Hot in the city

Before I get to my short rant about summer, I've uploaded quite a few photos from Toronto, Hamilton, and Québec, so enjoy.

It's been searing hot here in Québec. It hasn't reached ridiculous temperatures, but the humidity has made it quite unpleasant. Even today, when it was cloudy (it's actually just started to rain a few seconds ago), the moment the sun made any appearance, you would just start to broil inside your clothes. The fact that the city is very hilly doesn't help one bit. Walking uphill in 30+ with the humidity amped up are perfect conditions for dehydration.

Accordingly, I haven't been outside of the hostel for more than one hour at a time. I just sweat far too much and, even armed with a full bottle of water, I need some shade and refreshment at regular intervals. It's a nice city and all, but the weather hasn't helped me out in seeing all of it... not that there's a ton to see. In fact, I've probably seen most of what the city has to offer despite the limited time I've had to walk around.

The other reason I haven't done a lot is because of the money situation. I forgot to mention this, but I lost my Canadian bank card in Burlington before leaving, and had to cancel it. This encouraged me to save up some money and only spend what I had left in my wallet until I got a replacement card. I finally decided to get a replacement card on Wednesday (after much confusion, partly due to the language barrier) but figured it would be good to continue the trend, so I kept eating self-prepared food, resisted the urge to join the several pub crawls, and haven't entered any attraction that has an admittance fee. I think I've done pretty well.

To the Maritimes

I've just finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and it was a good read indeed. I really want to read the next book now, but it's not yet out on paperback, so I think I may have to just start reading bits and pieces at bookstores when I get to the Maritimes. I suppose the three other books I've started reading will have to do for the train to Halifax.

I leave for Halifax tomorrow, getting there the day after (as the train takes about 20 hours). I'm sure hoping that the coastal weather at this time of year is a lot more forgiving.

Québec

I haven't actually done a lot in Québec. I got here late on Sunday night, and today I've mostly been recovering from a body-wide soreness that I got as a result of way too much time on the trampoline on Saturday (more on that later). I guess I should give a bit of a recap on what the hell happened between now and a week ago.

Bowling for Burlington

A few of us went bowling on Tuesday, for the most part as a rematch between Shelley and I, stemming from a friendly feud that Shelley had gotten the better part of from our Panorama days. This time, instead of 5-pin bowling, we went with the more traditional 10-pin version. I finally got one up on Shelley (literally) in the first game, winning by one point on the final frame. It was the taste of sweet victory. She beat me on the second game, but that matters not.

Climbing rocks

On Thursday, we went and did some outdoor rock climbing. I hadn't done any outdoor climbing before (all my experiences with rock climbing had been indoors), so I wasn't really expecting to get too far on my first attempt. It turned out to be a lot of fun, albeit a lot of hard work (as is always the case whenever I go climbing after a long period of not doing it). On my second attempt I got more than two thirds of the way up the climb, which is about the point where it got really tricky, so I was satisfied with my achievement.

Dead by dawn

On the Friday night, we were scheduled to watch Evil Dead: The Musical in Toronto. The original plan was to leave at around 6, pick up Janna from Mississauga, and go to the theatre. Sadly, things don't always go to plan. We left at around 6:30, and were left to rue the traffic heading towards Toronto as we slowly made our way there. Thankfully, we were only late by a few minutes. We sat down at our table (each 4 seats had a table, which was neat), and enjoyed the show.

And what a show it was! Having only seen about 4 or 5 musicals in my entire life, I can safely say that this is the best that I have seen. It's a low-budget musical that both satirizes and pays homage to the low-budget cult classic trilogy of the same name in a fittingly cheesy fashion. Everything from the songs to the dialogue to the cheap production values to the excess amounts of fake blood fits so well with the franchise, and it's no surprise that both Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell (of Evil Dead fame) approve of this theatrical interpretation of the Evil Dead. It's really silly and really really fun, and I honestly hope that it gets productions worldwide.

