After a week of peace and quiet and a general slowdown in the otherwise couchsurfing spring Skopje madness, this week of couchsurfing experiences will be kicked off tomorrow with the arrival of Andrea, a Toronto based chef (how cool is that?). Andrea has a gazilion CS references (Toronto also seems to be one of the most active couchsurfing communities) and Skopje is the 5th stop on her tour around the Balkans. She'll be staying with us for a couple of days and hopefully she'll make it in time tomorrow evening to drop by the city park for the Bob Marley Tribute Day (a Skopje tradition).

Andrea will be our second Canadian couchsurfing guests (we hosted Hanna from Vancouver a little over a month ago). Neither of us has been to Canada yet, although we've often wondered about what life there must be like. We have this myth in our heads about it being a land of extremely cold with the main activity being snow shoveling. But according to this the average minimum temperature in Toronto in January is  -7C, which is not too far from what we're used to here in Skopje. We'll check with Andrea if it's really like that.

And yes, residents of Toronto are called Torontonians (for some reason that sounds a bit weird on my tongue). The word Toronto apparently has Mohawk origins (tkaronto meaning "where there are trees standing in the water"). Trees standing in water? Intriguing.

Also intriguing is the fact that Toronto is the home of the only real castle in North America. The medieval Casa Loma used to be a private residence and "it had so many telephones (59) that the castle’s switchboard operator handled more calls than the operator for the entire City of Toronto". It is now a museum, obviously.

Stopping here before we become too knowledgable about Toronto and kill the fun of learning stuff from Andrea...Stay tuned for more coverage:)

PS: OH! Almost forgot: during the coming weekend we'll be hosting a couple from Palma de Mallorca! They spent 8 months in India and Nepal !!! Can I use more exclamation marks???


~ Elena