The last tea in the I-House kitchen with Kate and Marianne, with French cheese and muffins.

The waiting at the Greyhound bus terminal was long and boring. Mr. P fell asleep on my backpack.

The next morning, there was an accident on  the road we were supposed to take from Merrit. So, the bus had to reroute and we ended up taking the sceninc route through Fraser Canyon. I didn’t mind. The mountains were breathtaking.

Monday evening: Now, I’m on the Greyhound bus heading west. I’m sitting behind a girl who just finished a long phone call with what I think was her ex-boyfriend. She had been unfaithful and her family circumstances were quite complicated and in the end she cried a little. She was quite loud.

But what I listened to most was her lovely Canadian accent. When I first arrived in Canada, I couldn’t really make it out, but now that I’ve been here for more than a week I hear it everywhere. It’s subtle. Excepting a few pecuilarities, it is more in the way the words are said than in the way the letters of the words are pronounced. There is a kind of roundness in it. But then it hits me: Maybe this friendly and soft English is the Albertan accent, not the Canadian. That would make me so sad. The rest of my stay in Canada will be spent in British Columbia, and I might never return to Alberta. Ever. Not by choice, but because the need for water conflict experts probably won’t be that high here in the coming, say, forty years.

The sun is completely gone, there is only a thin orange line at the horizon, which I can see, because we’re out on the seemingly endless prairie now. The bus is smaller than I thought it would be, the Greyhound. They’re even known in Sweden. Actually, I’m pretty sure that it was an immigrated Swede who started the bus company somewhere in the States many years ago. I read an article about it in the paper ages ago, and my memory often surprises me with all the useless information it can contain.

It is not very comfortable, the bus, and most prominentely, it is old. I don’t mind, I prefer any kind of bus before flying, any day, but it makes me think of the buses in Bolivia. There, you can find the crapiest, oldest, dustiest buses with drivers that drive like crazy down the narrow roads on the Andean slopes. But you also find the super luxury, ‘bus cama’ buses with crazy wide seats with backs that go back all the way, so that in the end, it feels as if you’re traveling in a bed. And if you are smart enough, you go to the bus terminal at a time when there aren’t that many traveling, and just happen upon a luxury bus that is not full. Then you can make a real bargain, and get the bed bus ticket for almost no money at all.

That’s South America for you. Now, I’m on a Greyhound in the middle of the Canadian prairie, heading for the Pacific coast – and I heard that the spring has come to Vancouver. Fourteen hours left. Then, the real adventure starts. The part without a safety net. The first challange: Managing to get off at Langley, and not continuing all the way to downtown Vancouver. Second: Finding Diane from Timeout Farms who will be at the bus stop to pick me up.

Third: Being confident enough to be the charming, nice person that I know that I can be, and not just disappear into a bubble of skyness and fear. I’m on my own now. I have to feel safe in my own shoes.

At Hudsons, and then again at the party, I met one of Frida’s MBA friends, Vishal. He thought that Frida was a terrible Edmonton guide, she didn’t even take me to the roller-coaster in West Ed! So, just to make up for my, in his opinion, crappy host, he took me to the post-St. Patrick’s Day brunch at a diner. And there I got back some of my faith in the Canadian cooking.

According to the Lonely Planet guide of western Canada, Canadians love to go out and eat brunch on Saturdays and Sundays. And the evidence I got from this particular diner on 109th Street in Edmonton confirmed that the Lonely Planet was telling the truth, atleast for the Sunday after the All-Day-All-Night-Beer-Drinking-Holiday St. Patrick’s Day. The diner was full, and we even had to wait before we got a table.

But it was worth it. I ordered a Smoked Salmon Bennie (which I guess, after some googling, is short for eggs benedict) and freshly squeezed orange juice. The Bennie turned out to be two toasts with smoked salmon, ‘sunny side up’ eggs (that’s atleast what my dad always calls them) and some kind of sauce, served with fried potatoes. And it was so good. The smoked salmon mixed so well with the eggs and the fried potatoes were really crispy, without being dry.

