Nearing the finish line

I just found out tomorrow afternoon the internet at our petite maison is getting cut.  I made a mad dash to my computer to put something up on here because otherwise I won't get one up till I get home.  Which, if you were wondering, is in 5 days!

This means it's very much ending.  The fact that my Katimavik experience is coming to a close should be already very obvious to me, due to the fact that we as a group have been packing and cleaning this place like mad for the last 24 hours, but I've chosen to ignore obvious realities =D..

I've got photos! (give a little cheer!)

I promised photos from Claude Lafortune's exposition.  

This is Paper Monzart just hanging out, throwing paper around, being creative in his slippers.

Confucius, just looking wise, at the beginning of the train of paper statues.

Ganesha, the four armed beauty, always able to balance for photos.

This person is not a paper structure but instead, a Sam, a creature of creation of expositions.  She is holding a map to help her find her way out of the confusing obstacle course around her. 

A Sam can be found in many different habitats and posses the qualities which allow her to stay up late at night blogging and reading massive religious texts.  (This is code for "Sam just finished her Bible challenge and read the entire bible and blogged about it all".  Go Sam! Perserverance!

 You can follow Sam at herlifejourney.tumblr.com <-- she posts lots of other stuff too so don't be shy) 

This is Joan of Arc, she is my favourite.  Her horse is also a majestic stallion.

Pope dude, having fun on his ship.

Crazy Moses.

Napoleon Bonaparte, looking wounded and short.

Pontiac the indian just having a smoke.  His feathers? Yes, they are paper.

All the little statues having a party.

Mary and Joseph with the babe.

We finished the exposition this week, most of the work being some mindless cleaning and more chiseling of carpets.  The next thing is for les bricoleurs, Denis and Guy, to complete the arena-style centre stage for all the newest paper statues to hang out on for the next 11 months.

The three Katimaviks with the staff of the museum.

Guy, Renée, Denise, Jean-François (aka BOSSMAN) 

Denis, Marie-Josée, Noémie, Sam, Petra, Jessie, and Mathieu. 

You will be missed! 

Our Final goodbye to Nicolet - we had so many people come out! Which was a huge difference to our goodbye party in Thunder Bay.  The Mayor paid for the catering and we had a few slideshows and some presents for our work partners and billet families.  Huge success but bittersweet as Katimavik is permanently leaving the community right as we are becoming known here. :(

We also got some great new t-shirts to sport for this event, thanks Katimavik!

Our gerbil-brained group tried to get a good jump shot for an unusually large amount of time and never succeeded.. (we blame the photographer)  I chose this photo from the lengthly archive I now have simply because Antoine and I look so incredibly dumb jumping when no one else is. I even put it to the "extra large" setting for optimal facial feature viewing. Your welcome.

Millie, Antoine, Sophie, Jessie and Eric: Frolicking.  Last weekend we went out as a group to take photos of each person's favourite place and work placement.  It was a beautiful day and we all worse our beautiful onepieces.  Needless to say it was a marvellous day.

On Monday I went for a little walk by myself* on lunch hour after I mailed home a massive box of all the things that wouldn't fit in my suitcase.  This is Nicolet's beautiful Catholic church; it was one of the first things I saw arriving here and I see it everyday at work as it is just across the street.  I will miss listening to the bells at noon everyday.

* I say myself because it is a rare moment when one goes for a walk or does any activity other than using the washroom by themselves in Katimavik.  I will enjoy solidarity when I return home, I imagine.

This is the fenced off railroad bridge just around the corner from our Katimahouse.  We go exploring around here every now and again and we brought some of our cluster group members here on New Year's Eve.  We also tried watching the eclipse from here, as it is the only major high point in town, but the clouds decided to change that dream of ours into a movie night with no popcorn.  

Goodbye front porch which allows for optimal people watching and grabbing icicles from our poorly designed roof.

Just for the cliché effect, I had to get a throw-the-hands-up pose just like in Thunder Bay.  Unfortunately Nicolet has even less mountains than Thunder Bay and so I had to substitute the roof of the museum for a mountain.  It was a great view though.

Denis was nice enough to take us up the dangerous ladder to the roof after we pestered him in French for a while.

This is another one of those photos I only post for the enjoyment of the reader.  

The sun was so bright that I suppose I figured that smiling with my eyes closed would be a much better, optically healthy way to go about things.

