The first guest was my husband’s colleague from the new job. As it turned out they had previously also worked for the same company, but never met before. He had an interesting background – Lebanese-Irish-Scottish-Canadian heritage and had grown up in California and worked in the Middle East. We had a good time discussing different countries and customs and also sharing difficulties in establishing credit history in Canada.

From our trip to the local natural foods store 2 days ago, we had secured all kinds of tasty ingredients. Organic food really tastes better – tried and tested many times. Before dinner snacks were warm spinach tortillas with 2 different types of hummus. (It is possible to get hummus without garlic and it tastes really yummy). In addition also lentil crackers and vegetable crisps (no regular potatoes, but sweet potato, beetroot, yuca and plantains). For drink tried and tested Sapporo beer. We have been tasting different local beers here, but haven’t quite yet found our favourite. We find the local beers a bit watery. So to make sure that we get the real beer taste we buy either Stella Artois or Japanese beers.

For the main course we prepared barbecue chicken in the oven – it was a free range chicken so it did not shrink while cooking and came out juicy and with a lot of taste. Baked sweet potatoes – my favourites especially with a bit of olive oil and salt and two types of salad – tomatoes with spring onions and spinach and dandelion salad with mustard and honey dressing.

We had bought two Okanagan Valley Sauvingon Blancs that went really well with the chicken. With wines we are committed to trying out different Canadian wines to find our favourites. On the contrary to beer, we have already found a few.

For desert we served two types of sorbet – pineapple-lime and blackberry – it was a nice colour combination with a basil leaf on top. I am also very grateful that the local stores carry a lot of sorbet’s – here I don’t seem to be the only one who cannot have milk products.

Dinner did not last very long, since we get tired really early here. Must be still the body not getting used to the local time or just because the days are busy and we get up early.

Now today the hunt for the place to live continues. It seems like we need a lot of references in getting our flat, so we will dig out our official papers and fill in the long list of questions that need to be answered for our background check to be done. And then the landlord decides whether we get the flat or not. Definitely the landlords market here.