Cold in Montreal

Well, I can definitely say it's cold in MTL! (Heck, I'm not complaining, if I wanted a subtropic winter, I could've stayed in Belgium ;-). The last couple of days we had 30cm of snow and highs of -15 degrees Celsius.
But I have a couple of items to explain/show how cold it really is:

First of all this Calvin & Hobbes cartoon.

My boogers are really freezing when I walk outside now.

Check out this song (and video) from the Montreal based band Malajube. U probably won't get the lyrics coz it's in Quebecois. But the title of the song is "-40degres a Montreal". Says it all, no?

And finally: I buy my beer from a Depanneur. When I come from outside, walking through the beer fridge, it feels like tropical paradise.**

** Ok, you might not fully understand this, so a bit more explanation about depanneurs and the concept of walkthrough fridges is needed here: Depanneur in QC means mostly independently run convience stores, kinda like nightshops. Everywhere else it means a towing service when your car breaks down. Since in early provincial law only the SAQ and small grocery stores like depanneurs where permitted to sell alcohol. So that means that they have a long tradion of selling booze, meaning you have a vast array of beer in every small depanneur. (Nowadays supermarkets can sell beer and wine too.) They usually have big walkthrough fridges (a couple of square metres). So you can buy cartons of beer, that is always chilled. Which is nice, of course.

Besides that: we started painting, redecorating and sometimes it's just basically renovating. We found almost everything at IKEA, besides the fact that they forgot to count our bed. So we have to go back for that. The paint, dust and cold don't do Tinneke's allergies very good.

And I am still looking into different jobs and unfortunately didn't get the job at Flanders Investment and Trade. But I think the whole thing was fixed coz they didn't check my French skills, which is a bit unusal especially for working in Quebec. Well, anyway ...