Soooo muuuuuchh Poutine.. our goodbye party at the musée.

Note Jean-François taking a mega bite of this fantastic health food!

Today and tomorrow we are spending cleaning out the house and getting packed.  We've been doing small debriefing activities over the past week but now the weight of things is really hitting us.  It's been fun.  It's been too much fun.  And I can't even begin to imagine what it's going to be like not waking up to these people in my life.  When Martin left we realized the temporality of our program but leaving each other on Tuesday is going to be a full breath of air.  I can vividly remember meeting the group in the airport back in September, it feels so surreal to be 5 days from leaving this place and these people.

If Antoine hadn't drilled into my brain and implanted the cliché identifier and made it impossible for me to become sappier than this I would post beautiful metaphors about Katimavik and how it's changed me from a small chrysalis to a large and bold butterfly.

But, I am incredibly happy I said yes to this program and have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.  Did I mention that Katimavik implants promotional material into our brains which we randomly spit out, unannounced?

You should apply if you are 21 and under.

oh whoops, look what just happened..

Goodbye! See you on Tuesday, Rossland!

Petra J

The Destruction of an EXPOSITION

During our week of billeting Jessie and I were able to keep in touch quite nicely by means of verbal communication at work.  Once again, we both work at the Musée des Religions du Monde, doing various tasks and joking with the fabulous staff that teach us to speak french.

When we first arrived in Nicolet, before Christmas, we went to the Musée to check out the exhibits (exposition, en Français) and spent a lot of time in the Noël exposition.  (Mostly because it is the only one without English information as well as French and translation was timely.)

This is the Noel exhibit at the beginning, on the other side of the wall on the right there was a "salle secret" where school group kids would go and do activities.

The tree held different items that would typically be given at Christmas in each of the 5 major religions of the world.  The showcase pieces were all of different nativity scenes made from various mediums.

A quaint little chimney.

(this is the secret entrance to the secret room.. shhhh)

But alas when the jolly season ends there is little need for an exhibit about it and so the destruction began.

First stages - taking down the info panels, removing the fake snow and presents, and Noémie putting the nativity scenes back into the archives.

My large heap of presents, which later inspired impromptu Christmas card photoshoots.

Goodbye Christmas.

I found Santa.

I also found a small girl in the corner wrapping wire around a stick.  I fed her my lunch and nursed her back to sanity.

Jessie's sanity levels plummeted drastically when we took on the task of disassembling the Christmas tree.  The Christmas tree was constructed of pipes, fake tree pieces and ornaments, and it was all strung up to the ceiling by wires.  Wires which demanded full attention and precision of fingers when dealing with.  Because this giant tree was right in the middle of the exhibit and mass amounts of children visited the exhibit every week I am quite thankful for said supportive wires.

My sanity levels took a plunge when Jessie and I were given the task of placing all the boxes and decorations from the Noel exhibit into the shower, a locked room inside the ladies washroom.  We dragged boxes and boxes from the exposition over to the shower and proceeded to play puzzle trying to make them all fit.  We realized along the way that things would need to be cleared out first because our shove-everything-in method simply wasn't working very well.  I was meticulously placing the lower portion of a Santa Claus in the shower when a noise like thousands of beads hitting the floor rang in my ears and a blast of something very cold hit my forehead.  It was after I jumped backwards into a bag of incense sticks and told Jessie in a considerably loud voice to "AHH do something!" that I realized I had turned the shower on full blast and Santa was getting a nice Arctic quality rinse.  I turned it off when I realized Jessie was helplessly lost in laughter at my.. erm.. miscalculation of placement.

After full belly laughter for approximately 10 minutes we decided it would be a good idea to find some paper towel and dry the things I had inadvertently decided to drench.  We hung the fake snow up on the children's coat hooks in the vestiare.  Jean-Francois shook his head a lot at us for a few days afterwards.

Moving everything out.. for some reason I always get photos of Guy's back.. hmm..

Suddenly very empty!

When we took the drywall down a mysterious window was revealed.

Blue trollies = also great for racing.

During the destruction Jessie and I were informed of several processes which are quite normal to the likes of the musée that we were rather unaware of.
A brief description of what we did can be summarized in just one word.

Chiseling.

Jessie and I chiseled everything.

We chiseled the walls, we chiseled the showcase stands; we chiseled paint off pieces of trim, we chiseled sticky tack off walls.  We chiseled paint off the carpet.

