The start in Montréal

After surviving the total of 8 hours long flight with a layover in the beautiful Iceland, it took a while at the airport until I received my working holiday visa. The whole process took about an hour and it felt like the border officers had a long coffee break between 5 and 6 o'clock. Luckily, I met a German family in the waiting area who were also going on vacation to visit relatives and were annoyed by the waiting. After I made my way to my accommodation with my visa, I immediately experienced the stereotype of the friendly Canadians: Since I didn't have an internet connection yet, I kept asking for directions and quickly received advice.

Checked in at the first accommodation, I was able to fall asleep immediately because I got tired after a long day. The next day, during a good breakfast, I was able to talk about the daily plans with many different tourists from all over the world and I immediately joined an American who wanted to explore the city with her rental car. Together, we visited various attractions in Montréal: the casino, St. Joseph's Oratorium, Biosphere, and Chinatown. We also bought our dinner there and went back to our accommodation.

The next day, I checked out some hostels for the following days and quickly found one. It was a kind of youth hostel at a good price, but the beds were not quite to my liking as I started experiencing back pain after 2 nights. But thanks to the friendly owner, I quickly solved the problem by moving to a room where the mattresses were much more comfortable. I spent the first week looking for jobs and inquiring. This also involved applications and improving my resume. Since Montréal is also the city of video game developers, I applied to different video game testing companies to control and improve the German translation of the games. I was told that German native speakers were urgently needed! After receiving some quick responses from the companies, I immediately had to take various tests to prove my language skills in German and English. In addition, knowledge of video games in general was also asked. The answers and various tests took the whole week and at the same time, I explored the surroundings on foot.

I spent the weekend at Diego's, a friend of my former colleague. He lived about a 50-minute walk away from the hostel and shared an apartment with his roommate Max. Both work as chefs and on the first evening, I could watch Diego's cooking skills. It was clear that he does it professionally. However, he said that they usually don't cook so much at home, probably because they already cook frequently at work. Diego is studying full-time and wants to own his own restaurant in the future. The next day, I climbed the small hill in the city center, Mount Royal, at -14 degrees Celsius. It took me a total of 45 minutes from the apartment and I was glad when I reached the top: The effort and enduring the cold was worth it because up there, you had a beautiful view and a great overview of the city. There was a small castle up there where you could warm up again for the way back.

In the evening, Max and I went to a sports bar because a game of Canada's national sport - ice hockey was on TV. An interesting and tough game. Maybe there will be an opportunity to see an ice hockey game live. Afterwards, after the game, we went to a friend who joined us later and spent the evening with a few beers and playing FIFA and ice hockey on the PS4 - which brings us back to video games.