Some days are long

One thing I've noticed here on the east coast of Canada is that the days are ridiculously long. I guess the time of year doesn't help in the matter. It only really starts to get dark before 9, and once it is dark, it's basically late night already.

On a totally different but equally curious observation, the bilingual nature of this country baffles me. There are signs everywhere that include both English and French, since both are official languages, presumably due to, for the most part, Quebec. The thing is, signage in Quebec contains no English. Now, I know French is spoken in other places outside of Quebec, but I think it's safe to say that most of the French-speaking areas of the country are in that province, so I don't think it's unreasonable to say that signs outside of Quebec should only be in English. It's unfair to have to contain English and French in the mostly English-speaking areas of the country while the rules don't seem to apply in the predominantly French-speaking areas.

But I digress. Onto the stories.

Drink, drunk, drank

I was feeling a bit sick when I arrived in Burlington, and this wasn't at all helped by the fact that I went golfing with Dave and Shelley a couple of days after I arrived. It was only my second time golfing (the first being at a driving range), and my first at a course. Mind you, this course in Hamilton was not exactly the best course in the world. We played 9 holes, and I shot a 63, which wasn't as bad as I was expecting, especially for my first time. Still, I was feeling quite bad the next day.

The illness receded, only to be replaced with a few consecutive hangovers. The first of these hangovers came when Shelley was in the process of cleaning out her fridge. A bottle of liqueur and some beer were among the items that needed to go, so I gladly obliged in getting rid of them. We watched Live Free or Die Hard at the movies afterwards, which was pretty enjoyable.

The next night, we went to a local pub with some of Shelley's friends and hung out there for the night, with Shelley determined to finish the night early so that she could go mountain biking with her brother the next day (yesterday). This attempt didn't go exactly to plan, as we continued drinking when we got back home, and ended up sleeping at 3 or 4 in the morning. Shelley ended up canceling on her brother as she couldn't get up early enough. When she finally got up, she showed me around Burlington, which isn't really much of an exciting area in terms of tourism.

Yesterday night, instead of sleeping early to get up for our trip to Niagara Falls, we went to a pub for some karaoke. The night was a lot of fun and I didn't have too much to drink, but somehow ended up with a pretty big hangover this morning, although I guess it was mostly from the lack of sleep. We picked up Mira, who was currently staying in Toronto, at the train station, then grabbed some breakfast before heading over to the falls.

It was an overcast day, with some sprinkles of rain, but the weather was still rather humid, and you could certainly feel it. The falls themselves were very cool. It's funny that Canada gets a good view of their falls (Horseshoe Falls) and the USA's falls (American Falls), while the USA barely gets a good view of either. It was a good thing too, because it meant that we didn't have to cross the Rainbow Bridge into the USA and deal with the hassle of going through customs twice just for a view. We ended the day at Niagara Falls by watching the IMAX movie about the myths and legends of the falls.

Harry Potter and the somethingorother

Jenn, Shelley's friend, mentioned to me that the new Harry Potter film comes out on Wednesday, to which I replied that I've never actually seen any of the movies. She immediately recommended that I watch them all so I can watch the new film with them on Wednesday. She lent me all four movies on DVD so that I could catch up before Wednesday comes. So far I've seen two. Two to go.

Photos(hopping)

Finally, I've uploaded the photos from Montreal, and also the photos from Burlington and Niagara Falls. I started messing around with some stuff in Photoshop, so you'll notice a few of the pictures are a bit 'different'. Despite never having done a lot of it before, I like it this way, since it can make otherwise bad photos look rather nice.

Speaking of Photoshopping, I also made a mock postcard for Montreal.