In fact, we spent a good amount of time chiseling the carpet, and for lack of a more gracious description we nearly died of laughter upon realizing we were chiseling the carpet.

WHO CHISELS A CARPET?

Now whenever we go somewhere with walls (which, believe or not, is pretty a pretty common occurrence) we catch each other examining the walls with the desire to chip away impurities from them.  It's a disease of the mind, but watch out; it is strangely contagious..

I haven't posted an update since we started the destruction and since then we have continued into what one might describe as the "Making of an Exposition".

We have helped put together showcase stands, painted all the showcases stands, chiseled old paint off painting equipment, chiseled new paint off painting equipment, chiseled more carpets, helped Denis put up some walls, painted walls, and vacuumed for more hours than I care to count.  It's been lots of work and lots of moving things back and forth because of limited room but it's so rewarding to look back at the photos of the Christmas exhibit and see how much progress we made in just three weeks time.  The whole room is yellow now, and filled with paper statues of various religious and historic characters.

Claude LaFortune is a man who had a biblical television show in Québec in the 70's ("L'évangile en papier") in which paper dolls played the characters.  His works, both then and since, have inspired puppeteers everywhere and my boss Jean-Francois commented recently, "You cannot comment on other puppets and say Claude's work looks like theirs.  He is the pioneer; their work looks like his."

The paper statues are enticing and unique and his entire collection is made of recycled materials; namely, paper.  Mr. LaFortune is the showcased artist for this new exposition at the musée and yesterday and today the three of us Katimavictims met him and looked at all his amazing projects.  Photos to come.

12 days left of Katimavik - I should have posted more over the last 6 months!

home soon!
Petra

An Ode to the Onepiece

The Onepiece is an article of outwear that looks, generally, a little something like this.

*colours and pattern may vary*

It is a piece of outdoor gear to be marvelled over, a combination of wonder.  The sealing of pants and jacket as one forever changed the unkind fate of waist line snow burn, the unsightly mistake of plumber's crack, and above all - the doom of the dreaded back shivers.

Commonly known as the "onepiece" or the "onesie" it also goes by other names; the fartsack, the snapsuit, the bodysuit, the shapesuit, the curve-hugger, the gaper, the gerber, the velcro, and the list must go on though I'm unable to provide more.

For generations the onesie has been passed down, first worn by our forefathers in the early 70's - at that time, as a statement of outright, vivacious fashion.  To don a onepiece at that time meant extreme practicality, style and the right to be seen.  It is no wonder that the collars of every onepiece from those days still in existence today boast security, masculinity, and freedoom.  Each onepiece is unique to it's owner; like a prized child, an honour, not simply a possession.  Wearing a onepiece means taking care not to tarnish a fabulous, decades old reputation of quality.

Sophie is modelling the "top down" option.  The wearer of a onesie is always in control of their temperature, and this great feature can be sported quite stylishly while maintaining composure.  If the sleeves of a onepiece are long enough, don't hesitate to tie them in a knot in the front.

It is with pride in our hearts that we Katimavictims adopted the onesie lifestyle, and continue to glorify this terrific way of being.  It is a privilege to be given such an opportunity.  Truth be told, we find ourselves envious of the days when flaunting a onepiece was not an extreme statement of fashion, but merely a tool for everyday life.  The average day becomes supernatural when in a onesie; one's life is drastically altered.  Everyday tasks become an available task to be performed in a onesie.  Laundry becomes exciting, eating dinner can be a miraculous event.. hold on.. "Could I shower in this thing..?"  (a quote from Martin Napier)  Outings become unusual and festive by simply changing from our common attire.  Colour is put back into our drained and tired world when the group of us 8 onesies glide down rue Notre Dame in gracious left, right, left.  In chilly Quebec we have found many uses for our multicoloured onepieces, and try to execute their outings professionally and with great pride.

As the Spiderman movies sensationalized: "With great power, comes great responsibility."

There are rules to wearing a onepiece.

Rule #1 - Never deny a friend the right to a onepiece.  If you are lucky enough to know the whereabouts of a marvellous, colourful onepiece, and your friend desires such an article, it is your civic duty to bestow this knowledge upon your friend.  It is, one might say, the greatest gift you can give a fellow winter-man.

