Share Our Lives: Unique Things About Where We Live

This month for "Share Our Lives" we are talking about "unique things about where we live." I decided to break this into four separate categories -- our house, our city, our province, and our country. Thanks to the Share Our Lives bloggers who are Sarah, Dara, Joanne, Adrienne, and Jen. (Click on each name to go their blogs.) for hosting.

 

Unique Things About Our House

1) We have a window in our house.

As the playroom was an addition, built onto the back of the original house, we have both the outside brick, and a window, in our house. I've never ever seen this before. The window is between the office and the playroom and is the only way natural light gets into the office.

 

2) We also have a porch light in our house.

 

Thanks to the aforementioned addition, we also have a porch light in our house. We have additional lighting in the playroom but sometimes, all we need to use is the smaller porch light! 

 

3) Our house is half covered with ivy.

 

I love the ivy covering our house. (And no, it is not the kind which wrecks the mortar between the bricks. We've checked.) I think it makes our house looks a little like a fairy tale cottage. 

Unique Things About Our City

1) We live in a twin city.

Our house is actually right on the border. We live in one city and our backyard neighbours are another city. We have two separate city councils, two separate town squares, and two separate libraries but one public transit system and one school board. When the kids were little they loved running ahead of us when we were walking around the block and shouting, "We're in a different city than you!!!" Technically, it was true, even if there were only three sidewalk blocks actually separating us!

 

 

Two different cities -- one city centre is referred to as Uptown and the other one is called Downtown. We spend most of our time in Uptown but we do head Downtown once in awhile. We live equidistant from both city centres -- we just tend to gravitate towards the one. I don't know why.

2) There are two universities about six blocks away from each other.

Considering that my home province of Saskatchewan has only two universities in the whole province, and a couple of other provinces only have three or four, it's a little strange that our "not so big" city has two and that they're so close to each other.

3) All the walking paths.

There is my favourite path (the Spur Line Trail) which goes along the east side of the twin cities and another path we sometimes walk on (the Iron Horse Trail) which goes along the west side of the cities. I walked home from church yesterday (8.5 kilometres/over 5 miles) and about 80% of my walk was on a walking path of some sort.

 

4) Ducks and geese

There are constantly ducks and geese around. They live here year round and I feel bad for the ducks in winter when it's cold. Geese are evil and hiss at you if you get too close. They also poop everywhere. There are a ton of geese between Uptown and through the park to the universities. And I love how the cars stop when the ducks and geese cross the road. Sometimes, the traffic is just randomly stopped for no reason and we'll realize it's because of the ducks and geese. 

 

Unique Things About Our Province - Ontario

1) The Great Lakes

I didn't realize how unique this was until I was reading another blogger who said they had never been to a Great Lake. We live within a couple of hours of three of the Great Lakes. I've been to all five of them. My goal is to get to the beach at two or three of the Great Lakes this summer.

 

Lake Erie -- two different beaches 

Left: Lake Superior; Right: Lake Huron in winter

2) A province of opposites

Ontario is both extremely populated (Toronto has over three million people living in it) and very remote (there is one stretch of highway when there are absolutely no services for 200 km (125 miles)).

Unique Things About Our Country

1) Officially bilingual

Canada has two official languages - French and English -- all packaging in Canada is in both languages. I didn't think about how unique this was until I sent a package of cookies and chocolate bars to a friend in The States and they commented, "Natasha even made sure to send me the French packaging too." You won't find ingredients listed on groceries in just English. We get so used to "cereal box French" as it's called, we don't even notice how unique it is.

2) Extremely spread out

I could drive to my friend's house in Texas quicker than I could drive to my parents' house -- even though they only live three provinces away. I did some Google maps directions and it would take 48 hours to drive from Bar Harbor, Maine to Los Angeles, California. However, it would take 62 hours to drive from Vancouver, British Columbia to Sydney, Nova Scotia, if you only stayed in Canada. Ironically, if you drove through the US, it would only take 59 hours to drive that.

3) Not a lot of professional sports

We have one MLB team for the whole country, seven NHL teams, three MLS (soccer) teams, one NBA team, and our own football league (CFL) with nine teams. Ironically, a unique thing about our province is that Toronto has one of each team -- the Blue Jays, the Maple Leafs, Toronto FC, the Raptors, and the Argonauts (CFL team)! My home province of Saskatchewan has only one team -- the Roughriders, which play in the Canadian Football League. When I say that practically the whole country is rooting for the Oilers to win the Stanley Cup, I'm not wrong -- they currently have about 40 million fans!

So there are some unique things about where I live -- from my house to my city to my province to my country. This was a really fun prompt to think about. Tell me something unique about where you live!