mercredi 22 octobre 2008

Bedtime stories and air hostesses from the sixties...

I am back.
Did you miss me, O silent readers whose commentaries are so scarce? Did you even notice I was gone in the first place? Is anyone reading this, anyways? Well, if anyone is, here are a few of my latest adventures...

Things have been moving pretty swiftly since the last time I wrote on this blog. Babysitting my cousin ended up being quite an exciting adventure. As general common sense should have already thaught me, taking care of a 3-year old is pretty demanding. It was odd to pick him up at the "Petite Grenouille" day-care centre after school, especially since it's the same day-care I attended when I was his age... with the same nice ladies making sure he doesn't throw too much sand in other children's faces as back in 1988. If it was weird for me to meet 55 year-olds that all called me "Mumu" and knew what I was like when I was 4; it must have been even weirder for them to hear I was in university finishing a bacc in education. In any case, having Tom at home made me realize that writing essays and reports becomes more difficult when you have to entertain a child and prevent him from eating marbles or crayons all at the same time. I gained a lot of respect for people who do that full time. Jessie, you are a wonderwoman. Oh, and of course, as I mentioned last time, we also took care of Ginger, my uncle's chocolate labrador. So after reading Thomas his bedtime story about firemen I went for a stroll with her. My uncle got one of those new short leashes for Ginger since she pulls like a freakin' sleigh dog, but it's not particularly efficient... so I decided to just keep walking until either of us would get tired. After going twice across the entire city, I gave up. I really want to get another dog some day.

The day we were done babysitting Tom was also the day we left for Europe. After my morning class, thanks to my dad's controversed sense of efficiency, my parents came to get me on hwy 132 where the bus had left me 15 minutes earlier. What greater way to start a trip to Amsterdam than being picked up like a prostitute on the side of the road... I smell irony, here. We flew with KLM for the first time to get to the Netherlands. Apart from the fact that the flight attendants might have the most hilarious costume ever designed for a flight company, the trip was pretty uneventful. In KLM transatlantic flights, they installed those individual entertainment devices that allow you to watch the movie you want instead of only the back of the head of the 6-foot tall guy in front of you, which is neat. There was a language learning program, too, so I tried to learn a little dutch on the way. The course was sponsored by Berlitz language schools and, just like Marilyne and I found out in your 1st year research paper, that method is bullshit... anyways, at least I know how to say hello and thanks, now. The basic outline of the trip was that we were going to spend a family day in Bruges, then my mom and I were going to visit Brussels while my dad had his meetings and then as soon as he's done we'd take the first train to Amsterdam and hang out there until the end of the week... My first contact with Brussels was walking out of the hotel and strolling around a disorientatingly flat area of the old town to go to Grote Markt (Grand Place) and have a drink. Grote Markt is basically the heart of Brussels. All the houses around it were built by bourgeois corporations that tried to show off to everyone else, and the result is beautiful.
The next morning, still pretty messed up by the jet lag, we booted it to the Centraal Station and took the first northbound train to Bruges, a relatively small town in the Flemish part of Belgium that is well known for its lace, its architecture and its canals. In the train, we met a Alec, a poor dude from Russia who had no idea if he was in the right train or not. We started chatting after being kicked out of the 1st class wagon we both accidentally sat in (told you I don't understand Dutch... fucking Berlitz...) We understood from his rudimentary English that he was an ingeneer in Moscow and he left us a postcard from his hometown. Nice dude. Bruges is a very cool place. Upon our arrival, the morning fog was still thick and therefore the tall church towers and the canals looked somewhat mysterious and eerie. As the sun rose higher, though, the fog dissipated and revealed the city in its entirety. While my mom was busy systematically going into each store to look for lace and pretending she knows what good lace looks like, my dad was trying to hide his exasperation in wandering off and filming whatever was around with the camescope we got him for christmas. Amused by my parents' classic family vacation scene, I walked around a little and gazed in amazement at the hundreds of gables and at the old ladies making lace in the back of their little shops. It was a warm and sunny (thus busy) Sunday, but the city was still pretty quiet. The afternoon went by slowly as we looked around for antiques and walked along the canals in which the brightly coloured leaves were reflected. Awesome. Bruges also has an impressive amount of parks considering the size of the city. We made a detour through the Minnewasser, one of them, before heading back to the station. The silence was only broken every now and then by someone ringing on the bell of their bicycle to tell us to get the hell out of their way. That night we went to Chez Léon, back in Brussels, one of Belgium's most famous mussels and french fries place. I ordered a gargantuesque mussels dish with a pint of Léon's house beer (house wine is just not an option in Belgium...). No kidding, even the chocolate smell emanating from the Godiva's shop on Grand Place seemed disgusting after eating so much.
The next day, my mom and I decided to go check out the famous Atomium. The Atomium is basically a building shaped like a giant iron molecule enlarged I-forget-how-many times. It was Belgium's hall for the universal exhibition of 1958. I've seen quite a few odd-shaped buildings in my life, but I must admit that this enormous molecule is pretty ridiculous. You can visit the inside and take escalators to go from one "boule" to another, and everything inside is arranged like in the 50's. The best part is that it is located near other random weird-looking buildings, such as a Japanese tower, a Chinese house covered in golden dragon sculptures, a park with miniature reproductions of all the most famous buildings in Europe, an amphitheatre entirely made out of organic matter and grass, and, last but not least, the royal palace of Belgium. Let's simply say that it is easy to find your way around this part of town. In the afternoon, we checked out a few art nouveau buildings from the beginning of the century downtown and then we walked all the way up to the outrageously big Brussels Justice Hall, in front of which is located probably one of the most moving unknown soldier monuments ever made. Our third and last day in Brussels consisted of walking around a lot, drinking an unhealthy amount of coffee, checking a modern art exhibition about (believe it or not) Jesus and religion in the St-Michel-et-Ste-Gudule cathedral and, more importantly, going back in my childhood days while visiting the Comic Strip Museum of Belgium. Because as you may already know, Belgium is the hometown of most of the best known comic strip characters ever created, at least in the strange world of French speaking people. So I spent a good chunk of the day with my dearest childhood heroes: Tintin, Spirou, the Smurfs, Blake&Mortimer, Gaston Lagaffe, Cubitus, Achille Talon, Boule et Bill, and so many more. All of a sudden I realized that the sketches I do are absolute amateur work. "J'ai des croûtes à manger", as we say here. Speaking of which, this week I have to draw key scenes of the novel "The Lord of the Flies" for a project in ESL Literacy and Language Arts. It's fun, I get to experiment with media I hadn't touched for years (watercolours, charcoal, etc.), but on the other hand it's hard to find key scenes that can be represented graphically without having any gory or other traumatizing, inappropriate stuff for teenagers. Anyways, that was about it for Belgium. Whenever I get time to write some more I'll let you know about Amsterdam and its wonders...

