a beautiful beginning. DTS days 1.5

I arrived in Montreal monday evening after a a long drive and a few quick visits with my best friend, one of my dad's college friends, and my family in New Jersey. The immigration process wasn't nearly as terrifying as I had imagined it would be and thankfully I had no problems getting a "non-salaried religious workers visa." When we first pulled up to my brother's apartment, he ran out to meet us, gave me a big hug and said "welcome home." I spent the part of the week with my family, shopping, walking around the city, visiting a museum, and seeing friends. We threw my dad a surprise 50th birthday party (a month early...) with all our friends from up here, it was so wonderful, like a huge family reunion.

I moved into my apartment Thursday afternoon, and the DTS started Friday. We met at 8 am at the Jeunesse En Mission (YWAM) office at 8am to be given a task and to meet everyone. Our DTS has ten people from all over the world; 2 men from France, 2 men from Holland, 1 man from Brazil, 3 ladies from Canada (2 anglophones, 1 francophone), 1 lady from Switzerland, and me. The DTS staff gave each of a list of places and things around the city we needed to find and photograph, and a metro card. It seemed easy enough except they gave us no addresses and no map, and some of the places were pretty specific, for instance we had to photograph the 4th floor of one of the local libraries.

My partner was Jisca, a girl from Sherbrooke, a town about two hours from here. We managed to get find a handful of maps and metro maps and made a plan of the best way to find as many spots on the list. The first place we went to was pretty tricky, and we ended up wasting an hour and a half walking around aimlessly and waiting for a bus that never came. We decided after that to ask folks for help so we wouldn't waste so much time. We made it to about 7 spots before running into 3 other teams (who were chilling in the library). At that point we all decided that we were tired and wanted to take a break from the game so we all went to a little cafe and hung out until it was time to go to our rendezvous.

It was being forced to spend time figuring my way around the city, and even though it was just for a day I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the metro system. I've also enjoyed getting to know my group, everyone is from such different backgrounds and were all brought here by unique reasons circumstances. I've also spoken so much more french in just the past two days than I have in quite a while!

This morning (sat), one of the DTS staff members took a few of us to the Jean-Talon market, a HUGE farmers market with local produce, meats and cheeses, and pastry and bread shops. It was really fun! A few of us girls bought some produce for our apartment and did a little more exploring.

Thats all for now, things will really get rolling around here on Monday. Next week will be one of mostly orientation, and I believe we will begin studying Genesis together.

I really love this city.