Rule #2 - Stride is everything.  Let go of all inhibitions and allow your hips to swing in their natural pattern of sway.  The derrière is everything to a onepiece, and if your bum is not wigglin', you best take that onesie off.  A onepiece is a curve hugger, and you must allow all natural curves to be let loose.  Don't worry about shoulders at first, their swag will come with the flow of your hips in good time.

*Stride Tip*
Save that swag for when in boots; a swag on sticks will ruin your turns, and possibly deter the gaze of a passerby skier, when his attention should be to downhill obstacles.

Rule #3 - It is always acceptable to wear bright sunglasses with the onepiece.  Yes, even at nighttime.

Rule #4 - Loose that extra layer! -  The biggest crime one can commit is covering the uppermost portion of one's onesie with more outdoor wear; why cover something so perfect?!  If in dire need, a translucent covering is pushing the limits, though bearably acceptable, if the intention is to save the condition of the onepiece.  Understand the dress-code of honour, and do your best to respect.  Ponchos need never be matched with a onepiece.  For footwear fashion while commuting, Reeboks area an acceptable choice.

Rule #4.5 - No backpacks.  The onesie is a bag all on its own.  Store your lunch in the overstuffed collar that warms your neck, keep your mobile device in one of the many convenient pockets, and when in doubt, secure your waist belt at a tight setting and store goods just above, ensuring your zipper is fastened.  Don't worry - they're not going anywhere!

*The exception to this rule is for those with the addition of a child.  Yes, you may store your infant in a seatypack on your back; that would be best.

Rule #5 - This rule comes to me from the net, though I believe it is written for saftey purposes and feel a need to warn those wishing to travel with their onepiece.  Do not wear a onepiece in Colorado.  By the sounds of it, you're likely to be leaving Colorado without it, and most of your other belongs, including your dignity.  This rule may be applied to other destinations, more research to come.

Rule #6 - Don't hesitate to hate! Upon viewing a tardy attempt at a onepiece (commonly known as the "matching snowsuit") allow yourself to obtain a look of confusion, even disgust.  How insensible such apparel is. Provide yourself with an optimal vantage point and allow internal laughing to commence. Personal thoughts are best kept silent however; a onesie-wearer is proud, but modest.

Rule #7 - When in a crowd of fellow Gerbers...
Celebrate.  Dance.  Rejoice.  The wearers of onesies are a gracious people, of cheers and boasts and compliments.  They are a crowd of colour who tastefully represent the most practical way to contain a human body during winter months, and the times shared between the members of the onesie extended family are often of great value.  The lasting (or.. temporary..) friendships you will create with other Gerbers will be some of your fondest connections.

Rule #8 - Retro Day is Every Day.  Why wait?  What good is that fartsack doing gathering dustbunnies at the back of your closet?  Why not don the showstopper on an idle Tuesday?  The occasional outing won't do it any harm, provided you save a clean snow day for its playdate with the elements.  For best results, ski with other Gerbers, and be sure to use the swagger (as described above) when entering and exiting public restrooms.

Rule #9 - Extend the destination.  Why keep a onepiece solely for winter excursions?  Sure that garment holds a solid function when in snowy winter conditions, but have you never considered the many other feasible options for a onepiece outing?  Take that onepiece to the supermarket, the kid's soccer game, church and even to the club.

Case Studies and Examples

"With great power comes great responsibility.."

It is believed by many (notably, Chuck Norris) that this statement applies specifically to the owners of onepieces everywhere, and was only used in different context as an international deterrent from the aquisition of a onepiece by all people, everywhere.  This clear attempt at corporative allusion is basically a scheme to keep countries spending coveted dollars on overseas wars.  What would our world become if everyone owned a onepiece?, one might ask themself.

Allow me to seriously enlighten you.

The wearer of a onepiece can be any human being, save a quadriplegic.  As a onepiece is the most incredible insulator, the wearer is always warm.  When human beings are warm they are happy.  When human beings are happy there is little need to bicker, occupy foreign land, annex hostages or throw bombs.

My dear friend Sophie said recently, "I am always happy in my onepiece."

The truth is spoken.  If all humans everywhere had access to free, clean onepieces our troubled world would have less conflict and the assurance of warmth. It has been nearly scientifically proven that wearing such a costume makes the average human being a better person.  No Gerber ever wants to start a war, no Gerber sees the need for war!

Perhaps this state of mind comes literally from the original Gerbers - babies.  Perhaps the carefree and peaceful attitudes of darling children has been sewn into the lining of each fartsack, and sporting such attire causes the wearer to effectively utilize such qualities.

