shifting steel pieces, that must cost a fair bit more to run than the light conveyors in Pakistan. To add to this, baggage comes down slowly from the floor above, where it then slides down onto the carousel, not only slamming into the bags below, but sometimes stacking two, if not three bags on top of each other. This means that if your bag happened to land on top of a couple others, you then have to reach as high as you can to fight your bag off a revolving mountain.

Before seeing the baggage carousels, my brother told me that he liked the way they were built in Canada and that he thought they were “cool.” However, after almost an hour and a half of waiting for bags to slowly drop down before we could wrestle them off off one another as they quickly slipped by, and almost pushed him into a railing as they went by, he had converted to my hatred of Canadian carousels.

To add to this, Toronto Pearson International is the only airport I know of where a person has to pay to use the baggage carts that are normally provided for the public. And after paying a whole two dollars to get one, one finds oneself with a pitiful little cart that cannot go backwards, and that needs to have its handle pressed to move at all. As always, I was not impressed. The only time that I found this cart closely useful was when it didn’t roll away from me as I loaded my bags from it into the car in the parking lot. It seems the only thing it does well is to keep from moving.

After using the cart, the thing should then be returned to it’s cart ‘corral’, where usually a person in dealt out twenty-five cents by the machine attached, to make one feel a little better about their financial loss over this awful contraption. Instead, upon returning the poor cart to the ground floor, my brother and I were left empty handed by the machine, two dollars poorer and feeling very much cheated.

So, Toronto Pearson International Airport, it’s official, you are the worst airport in the world.

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Hospital Clothes

I went to the hospital for an x-ray yesterday. It wasn’t anything major, but I very soon realized how little time I actually spend in the hospital — which I’m glad for. After registering downstairs, and then checking in upstairs, I was then told that I would have to undress and put on a hospital gown — if that’s what you can call it. I was led into a little change room where I was shown my gown that I was to put on, followed by a light blue floral housecoat. The nurse pointed out some plastic bags as well, which might be used to put my personal belongings in. I felt like I was going in to prison. Why did I have to put them in a bag? Was I never to see them again?

Hospitals are not friendly to any sense of dignity or manliness. The scanty clothes they give you seem as if they were made for another species, one with a single dimension with two protruding arms — certainly not for humans. I could hardly figure out how to wear the silly gown at all. I tried it on with the opening at the back, remembering that in movies I had seen similar gowns close down the back. Then, after fiddling helplessly with strings that didn’t seem to meet, I switched the gown again, overlapping the sides at the front. Nothing seemed to work. Finally, after almost bursting out in laughter in my little stall, I just wrapped the thing around me, pulled the strings together and then pulled on the housecoat, trying to hide the low neck and over exposed chest that had resulted in the way I had put the gown on. Why do hospitals subject patients to such torture? Can’t they post instructions on how to wear these outlandish clothes?

I finally emerged from the curtain, my small bag of belongings in hand, trying smother my giggles. I was glad there wasn’t a mirror around, or I fear I would have just burst out laughing in front of everyone in the waiting room. I just wanted someone to laugh at me — to laugh at how ridiculous I looked, so at least I would know that someone felt as I did. But unfortunately hospitals are professional places, where their scantily clad patients are met with polite faces and professional discourse.

After being led inside the x-ray lab, I was told to stand up on a platform while a giant contraption with a laser was aimed at me from across the room. Barefoot, with my thin clothes oddly overlapping to cover me, I felt like a prisoner in Abu Gharib, rigidly awaiting my fate. First they had me face the machine, with my back to a plastic panel while they shone a light in my eye. Then they told me to turn and face the panel, putting my arms on what they called ‘handles’, far too high to rest my hands on at full length. I had a wonderful view of the close wall from there, where I studied its tiles and small medical notes on a sheet of paper while the giant machine chugged away. I wondered if the nurses ever laughed at all this — their patients having to stare aimlessly at a wall waiting for them to say that the procedure was done and that they could step down from their pedestal of shame.

With my clothes back on, I felt I became a human again, and after wandering the halls and getting lost, I was soon back outside in the fresh air. No more hospital clothes for me.

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Mornings, Evenings or in Betweens?

I always thought I was very much a morning person. In the summer, waking up early for my 6:30 start suited me fine. I managed to get up every morning with time to read my Bible and still have the morning ahead of me. At school I still try to get up early, even if I don’t have class until later in the morning, as I enjoy the quiet of the morning and I feel I can concentrate better. And yet these days concentration and motivation are ghosts, apparitions here a moment and then gone. With only a couple weeks left of school, doing my little bit of work is like pulling teeth.

Yet somehow I do better in the evenings – with the sky black outside, the clock having long since seen ten, then eleven. My eyes are tired and strained, my bed looks like heaven and each thought of waking up in the morning fills me with dread. Go to bed now. Yet everything is clearer. I read through long scholarly articles for class and suddenly I understand what the authors are saying. Ideas flow from thought to thought and I have the patience to plow slowly through a page, and the drive to move on to the next. Why does this happen after eleven-o-clock at night? Why does my body taunt my mind with this turbo-charged diligence?

When I was younger my brain seemed to switch on at night. Just as my mum would tuck me in to bed, my heart would decide it wanted to pour out all my thoughts, fears hopes and curious questions. Philosophy and existential discourse have no respect for bed times, perhaps more so in the mind of a young child. Reluctantly my mum would sit, listen to me start, and then stop me to tell me to wait until morning – to talk then. Of course, my thoughts, dreams and fears would vanish with the stars, fading into the brightening morning sky, not to be found by day. Now I play the double role myself – both the dreaming boy and the tired mother – the buzzing mind and the weary body.

Mornings or evenings? Some days I feel like I am trying for the best of both worlds, waking early for the industry of the morning and then working late into the dark of night as well. Perhaps its time for me to give up the idea of being a morning person. But I love my mornings. I love my evenings too. Naps. I should perfect the art. This childhood nightmare and adulthood euphoria might just hold the key to my body’s strange ideas about when it wants to think.

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Tea

Tea is such a mysteriously amazing thing. I’m not quite sure what life would be like without it. There’s never a time when a hot cup of tea can’t make life that little bit better. On days when everything seems to overwhelm, when the air outside is cool and chilly, or when your brain is full of questions and heavy with worries, tea is comforting solace from the mess outside and inside.

Tea calms the nerves. I think an important part of drinking tea is the way in which you drink it. Here, in a culture where people are always busy, with no time for anything or anyone, tea can be that break. You stop and boil water. You watch the dark plumes stain the clear water of the cup in a slow and swirling dance. You sip, cautiously at first, letting the vapours reach your nose.

Tea is a chance to sit, to stop and to gaze outside the window at the much anticipated sunshine pouring onto the cold ground. It’s that break, to catch your breath and smell the roses. Forced to slow down, relax and think about things, the mind has a chance to settle. Sometimes people simply go to fast. They don’t take time to think. There is a girl who has come to the coffee shop downtown a couple times while I have been there. She asks for two tea bags and for the hot water to be mixed with cold. “Perfect guzzling temperature,” she says. This way she can drain the cup quickly without having to wait for the water to cool or the leaves to take their time and seep. To me, that’s a waste – a waste of a good tea and a good time.

Tea is a great facilitator. Often the best conversations are held over a couple cups of tea. If you want to have a good talk with someone, have it over a cup of tea. I wonder if there have been wars that could have been avoided with tea ? decisions made by grumpy politicians who would have thought more clearly with a tea cup in hand. We’ll never know. Tea makes people happy, and happy people are friendly people. Have a cup of tea.