Every morning when I flip on the radio it is obvious. I am definitely in a different country. Is it the funny accent you ask? Is it that they play strange music? Nope. None of the above. The answer is the weather. As you probably know, temperature is done in Celsius here. Every morning when I hear the weather for the day I find myself thinking "hmm 6 degrees Celsius, what is that?" As long as it is between -5 and 10 degrees Celsius I have a generally good idea of how cold/warm it is since that was the usual temperature range I encountered in Russia. Fortunately, my computer has a nice littler temperature converter too that I take advantage of when I am not sure.
Then there are the other Metric system measurements. I have to forget oz and pounds and miles, throw them away. Poor things. Here we all think in litres (yes spelled "litRE') and kilograms and kilometers. I know, it makes more sense and all but I still have a hard time figuring out just how far away something when given to me in kilometers.
Finally, the big shock for me this week came in class. My first french paper was returned to me on Thursday and right in the middle in red pen was a big 78. I was pretty much devastated as this class is an undergraduate class and I spent a fair amount of time on the paper. I really began to panic and the string of usual doubts surrounding graduate school came threading through my thoughts: "maybe I'm not good enough, maybe this is too hard, maybe I should've taken some time off..." While talking with Rich about my disappointment, he thought to look up the grading scale for the University. To my surprise a 78 in Canada is actually a B+! The Canadian grading scale is completely different than the U.S grading scale. 100-80 is an A, 79-60 is a B, etc. So while I now have to adjust to the way I think about grades and numbers, I am very relieved!
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