Like any fashion trend there are, of course, several ways of wearing the onesie which are unacceptable and shunned.

This must be some sort of joke.. camo onesie.. 

This would mean the wearer is pro happiness and pro man slaughter.. choose a side already. 

(Couldn't find an outdoor onesie so these pajama onesies will have to do.)

Let's take a look at some classic onepiece extremism.  K2.

Many people strongly dislike this film.

But opinions aside! See how that man struts his mountain presence in his onepiece! 

View his determined face! Observe how he clearly possesses strength beyond normality; the strength to get him and his friends up the second tallest mountain in the world! (almost..a few of them die..)

This strength does not come from years of preparation or experience, pshh, no!  This strength is merely within their reach due to the fact that they all wear onepieces in the film! How else would everyday Hollywood actors be capable of striving to such feats as this movie presents? This is an excellent representation of obtaining a onepiece for bearing the elements and also looking intimidating/like a telletubbie.

Most of all, remember - The uniform doesn't make you brave.
Attitude is everything when wearing a onesie; simply putting on a bib before the gun fires doesn't make you a competitor!  You must run the race if you hope to achieve the status of a sportsman.

Let me know when you find your onesie,
Petra

It's only been a while..

Lots o stuff coming at you.

Arriving home from our weekend of shenanigans in the big city of fun felt like that strange sensation in your knees when you attempt a jump on solid ground after several on a trampoline.  Oh right.. this is earth.. Oh right.. we have work tomorrow.

We had a week of melancholy, G-rated fun including some language lessons and swimming lengths at our second home, the Police Academy.  We also had a meeting with our project coordinator about the progress we're making and what we have left to do for the town before we leave.

We found out a few days before this meeting that Katimavik has a bunch of stuff on their plate right now, that is probably less than appetizing.  Back in June'10 the program had some massive budget cuts from the Canadian Heritage Society and one of the results was making the 9 month program into a 6 monther.  They had to cut a huge amount of communities for housing placements because they didn't have the funds to keep the program running at such a high level.  After this there was a decrease in participant entries and so in order to keep each house operating (which is a no brainer - why waste money on a house when there isn't a group in it?) they had to start groups off with as little as 8 or 9 people, instead of the standard 11.  In hopes that more participants would show up, or check their yes box, Katimavik placed groups in nearly every community they had.  The low numbers became a problem when individuals began to leave the program, for various reasons; groups were down to as low as 5 in some communities, as early as one month into the program.

For obvious reasons, Katimavik doesn't want to deal with situations like this down the road and over the fence so to combat such obstacles they have had to make cuts again. No budget this time, but community placements - the need for less has made it necessary for a decrease in houses, in order to start groups off with full numbers.  This info came to us because we will be one of the placements that will not be continued, as well as three other groups all within an hour of us.  I've got all this news through my program leader, because it's not publicized on the web.  Very sad news, and it changes our last month of activity because we have to clean out the entire house.. we're planning on a garage sale.  Need a toaster?

Fun Part of post: Skip to here if disinterested in program logistics.

Here's a picture of some cross dressers.

Aren't we sexy?  Theme Thursdays are always a mystery..

Last Friday we started billeting, which apparently is a word that is not widely used and I need to specify its meaning instead of making the assumption people know what I'm saying.

Firstly, we advertise ourselves as the fabulous, interesting and "bilingual" *wink wink wink* people that we are in order to get phone calls from people willing to take us in for a week. We also promise a daily stipend of $10 to feed each hungry Katima-mouth.  Then we start the action of billeting; we all go different ways for a week, to a willing host family, and forget any minor problems we have with each other's living habits (darn that John, always leaving the milk on the counter.. etc). It also gives us a break from the program, excluding our work placement.

The idea is we get new people, new ideas, interesting conversations, different meals, hopefully a dishwasher, packaged food, showers longer than .8 seconds and our own room with a real bed.

This is the theory.

All that stuff usually happens, but on occasion Katimavictims find themselves in permanent babysitting situations or are set to work as a housemaid for a week and a half.  God forbid it should be both.

I've been extra lucky- both my billet families have been nothing short of amazing.

