Cats and dogs

When I first arrived in Halifax, just over a month ago, I was welcomed by gloomy weather. This weather soon cleared, but the rain had returned when I came back from St. John's, this time with a vengeance. After a few more clear days, the commencement of the Salty Bear tour, in which I partook, was met with precipitation and fog. Again, the weather got better after a few days, and all was good. Finally, on my last night, threatening to mark my departure in the same fashion as it had welcomed me, the weather above Halifax became a raging beast, the sky opening up to give free reign to downpour. However, as bad as it looked the previous day, the clouds parted the next morning to give way to just a little bit of sunshine, and I left Halifax, on the train, happy to be quite dry. This pattern of weather is a simple yet fitting allegory on the events of the past month of my travels - a whirlwind of emotions and decisions that ultimately had a happy ending.

Looking back, I now know that my time in the Maritimes was one of the most important periods of my trip, perhaps influencing me as much as my 4-and-a-half months in Panorama. It started off, much like the weather on that first day, as a pretty standard disappointment. I won't lie, I had this really romanticized image of Nova Scotia in my mind (I'm not quite sure where I got this idea). I thought it was going to be this place where I could just walk in, get to know everybody instantly, and have a great month as a local. It wasn't so, at least not straight away. I did make some good (and possibly lifelong) friends at the beginning, but when I walked around the Halifax (when the sun finally came out), I didn't really find anything too remarkable - nothing that really made the city (and indeed, in my mind, the whole Maritime region) stand out. Ironically, it was precisely this reason that I ended up loving Halifax. It's not really a city to go sightseeing - most of the 'tourist attractions' can probably be seen in a day. It's more of a place where you can hang out and just enjoy life.

One of my previous posts talked about first impressions, and how mine always seem to suck. I didn't elaborate on that at the time, due to technical difficulties, but what I was trying to say was that I always seem to jump to conclusions a bit too early about things and places, and my first impression hardly ever seems to stick. I was at St. John's at the time I wrote that passage, and that was probably the turning point of the whole month. I had arrived there, thinking just about the same way as I did when I got to Halifax - "what a boring city." By the time I left, of course, I was (happily) proved wrong. The revelation I had in St. John's was finally remembering the real reason why I was traveling around in the first place - to see the world. Not just see the sights (although I do love taking photos), but truly experience places by sharing tales with locals and travelers alike, and by reveling in those little differences that make places unique.

Despite the soaking I received (and subsequent drying that I had to go through) from the heavy rain on my last night out, I left Halifax on a good note, and the slight hint of heat telling me that the sun was about to break the clouds told me that it's all going to be okay. A funny thing I noticed was that I didn't really take a lot of photos of Halifax. I took plenty of photos at a lot of the other places that I went to in the past month, certainly, but only a few of Halifax itself. Although, I suppose that, by now, the image of the city is so ingrained into my mind that, to misquote Dallas Green of Alexisonfire, "I hardly took any pictures cause I know I'll just be right back."

A slight aside: In another crazy rendition of the whole six degrees of separation thing, I randomly ran into a couple of people who worked at Panorama last winter, and who lived/worked with Shaun (of ski school and jam night fame). They were hanging out with Amy and her friends from work, whom I met up with for drinks to mark my last night in Halifax.

Anti-Pocky

To counter my deep and meaningful exposition seen above, I will end this post with a bit of a pointless complaint. Pocky. Yes, those lovely little bread sticks with the chocolate covered ends. They're absolutely delicious and, upon seeing them in an aisle at the supermarket, I was giggling like a little schoolgirl (well, not really, but I was pretty excited). I promptly picked up a packet to have as minor sustenance for my long train ride to Toronto, but was quite annoyed to find that the packaging of the Pocky sticks proved to be quite contrary to its purpose. You see, the beauty of Pocky, apart from its taste, was that you could theoretically eat all the sticks and you wouldn't get any dirty fingers. However, the packaging was such that all the sticks were packed really close together, with the chocolate making them stick (pardon the pun) together under certain temperatures, so that whenever you tried to remove any individual stick from the packet, it would break apart at the end that had no chocolate coating, leaving a huge set of chocolate-covered Pocky sticks, all stuck together, without any 'clean' ends. In short, you'd get chocolate on your fingers when you try to eat them. Hence, Anti-Pocky.