Then, of course, it didn’t hurt that the company was extraordinarily obliging too. Most people tend to laugh at me or look at me strangely if I start talking politics or science or other serious stuff when it’s not really expected. But Vishal, he didn’t shy away, he dived right in and we discussed the pricing of water and American politics and I had a really nice Sunday brunch. Like, one of the best.

From there, I went on to bake the Swedish pastries with Frida and Karin for the all-I-House potluck. So Sunday ended up being a very tasty day, a way for me to buffer up on some fat for the coming months of tough farm work.

Monday was mostly packing and fixing stuff, but an hour or so before I had to leave for the bus, I had tea in the shared kitchen with Frida, Marianne and Kate. Marianne had just got a package from her aunt in France, with REAL French cheese and some cookies and candy. And just like all the other generous people that I met in Edmonton, she gladly shared her goodies with us. Ah, the cheese! My dad is a real cheese enthusiast and spends a lot of money on exclusive cheeses, and I’m pretty sure that he would have liked this one. I know atleast I did.

It felt strange saying good bye. I had become fond of that kitchen, where we had spent many afternoons, evenings and nights cooking, eating and talking about everything from petty gossip about guys to the difficulties of development in Central Africa. I really felt that I left something good behind. But that’s life, right? Most things we have to leave behind, and in the end the only things we have left are our memories. Luckily, my memory is good.

I bought a blue lace dress and a golden plaited belt in the West Edmonton Mall. A really cute blue lace dress. So even though we were invited to a St. Patrick’s Day party in Dress-Down-Canada that same evening, I skipped the green and dressed up my new dress, the golden belt and the bright red lipstick. Canada will simply have to get used to my colourful Swedish taste in fashion.

But really, I didn’t stick out as much at this party as I had done in the bar. Atleast the girls were pretty dressed up and in the end, I even got to dance. Raul, the host and one of Frida’s MBA friends, provided pizza and chicha (might be how it’s spelled, the English equivalent of ‘vattenpipa’), and only an hour or so after our arrival, we were dancing to Rihanna, Avicii and the Swedish House Maffia.

It turned out to be a great party and the most important thing that I took with me from it, excepting the slightly sore feet, a wonderfully light feeling in my neck and an extremely good mood, was the knowledge that even Frida’s non-I-House friends were a bunch of really warm and friendly and generous people.

On the walk back to I-House, I sang Swedish folk songs for Kate and Hortense and Frida managed to slip on some kind of metal ring and fall right into a mud puddle. Of course we laughed, but in the morning, in the light of day, we saw that her coat was covered in mud, her white mittens were completely black and her thigh was sore and stiff. But hey, St. Patrick’s Day is not a real St. Patrick’s Day without a trip and fall.

In West Ed, there is this little place called Once Upon A Cupcake, and they have the most beautiful display of cupcakes. Pink and white and green. Of course, we had to buy one each and then have a cupcake fika (for lack of the right word in English) when we got back to I-House.

Mr. P and I shared a Legendary Berry, a chocolate cupcake with strawberry icing and pieces of chocolate on top. And we both agreed that it was more beautiful than it was tasty. Neither Mr. P nor I are that into sweet things just for the sweetness. This cupcake was like a bomb of sugar.

But it was pretty, all the same.

A day of shopping is really trying, especially if you are a tiny teddy bear and the shopping mall is the biggest in North America. And Mr. P didn’t find anything interesting there either. It was just too big. He much more prefers the small, exclusive boutiques of Whyte Avenue.

This week that I spent in Edmonton, I slept on Frida’s floor in her tiny room on the fourth floor of International House, 111 Street. I cooked my meals in the shared kitchen and spent my evenings drinking tea and talking or watching a movie in the lounge with some of the other inhabitants of the fourth floor.

Already on the first night, when I arrived from the airport, jet-lagged and exhausted, I was met in the kitchen with welcoming smiles and offered herbal tea that would help me sleep. And that’s how my stay continued.

