BeyondTheMargins

I was having coffee with some friends in India, and this just came up that I should post about my time in the town of Steinbach, predating my time in the French town Beausejour, when I was first posted for the government for the southeast designated area. It is notable to note that this era was filled with all kinds of “awkward” developments in my life due to the onset of COVID-19. In 2019, I started working in the small German town of Steinbach in Manitoba. This would make an exciting post because it seems that in 2 years, along with the culture shock of serving some Germans, and being in a lockdown and moving into an unnecessarily large country home on a whim, I was breaking personal barriers.

Steinbach is a German town in the southeast designated area of the government, mainly comprising Germans who immigrated from Germany and Russia and set up various companies in the area, mainly related to chemicals, pesticides, farming, 100-acre large-scale farming, trucking and logging companies, and large-scale housing rentals, etc. For the record, I still use Steinbach Credit Union, which is used by many millionaires in this area, and it offers me the highest interest rate than any other bank in the province. As hard as it can be to believe, Steinbach is home to many Germans who are rich and reside under the radar in the country. To be fair, Steinbach looks like this.

( Above the government building in Steinbach or my work place)

Working with this community in Manitoba is a challenging task. If you’ve read my previous post on Muraveinik, then it’s good to know that many German Russians settled in Steinbach and made a lot of money and set up companies. This is a strong “builder” variety type community, and they run large-scale operations in the small town of Steinbach. Steinbach is dominated by the German community, and as you walk the streets, you can sense it and feel it to the point that if you ask somebody a question, the response will be “ja” in German instead of “yes.” For the unacquainted, the community is exceptionally introverted, reserved, hard-working, disciplined and hard to break into in the initial stages. You are expected to know the language, and even knowing the language would only get you so far. As a rule, they are complainers and don’t take well when a government official does not do their job properly or they detect inconsistencies. In short, you better shape up or go home; the community puts a type of pressure on the person who resides, forcing them into a gradual and ruthless readjustment phase. (Of course, as you know, this is completely different from the later described French community of Beausejour, and I doubt these two communities even talk much to each other due to their differences). Alternatively, staying around them for too long means they start rubbing off on you, and you start becoming like them: introverted, reserved, efficient, and a workaholic complainer with high standards. Life can become a case of self-inflicted brutalism. . .

For the unacquainted, despite the “brutalism” and “savagery,” I have to just say it, everything that this community does is flawless and almost perfect in design and architecture. They have money and they have a brain, but they also don’t seem to care all that much about anything at all.

For the record, once I got a government job I relocated from a small apartment in Winnipeg 90 km west to Steinbach. I was so stuffed living in an apartment in the city that I just could not wait to get a more open space in the country. In came my German landlord, who was friends with a friend and owned the best-level construction company. My landlord owned about 35 houses, and the one he offered me was a massive 3-bedroom home in the country with an attached garage, a large backyard, and a front driveway. The house came with heated floors for the winter, which meant you roamed around in -30 degrees being barefoot inside your home. I wanted to experience the level of spaciousness, the experience of having a massive home in the country, and just took the home without much thought. At the time i had bought a nice luxury car, acquired a competitively held government job position and safe to say i was feeling confident about life in general. This house was close to the workplace, and I wanted to live a little big just this time..

The home was a 3-bedroom, two-story house on the right side of a duplex. The home had 2 bathrooms, one on the top floor and one on the ground floor. On the bottom floor, it had an open-concept kitchen with a massive living room, a separate mechanical room for the heating equipment of the house, and another storage room on the bottom floor. The house had an attached garage right in the front, a driveway, a side yard, and a massive backyard. The enormity of the house meant that although the process of moving into the house was very exciting, once I was settled in, my mind did a little bit of an ‘oops.’ Pretty soon after moving in, COVID-19 hit the world, and Canada went into lockdown, and the ‘oops’ turned into a larger ‘oops.’

(My driveway with the birchwood hybrid Lexus replacement for a week)

It meant that I was going to be working from home, and while the delta variant ravaged the planet, southeast in Steinbach only had just about 5 active cases in the entire city. However, the Canadian government is rabid about its public health policy, and that meant that we were still in lockdown despite only just about 1 or 2 cases of COVID-19 going around… Meanwhile protests took over the United States when people refused to wear masks and we watched our neighbor country with covid cases in the hundreds of thousands on tv beating each other up over masks and storming the senate …

In 2 years I saw the landlord probably just around 2 times – at the time of moving in and at the time of moving out. It did not matter if the doorknob broke, or the microwave broke, or the house caught fire; the general response was something like “I have 35 houses, I don’t have time to come out there and look at everything, buy it yourself and replace it and send me the receipt.”

Safe to say, this was probably the best landlord I had in my entire life. i had never seen anything like this before. He never bothered me with anything at all; in fact, he himself did not like to be bothered. If we were going into the territory of sheer negligence here or what were we doing exactly was hard to assess…. its not too often you find a tenant complaining that the landlord was just not bothered with the house at all…..