This round I was matched with Stephan and Isabelle and their three entirely french speaking children Antoine, Esteban and Marie-Claire.  The kids were a great source of laughs and I'm sure I was a great source of amusement for them too, constantly using broken phrases and extensive hand gestures to indicate things I desired to tell them.  When I would speak English too often they would point at me and say "WHIPPET", a word which has no meaning in either language but means very simply "Hey you dumb anglophone, that's a warning, do it again and we're going to dog pile on you".

I had a great week.

Last weekend we went to Trois-Rivieres several times ( I know, right, I'm over there more than I am in Nicolet.. it's a nice place)  once for Antoine's soccer practice and once for a winter festival.  Soccer practice was in a huge new sports centre that just oozes government funding and its luscious full sized turf made me drool.  Not to mention there was an ice rink right next door with small children workin' on their Catriona Le May Doan strokes.  Never have I ever wanted to live here so badly.

Nuits du Polaire was the name of the festival, which included a rail jam, lots of concerts, an anticlimactic snow slide that was really not worth waiting in line for, lots of people with dogs, and tons of children's games which the kids spent the afternoon exhausting themselves with.

It was also something like -21 that day so I merely examined the exuberant fun being had as I attempted to warm my many frozen body parts using both the run-on-the-spot and the exhale-into-your-mittens methods.  I could have been a much better sport that day had I not been intent on ensuring my survival.  The kids did not seem to be phased by such temperature.

Wednesday found me at the Centre des Arts hopelessly attempting again to fit in with a crowd, this time involving choreographed dancing.   However, this is an uncommon kind of dancing.  Gumboots.

Isabelle brought it to Nicolet and is the instructor of the class, which was the reason one would have found me there that night.

From my years as a figure skater I possess enough physical coordination to look graceful in several areas of performance, but this does not, apparently, extend to situations of the likes of this style of dance.  I spent most of the lessons slapping my ankles too hard or too soft, always a beat too late, and using a version of hip thrusting I'm quite certain should never have been discovered.

Gumboots comes from South Africa, where slaves working in diamond mines needed secret codes to communicate with each other.  (No, this isn't bullshit)
They created a language of tapping on their gumboots (such well equipped miners..) which could be easily heard throughout the mine.  Then, with the addition of shiny things on one boot, they were able to identify a friend or foe with the quick shine of a flashlight.

And so, everyone at this new-age tribal dance class had a funky pair of gumboots (it was a very pretty array of plastic footwear :) ) and several had a nice string of bottle caps around the ankle.  Except me. I had some normal shoes.

Gumboots has become more of a traditional, cultural dance now and the sound of rattling bottle caps makes for an excellent contrast to the continuous sound of stomping, the most common step.  The beats change up frequently and the movements are basically unlimited, but the main idea is to stomp lots, whack your gumboots a lot, clap lots and occasionally say something like "ooywaaay".

I was terrible at it.

It was great fun.

Here is a link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdFXl3dU2Mw&feature=related
caution: this link contains scary mimes.

Thursday I went with Stephan back to Trois-Rivieres for ultimate frisbee!
It was a heap of fun, I brought Jessie to assist me in being unilingual and the two of us had a great time being embarrassed and inattentive.  We watched Stephan play in the league games afterwards.

Friday we played wii for a good chunk of time and had dinner with some of Stephan and Isabelle's friends and their cute blonde children.  I remember feeling so exhausted that night from stretching my french as far as it could possibly go; a full week of work, a full day of people and the questions of five kids that night.

Saturday morning after Taekwondo for Esteban and soccer for Antoine we drove to Montreal.  We spent most of the day down at the old port at the Science Musuem, afterwards going to a chocolate restaurant for taste bud pleasing desserts.  We stopped on the way home at Stephan's parent's place for dinner which was an extra late Christmas dinner with great food and hospitality to the extreme.  After such a great week in a dynamic family I felt so lucky to be a part of, I returned home to our Katimahouse to smiles of familiar faces with lots of new stories.

And that, ladies and gents, is the end.

Coming soon - the destruction of an _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ....

Bye
Petra

Montreal Round 2

Each rotation we get a minimum of 48 hours entirely off from the program.  It has to fall on a weekend.  Sometimes groups can extend it to 72 hours but we weren't able to this rotation, like we did in Thunder Bay over Thanksgiving.

Because no one wants to sit in a cold house doing absolutely nothing for a weekend we made plans to go to Montreal and raise some hell.  On Friday night we caught a ride to Trois-Rivieres with a few work partners, I was lucky enough to get a middle seat.. I always get the middle seat. It's the short legs rule.

