Ah well, somehow I got roped into the exciting rumor that everyone can go to Canada, pick fruit and camp and earn a glorious living. Easy, fun, lucrative. This rumor is running like wildfire among young kids in Mexico and we got caught up in it and here we are.

We arrived in Calgary on the 1st of July and were thoroughly interrogated by immigration to the point where we had to go to a special waiting room while the officers called to verify our Canadian friends' contacts. They asked a lot of questions, even absurd ones (like why Alex's mom would give him money to travel), and checked our bags one more time until they were disappointed to find that they just couldn't find a good reason to send us back to Mexico, thanks to God. Whew.

Thanks to Couchsurfing, a nice Polish lady and her daughter were waiting to pick us up at the airport and take us to their huge home in the Calgary suburbs. Like everyone else in Calgary, Dad works in the oil industry, hence all the luxury. They welcomed us with a backyard bbq (even though they don't celebrate Canada Day, just happened to be the day we arrived) and we stayed for a few days in their house, enjoying the luxury but not the long bus/train commute into the city. So, for our last couple days in Calgary we stayed in another CSer's place who was right downtown, next to the river.

Getting out of the city was nice. We "hitched" a ride off of Craigslist to Kelowna, where another Couchsurfer opened his home to us, despite the fact that he already had 4 other folks crashing with him. Kelowna is much smaller than Calgary but still too big of a city to move around by foot, so a couple days later we moved on to the village of Keremeos. The first night we camped in the city park and the next morning, with some luck and a tip from a Quebecois, we starting working at the Mariposa farm. First some weeding, then some cherry picking. The air is hot and dry in the Similkameen Valley, so the work that we weren't accustomed to was a bit more difficult still. Our fingers turned black and ached and when we tried to sleep we couldn't close our eyes without seeing cherries and stems and leaves and branches. Ay, the life of a migrant fruit picker. I'll never be able to think of cherries like I used to.