Becka Goodwin

 I spent a week hosting Jennifer who was my exchangee and I was going to be staying with her and her family when I was in Canada. We went around the local attractions such as Hereford Cathedral and Black & White House as well as the local Farm Shops and Westons Cider where I had never been before. It was a great experience!

 Going abroad is an expensive experience but with the help of willing local businesses I was helped a lot! Even my county YFC managed to find some funding! Some of the businesses that helped me are below!  Kington Agricultural Show  Hereford Market Auctioneers  Sunderland's & Thompson‘s

 The biggest step of all was getting on an airplane for the first time on my own and by doing it I’m not worried about doing it again!

 The Rinsdorf family moved from Germany fifteen years ago and had made a living out of being bee farmers and had over a thousand hives so when I stayed with them it was peak season so there was plenty of things to do around the farm.

The family were honey farmers so I got to help out with the rather complicated system and got to come home with some rather nice goodies.

Jennifer (my exchangee) worked at a bible camp as the manager of the riding stable so I stayed there for two days and it was an interesting experience considering I’m not too happy with horses but came back rather liking them. They also played this crazy game which was a mixture of football, rugby and netball and was played with four yoga balls! Mental

 Matt works at the local grain elevator (where they load grain onto trains) so I didn’t see a lot of him but Carrie is a teacher so she had plenty of time on her hands to show me around Manitoba because she was on her summer break too.

I spent a day in America and I was surprised even though it was an hour and a half away from where I was staying, how different it was. This also made me realise who different the Canadian and American accent is, their attitudes as well.

 Like valleys, cattle are a rare sight in the grain province of Manitoba. It even brought me closer to home when I saw that they were Hereford crosses.

Almost every town I saw in Manitoba had a statue to represent their town. The Turtle was for Boissevain and the banana and bird was for Melita.

I was lucky enough to go to a wedding whilst I was there, it was very different to the weddings that I have been to in the UK. It was an outside wedding which was very relaxed, and we then went back to the local hall and had typical Canadian food, perogies, ham and bread rolls. The after wedding was similar to ones here, they had a few friends and family and we all spent the night dancing.

The Krinke family moved out to Manitoba eleven years ago from England and I spent a relaxed national holiday weekend looking around Brandon, their home city.

 The one place that I knew I wanted to see was Riding Mountain. It had to be the most peaceful place I had seen and we went for a walk around Clear Lake and did the typical tourist thing of looking in all the souvenir shops.

The Fenez family are small hobby farmers with a very large vegetable garden which they use to deliver veg boxes to families in Winnipeg which was only twenty minutes away. They also had Aberdeen Angus cattle which I helped them out with because I had a fair idea what I was doing. More than what I had with the vegetables.

On the free days we went and explored Winnipeg which has so much history, including a hundred year old cathedral which they count as old which had been burnt down almost to the ground and one of only a couple rare white buffalo.

Canadian food is very similar to Bristish food but there are a few things that I couldn’t get my taste buds around. The first being Poutine which you can see above which is French fries, gravy and cheese curds. The second were Perogies which are a boiled pastry thing stuffed with potato, onion and ham. Very weird.

Thank You So Much For Taking Time To Watch.