We bought bus tickets at the depot and caught a bus which got us to Montreal for just after 9.  The city was nice and lively and we had to walk with our huge backpacks (or in Dalandrea's case, wheel a carry on bag with snow clogged wheels behind her..) through the busy sidewalks to get to our hotel. We booked two rooms with bunk beds, which was probably our subconscious minds at work keeping us from getting homesick from the Katimahouse and our squeaky metal bunks.  Our hotel was three seconds from Chinatown, 3 minutes from downtown St. Catherine's, and supplied a free continental breakfast which was ideal for our tight budget situation/bum lifestyle.

Sort of submarine style, eh?

Within the first few hours of being at the hotel we found out we were three rooms down from some of Dalandrea's hometown friends and down the hall from a group of New Yorker's who insisted on becoming our friends.  This forced friendship would eventually lead to many attempts at ditching them once we were finally able to remove them from their hotel rooms to enjoy the daylight hours.

The first night we all went out to a club called foufounes electrique, but the locals call it foufs, so we did too, because if that's all it takes to be cool we'll do it. It was super close to our hotel and a really good time, the music was excellent and the dance floor was full.  I met up with two really good friends and Sophie saw hers as well; the best part was that Montreal clubs stay open until 3am.

Saturday morning, after a a cat's nap of a sleep, Sam and I went off to Chinatown to get breakfast and go shopping for chopsticks.  We stopped a Vietnamese restaurant and got veggie rice rolls, soup and sprout salad.  It was fun, and so yummy and we'd both never tried food like it before.

My beautiful breakfast date :)

Delicious

We spent the day as a group shopping on St. Catherine's which is long and full of great stores and lots of people.  On our way to find some of the group Sam and I stumbled upon what appeared to be a large, screaming, car-horn-honking group of people staging a protest/riot against a man named Ben Ali.  I'm not going to post things about Ben Ali, but here are photos!

They happen to be on an extreme angle because I happen to be quite bad at taking photos above my head in extra windy conditions.

This post is not finished but I have to stop right now, more lata!

Okay more now!

Back at our hotel eating pizza for supper we experienced a healthy sized panic attack when we found out the times for Igloofest (an event we'd been planning to attend since back in Thunder Bay) were earlier than we thought.  We considered not going.  We strongly considered not going.  But then we realized that we had all bought one piece ski suits for the event and the world needed to see our fabulous costumes.  We made our way down to the old port by 8:30 and were pleased to discover it was just getting going.

As for a distinguished description of this "Igloofest", I'm at a loss. One of my friends who didn't go asked "It's just a big outdoor rave with people standing around in winter gear getting cold, right?".  

Which is a fairly adequate description if you don't really get along well with snow..

I'm going to have to give this some thought, because I'm pretty sure words to describe this night haven't been invented yet.

It was a huge outdoor rave, with the best music of life - no sh*tty mainstream mixes, heaps of people from everywhere - we met people from the States, Russia and Brazil, and a back and forth ripple effect of energy the entire night.  There were massive screens everywhere, it started to snow the second we got there and it didn't stop all night.  You'd be filthy rich if you could harvest the energy of that night in full swing.

Photo credit to Sam Middleton, who constantly supplies our group with a photo timeline of our adventures together.

This was early days..

Dj stand, big screens, and happy people

Hanging out on Martin's shoulders during our dancing hours, having the time of my life

This photo is from the back of the crowd, maybe 150 m from the stage (that huge bright light at the end). There was a balcony all around the port and you could see how thick the crowd was from up there.  When the crowd got too big we bailed to the balconies and guessed that about 4000 people were attending.  Whenever I looked back towards the streets all I could see were more groups of people making their way to the port.

Group shot with a beer bottle

Dancing in our one pieces was a ridiculously hot experience in more than one way.

And also, that's a snowflake, not Sophie's brain tumour.

This is the website version of that night.

I haven't got many more words for that night, and I'm forgetting more and more of it each day so I'm glad I wrote it all down sooner rather than later!  It was just unreal.  We still can't believe we thought of not going.. No one in our group had a bad time.

We're loosely planning to have a Katimavik reunion at igloofest in future years. Our weekend in Montreal made all others we've had together seem boring and slow, but as we're all back to being broke and exhausted now we fully realize one can't do weekends like that every weekend.

bye!

Petra J