It's better getting out there rather than staying at home!

The first days when I was in Canada seemed to be very boring. I don't have much friends here or they would be too busy to hang out with me. But now it is my 5th week in Canada and I'm getting used to the loneliness. Or may be it's no longer called loneliness anymore. I kinda enjoy myself doing things in Canada.

The more I stay here, the more chance to explore the city. And it brings me through different surprising.

Last weekend, I joined a race which is called City Mosaic. It's a game which we have to register to join. The game was free of charge while we also received an uniform T-shirt. It was quiet big to me but not bad. Each group had 4 people and together we would visit 4 destinations inside Toronto. There were lots of challenges in this games and we had to find the answers for questions about these 4 destinations. The destinations were St Lawrence Market, Fort York, Hensinky Market, Post Office and the Subway from Spadina to Wilson. We had around 15 - 30 questions for each places and some of them were really hard to find out. Besides many tasks needed to finish, we also had the pressure of time. We only had 6 hours to complete the games. The only transportation which was allowed to use was public transportation. And we did have to walk a lot. There were prizes at the end of the games but I didn't really care about the prizes. What I found out was much more meaningful.

We needed to take only public transportation and walk.

Firstly, I had changed my impression about Toronto. I couldn't believe that it could be so diversity that much. We could see lots of culture here in food and clothes and lifestyle. I found most interesting place was the market where I saw different people from all over the world to express their culture to this city through cuisine. There we might find Holland cheese, Chinese noodle, local bagel and Italian ice cream, etc. To me, Toronto had more things to discover. And each member of our team were all agreed to come back and visit these destinations again. Because at that moment when we were in the middle of the game, we couldn't try any things. We just looked for the answer and quickly moved to the next one.

I  was impressed by St Lawrence Market because of the food that was sold here.

This was my whole team and we were doing one of the task: Taking the picture in front of a public clock tower.

Secondly, to win any game, we must create a strategy to deal with the tasks. What we did was just jumping into the game without making a plan on it. We just waited for what came next. Well that was not a smart plan to do things. The problem was that sometimes we paid too much attention to answer a low point questions and missed high point ones. We also put lots of effort in the first 2 destinations and had no time left for the last one.

Losting in Hensinky Market and tried to find name of the restaurant as request. We were tired and starving there and it was cruel to when seeing food.

Thirdly, I met lots of friends. I thought that it would be very competitive game at first. The other team should hide their answer or they wouldn't ready to give us a hand. I was wrong. To all participants, it was more like an adventure rather than a game. We tried to fight against our laziness rather than to beat other team. And that made us more generous to support each other. For example, when we couldn't find a stores in the market even we had tried to run around for long time. We asked a team and they were very happy to help. They stopped for a while to show us the direction and thanks for that we found the store. An other time, there is a question in the game that required us to find 6 coins with same year. We only have 5 coins in 2009 and another team gave us their coin to help us win the request. My team members were very friendly. When we couldn't make the team challenge or we made wrong answer, no one got angry with the others.

Finally, we hadn't gave up. Before the game we almost quit because we thought it would be boring as they had a very long speech before we actually started. I asked other members to forget this game and just go to have some bubble tea. But it turned out to be attractive and we were drawn to the game naturally because of its vivid activities. During the game, at the last mission, we sometimes thought about leaving the game and not returning to the host stage. But we kept encouraging each other. Even we couldn't have time to have lunch, starved and felt thirsty, we shared snack and drink to make it on time. We didn't win the game but we felt happy for finishing it and completing the tasks.

The final "prize" for us was just this ice juice. We didn't achieve the medal but I am happy to go to the end of the game.

Coming back from the game, I was tiring and exhausted. But I had a really good time, I realized that it had been a long time since I didn't laugh that much. And I was like more fall in love with the city than the day I come here. New adventure is waiting for me in future and I'm ready to take it.