It meant that when the microwave did not work, I replaced it and sent him the receipt; if the side pipe burst, I had a handyman come in and sent the receipt, the fridge gave up and i had an entire fridge home delivered and installed and had the old one thrown out by middlemen and the landlord looked at the pictures and receipts and replied with a “YA.. OK” . – Seriously what is this guy?

I was becoming more and more industrious now doing stuff on behalf of the landlord while sending him receipts of everything that i replaced… I figured out how the heating and vent systems worked in the home and hired someone to shovel the snow and mow the lawn.

(The backyard mowing in progress by the mowers)

By the way did you know that if you did not mow the yard before spring time, the by law officer would knock on your door and hand you a bill as failure to mow can lead to different bacteria breeding in the yard and cause a community issue? – well neither did I!

During Covid 19 one of my neighbors suggested i should make use of this large backyard property and grow some trees. So i grew a bunch of these…

When winter hit in the dead of Covid 19 and the Delta variant just started ravaging India right in the beginning of the year, the lock down caused a very deafening silence in the community which brought out these guys right outside my window, completely unshaken and fearless..

(the effects of Covid 19)

Apart from that, Covid-19 and working from home meant the introduction of another item in my life: an Akita, a dog breed that I had never owned in my life. If you are unversed on the breed, then it’s safe to know that the Japanese Akita is one of the most intelligent breeds in the world and also very hard to pin down due to its rarity and expensiveness. For the record, Superman actor Henry Cavill owns an Akita and takes the dog everywhere with him.

(actor Henrii Cavill with his Akita)

The Akita is supposed to be a companion and guard dog. The closest bet to the dog is the movie Hachiko by Richard Gere on the Japanese Akita and its loyalty towards its master. An Akita is famous for its loyalty to the owner, and its high intelligence in the dog department. The dog comes with double layers of fur, which means that it likes the snow and the negative degrees. It suffers in the heat and the sun…

The dog is recommended only for advanced dog owners and not the intermediate or beginner types… It means shelling out 3 grand on an Akita might seem a lot for a dog, but well, first times for everything in life: an unnecessarily big house, an expensive car, a good job; now that we were in over our heads and everything was exploding, why don’t we just go in for the kill and chew more than we could handle?

It meant the dog arrived like this …

and turned into something this…

for those wondering what i was doing outside in that snow – i went snowboarding.

that and when i could i went snowmobiling. . .

and that dog came with me.

During the lockdown the dog did everything with me…

Every morning, the dog plopped into the Lexus with the owner, just before work and we drove 15 km to a coffee shop to buy a large mug of coffee with 2 Cremer and a small bun for the dog, no matter if it was the snow or if it was the summer, this was our ritual.

My mother jokingly commented that the owner of the coffee shop laced the coffee with “aphim” or “opium”, because no matter the weather, if snow, a storm, the bright blazing sun or a torrid rain fall – we went for that coffee….

No matter how you look at it, the Akita has an instinct to protect the owner and the home. It meant that around the 1-year mark, I stopped locking the door of my 3-bedroom house simply because I could not be bothered to replace it… Of course, it should be noted that the landlord himself , was the last person in the world to be bothered with the broken front door knob. …Its safe to say that a once in a 100 yr world pandemic came and went and couple of door knobs broke in the process and the landlord never bothered me at all…..

I became so lax with the presence of the dog in my home and the general lack of accountability that I left the door unlocked with a Lexus sitting in the attached garage of my house and went cycling or something….. When the front door completely broke and fell off and there was no way to get inside, I just started using the back door of the house to get in.. It wasn’t like I was having any guests over during the COVID lockdown. For those unfamiliar, if one violated a COVID-19 lockdown and visited people during lockdowns in Canada, one would have the police at the door, asking questions about who, where, what? certain to say – we were not Americans….

The dog had his own full time career which included guarding the house …

inspecting the car and making sure no intruders were present in the garage…

Going out on long walks with the owner…

waking up the owner in the morning for daily coffee…..

Inspecting the garden tomato yield and making sure adequate quality controls were in place…

being a support animal…

It meant the relationship between the dog and the owner turned into a ‘bff category’ now, just like Henrii Cavill and his dog…

Soon Covid-19 ended, and I accepted a position in a French town in Beausejour with an entirely different subset of responsibilities and dealing with completely different populations. This time it was not the nonchalant Germans, but the French, the Cree, and the Métis. Plus, it would be Churchill and Pine Falls this time, meaning since the pandemic was over, the car would be put to good use. I learned from my mistakes and overconfidence and moved into a much smaller accommodation rather happily this time around in Beausejour. My German ex-landlord gave me raving references and reviews as a tenant for putting up with his bullshit and his absenteeism. I questioned if he was an absentee father as well… but from what i gathered he was a very dedicated father, just a workaholic… He told me that I was the best tenant he ever had, and I told him that he was the best landlord I ever had…. As we haggled on the last day, we wondered if we should give the dog some credit too for doing so much work around the household too? because why not and Afterall? …

For the curious individuals, the dog did not move to Beausejour but moved into a German friend’s 100-acre farm land. He’s living there, taking on the responsibilities of the farm for now and pretending to be a sort of a king. He might show up, if possible, if government regulations don’t hold him accountable for being an Akita.