love love love and the new york state fair!

Hi everyone! :)

I love you all so much and I'm so excited that you've all been asking me about everything that's been going on in Syracuse. So instead of telling the same stories a billion times, I've decided to blog about my adventures here so that I can reach everyone at once. I miss all of you back home a lot, but I've been adjusting surprisingly well to syracuse. Don't worry, I haven't abandoned all my Canadian-ness just yet. But I'm really loving the super nice people in my program and the program itself! Now I can see why God has led me to this school. :)

We moved in on the Saturday the 20th and it poured like crazy the next day. Thank goodness we didn't have to move in on Sunday... it was practically flooding! My loving family and Jacky's loving family helped me move in and we made the most of the weekend by visiting the mall and trying out some random asian restaurants in the area to see if they were any good. Ha. The chinese restaurant on Marshall was really terrible. I also met my 3 roommates - a sweet girl from Tennessee and two fabulous girls from NYC and LA who studied interior design on the Upper East Side. After my loved ones left to go back to Toronto, I spent some time exploring some stores I had always wanted to go to like Ulta and... Target!!! I looooooove Target! I could spend hours there just exploring the aisles of cheap goodness. Haha. The prices are comparable to Walmart, but the quality seems to be a bit better. I mean, 15 cents for a notebook! Amazing!!!! Haha :)

I got to meet some wonderful people at orientation. There was one other asian girl in my program and surprise, surprise, she's from Canada. Toronto, actually. And to be more specific, she's on Hwy 7!!! What a small world eh? I'm so excited to have met her and all the other nice girls in the program from all over (from little towns in the state to Cali!).

We went to the New York State Fair on the weekend. I was a little sad this year about missing CNE, but man, this place put the CNE to shame. Haha. Rihanna and Travis McCoy were having a concert that Saturday night that we went, but there was just to much to do and EAT to watch them! (Other randos performing at the fair were Aerosmith, Justin Bieber, Sean Kingston, Tim McGraw, Styx, and some American Idol people like Katharine McPhee). As we all know, food in the States is... different. I mean, they allowed KFC to come out with this 'burger' that uses fried chicken to replace the hamburger buns. It has bacon and cheese in the middle! Some of the food at the fair was absolutely disgusting (they deep fry everything!!!), but hey, you're only young once, so I tried some awesomeness. :P

The first and most nasty thing I ate at the fair was... a fried oreo!

Everyone keeps asking about how it tastes and I hate to admit it... but it was SOOOOO GOOD. I also ate a 'state fair must-have' called a blooming onion. They basically take a whole onion and slice it in such a way so that it looks like a blooming flower. And of course, it's deep fried. It came with horse radish and it was also disgustingly good.

I also shared lots of other junk with the girls like funnel cake, roasted corn, and kettle corn.

Lemonade was seriously old fashioned lemonade: ice, water, freshly squeezed lemon. It was so sour!

We also tried wine slushies! I had a strawberry flavoured one, which was yummy, but a bad idea because I hadn't eaten a lot at this point. Yikes.

But I saw some other things at the fair that just felt so... American. Like these pictures, for instance.

A giant rat? Really?

The classic 'Miss Something or the other'.

Apparently, they had the world's smallest horse. And it was supposed to be smaller than a bale of hay. Really. Ha.

A cute bird that was dipped in pink koolaid and a cute pink tractor driven by an old lady in pink.

Anyway, I had a great time hanging out with these awesome girls and I can't wait till we go out again! I will leave you with this picture of a huge vendor at the fair... that spelled Syracuse wrong. Seriously?

Haha, love y'all.

xx nat