Can i set up specific web pages to open everytime i open google chrome?

I use google chrome. When i open chrome i see no address bar shown but google as my webpage. However… how come i cannot type into the google search immediately on the webpage? I had set up www.google.ca as my home page.
Also when i open chrome up, i see 8 small boxes of websites. Such as amazon.ca, yahoo canada, gmail etc.
The thing is everytime i open my browser, i have to open a ton of websites and have to manually search for each one such as having to go to 2p2 internet poker etc and open a ton of windows manually. Is there a way where i can have like all those sites i want to open similar to like how i see those 8 boxes are on google? Of course i have to right click and then click each one to go to each site like amazon.ca, yahoo.ca etc but of course this isn’t as big of an annoyance as having to open each chrome browser manually.
How do i change each of those 8 sites to the ones i would like?
Is there a way where i can open chrome up and once i do, 8 tabs open up at the same time? Because i always go to same site everytime, 2p2 internet poker, sbr odds but i have to type in sbr odds in google everytime.
Is this called bookmarks or favorites? Because i did bookmarks but it didn’t seem to work.

See:

Pauly, I looked at the site Past Tense linked to. It’s pretty much right except I don’t have a gear icon. I have 3 short horizontal bars. That gets me to the drop down menu. You’d want to click on “settings”. The 2nd section down is “On Startup”. Now, there are 5 sites I always want on tabs when I fire up my computer, so I selected “Continue where I left off”, then I just leave those tabs up when I shut down Chrome. I might try the 3rd option, “Open a specific site” or whatever it is. Either way, your preselected site should come up when you fire up Chrome.

I’m currently forcing myself to transition from Firefox to Chrome, so I’m on the left side of the learning curve myself.