Half of the time, I didn’t need to cook, because someone else asked me to try their food. I’ve eaten Korean curry and had an amazingly generous french dinner with crepes and salad. We had to decline an invitation to a Mexican dinner, because we had already planned to eat sushi at a restaurant, and on Sunday evening, there was an all-I-House potluck, a kind of world tour through food where the lounge on every floor represented one region of the world. All the participants brought something typical from their home country and left it in the right lounge. Then we were divided into groups and were sent to one floor each, to spend fifteen minutes enjoying the cuisine of, say, East Asia, and when we were done, we continued on to the next floor.

The three Swedish I-House inhabitants and me had baked Swedish pastries, both ordinary cinnamon buns (kanelbullar) and a kind of sweet roll with whipped cream and almond paste (semlor) that to my knowledge isn’t baked anywhere else in the world, not atleast with these exact ingredients. We had spent all afternoon baking and there was quite a lot of buns – but when we finally arrived at the European floor (our last), there was no semlor and only four kanelbullar left. I was a bit disappointed, seeing as semlor is my one favourite pastry in the world, but mostly we were just happy to have managed to bake something Swedish that was at least as appreciated as all the French and Indian and Korean delicacies that were served at this most extraordinary potluck.

There is a kind of openness and understanding among the residents of I-House that I found really special. You could always find someone to talk to and already after just a few days, I felt as if I had become friends with most of the people that used to spend time in the kitchen.

This friendliness to strangers is probably due to the fact that most of the I-House inhabitants are exchange students. They are all strangers in a new country and in a way, their corridor and their shared kitchen makes up their new, temporary families. There was a lot of talk going on, gossip and misunderstandings, but all in a very small-scale, familiar kind of way. It felt like their way of creating a feeling of home and belonging among themselves, fast, in order to feel safe in this new environment. But I’m not saying that this familiarity was in any way fake or insincere. No, quite the opposite. These people, Kate and Marianne and Karin and Marit and all the others, are among the warmest people that I’ve met.

It’s a special place, I-House at U of A. After only a week, I already feel that I belong and am quite sad to leave. I could easily stay for another week, sleep on Frida’s floor and hang out in the kitchen in the evenings. But that’s just the thing: Belonging is created among people, in a specific context, and now that I’ve experienced that I could find it so quickly here, maybe I can carry that feeling with me during the rest of my Noth America journey. Frida has found really great friends to surround herself with here in Edmonton, and I totally undrstand her occationall pangs of melancholy now that her last days here are approaching. I almost feel the same.

Apparently, everything in Alberta has to be big. For example, Edmonton has North America’s biggest shopping mall, the West Edmonton Mall. Of course that was worth a visit.

Really, it was huge. There is no other word for it. Loads of people, a crazy amount of stores, an ice skating rink in the middle, there was no way that we could have walked through the entire mall in a day. And I didn’t feel the need to either. I’ve never really enjoyed shopping, and with all these people around , the few hours that we spent there were just exhausting enough. It was worth a visit, but it felt just as good to leave.

Downtown Edmonton was too shiny and bragy in Mr. P’s taste. But Old Strathcona on the other hand suited him perfectly. He especially liked the small boutiques and these uglily coloured, old time water thingies.

Only a few blocks from the University, a street called Whyte Avenue runs. This is thevmain street in an area called Old Strathcona, which used to be a separate town from Edmonton. Now it’s the hip part of town, with the oldest brick houses and the coolest shops and best restaurants. Kind of. And it is a really nice walk, along Whyte Avenue. The buildings are low and some are painted in bright colours. If I lived in Edmonton, this is the area where I would choose to go for a leisurely afternoon stroll.

And on Saturdays, there is a big, indoor Farmers Market. Now in March, the vegetables are mostly greenhouse grown cucumbers, but there were all kinds of other things to look at too, jewlery and sausages and flavoured honey. A really nice place to spend a Saturday morning.