lundi 6 octobre 2008

Here are the hectic harvest hurricanes (and other miscellaneous words starting with an H)...

Here I am, back in the "here-and-now-zone" after a whole bunch of entries about what happened back this summer. After 8 months and a bit on the run, I am finally back in Québec, to my great simultaneous pleasure and disenchantement. I have a relationship I struggle to describe with this province, really. The Stéphane Dion syndrome, maybe. In any case, as you may have noticed, I am still writing in English. I picked that up for awhile, we'll see how it goes. I gave up making promises and committing about writing in one specific language or another, as my past experience in trip logging and other blog-like entries proved that I can't freewrite in one language... I guess it's the downside of being trilingual...

So what have I done since I came back to good ol' "Je me souviens"? Enjoying the fall colours, smells and sights would naturally come first on my list since it is by far the most pleasant thing I've done, even if attending class and trying to figure out my M.A. was unfortunately the things I've actually spent the most time doing. This semester might be the apotheosis of the irrelevance of my teaching degree. There is something very frustrating about being an aspiring teacher and spending a good chunk of my studies engaging in long ethical reflexions on the moral component of teaching cross-curricular competencies or quoting texts about ultra-specific teaching methods rather than trying to become better at what I'll do. A lady from the bureau des stages took the time to wake me up early on my sleep-in day last week to let me know that my practicum project in a native community in La Romaine was unilaterally rejected for a stupid bureaucratic technicality. Way to suck the life out of my motivation to remain in my bacc. No worries, though, as I mourn my practicum project I'm already cogitating about what my next odyssey might be... for now I'll just keep going on short journeys and ridiculous adventures until I find something I really want to do...stay tuned.
My 22nd birthday was ok. Being 22 is far from being exciting, as no particular privilege comes with that specific age except getting dangerously close to paying full prize for my bus pass. Since everyone was busy 22-ing around, the birthday festivities weren't as wild as they used to be. I must be getting old. My birthday week nevertheless included a cool dinner with buddies I did my trip to Spain with and a good night out at the Laval University Pub's patio, both of which were awesome and included some good old fashioned intoxication. Thanks guys.


My enjoyment of the fall colours reached its climax this past Sunday, as Lindsay, Hélène, Merhdad and I went on a classic journey to Orléans Island for some pic-nicking and apple-picking. When Champlain first saw Orléans Island, he named it Bacchus Island since it was benefiting from an incredible micro-climate that made wild vines, fruits and vegetables grow in abundance all over it. That micro-Eden must have been pretty cool to see in the early 1600's, especially after the massive disappointment of figuring out he was nowhere near India, or Europe for that matter. "At least SOME things grow here", he probably thought. Orléans Island still is nowadays Québec City's backyard garden. Apples, berries, potatoes, and all kinds of other produce have been the economic motor of the island for ever, and most of the villages established along the shore of the island kept their original settlement buildings, which gives the wandering outsider a little feeling of going back in the first times of the colony just by crossing a sketchy bridge across half the St-Lawrence river. We stopped at the chocolate factory to pick up some truffles and then stuffed our faces with bread and cheese and paté on the riverside in St-François (because of course, 100% of the villages on the island are called "St-Something"). What else would you expect? The afternoon was highlighted by a visit to an apple cider shop and by making fun of all the people standing by the road dressed up as giant apples or other ridiculous stuff to get us to go into their orchard. No, thanks, giant McIntosh teenager, I am going to Roger and Margot's orchard. Margot's smile as she hands me that white plastic bucket to put my apples in has been highlighting my Indian Summers since I've been in high school. Next year, maybe, big apple. Roger and Margot's apple orchard is full of Orléans' island own McIntosh variety apple, and has a breathtaking view on the Laurentians and Mt.Sainte-Anne. As we admired the firework of autumn colours around us, a faint smell of boiled corn cobs and of fresh bread emerged from Margot's shack. God, I love Orléans Island. Here are a few pictures.

Yep, so that's about it for now. This week my mission is to contain hurricane Thomas, a 3 year-old cousin of mine that we volunteered to babysit for a few days, as well as Ginger, Thomas' 70-ish lbs. chocolate labrador. Fun times ahead... then Friday will be our departure for Belgium and Amsterdam for my dad's business trip. I love how we have family business trips, now. Hopefully it will be just as great as it sounds.