That wasn't the end of the days fun though. There was still the Harry Potter book release. But before that, an unfortunate and very sad incident occurred... upon inserting the Clerks Animated Series DVD's second disc into the DVD player (after we got home from the show), it soon became apparent that the second disc was exactly the same as the first disc, just with different printing on the front (saying 'Disc 2' instead of 'Disc 1'). This quite irritated me, because I hadn't thought to check if the discs were faulty when I first bought it in Banff. I have since gotten rid of the receipt, and obviously it would be more than a hassle to go to Banff just to get it replaced. I'm hoping that any HMV store (or any store that stocks the DVD for that matter) will replace the faulty disc with a proper one.

Friday night also happened to be the night that the seventh and final Harry Potter book was to be released. Chapters, one of the nearby bookstores, was having a midnight release of the book, and Shelley wanted to buy it, so we went and lined up. It was pretty cool, the doors were painted as a brick wall, and when you entered it said "Platform 9 3/4" (a reference to the secret train platform from the series). All the staff were dressed up, as were many of the people lining up for the book. There was much excitement as it got closer to midnight, and huge applause once the book was finally revealed. As an apparent joker was heading out of the store he screamed, pointing at a random page of the book, "OH MY GOD! HARRY DIES!" to much laughter. I bought the paperback of the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, as I am not fully caught up to the whole Potterverse. The lady at the check out looked at me funny and said, "you waited in line for that?"

Golf game and BBQ... OF PAIN!

Saturday was my last day in Burlington, and it was only fitting that it was filled with a lot of activities. I was going on about 4 hours of sleep from the night before, as I had stayed up to pack my bags. The first order of business was golf. The ski club that Shelley, Dave, and Terry belong had organized a golf game and BBQ for the day, and I was invited. It was only my second time golfing, and this time it was on a proper course, which was fairly intimidating. However, it was a social outing, so scores didn't really matter, as long as we had fun, which we did. I shot about 10 over what I got last time, which was pretty good considering the course was slightly more difficult. It's something I want to at least get decent at.

After golf, the BBQ commenced. It was held at Terry's backyard, and the many attendees could enjoy food, badminton, volley ball, and a trampoline. The trampoline was what I picked to be the main source of entertainment. I love bouncing around on them, and Dave had brought along his trampoline board, so I was doing snowboard tricks on it. It was incredibly tiring, but incredibly fun. The day was a long one. We sat down around the fire, drank some beer, did some more trampolining, ran through the cornfields, got bitten by lots of mosquitoes (damn them mozzies), before finally crashing on Terry's couch at around 3 or 4 in the morning.

When I woke up, I wasn't really feeling very sore, as it was around 8 in the morning, and my body had not yet had time to register the muscle pain from the excess trampolining (but I did feel those mozzie bites). It was only after I caught the train towards Québec that I started feeling just how much my body was hurting. It especially sucks when walking down stairs. When I got to the hostel in Québec, all I could think about was getting some food and some rest.

Burlington overview

Days spent: 20
23rd birthdays: 1
Last 9-hole golf score: 73
Theme song(s): Holly Throsby - The Shoulders and Bends

The clueless guide

I met two French guys (actually from France) at the hostel who asked me for some help regarding hostels in New York, which was where they were headed in a few days' time. I helped them out, and they were really friendly and appreciative, so we hung out and toured a bit of the area. I didn't really know a lot about the area, but I seemed to know enough of the immediate area to make them think that I was an expert on the city. I assured them that I only knew what I had seen during my couple of searches for food. If anything, it's a lot more comforting for me to have them around, just in case I run into some language difficulties with said food locations.

I have six more days in Québec, and apparently it's not such a big city, so there's no doubt that I'll have some free time to post new photos within the next week.

The number 23

I was lounging around a lot earlier in the week, enjoying my time doing nothing much at all, so the amount of things I've been doing since last Wednesday has been a bit of a shock to the system.

Toronto

I finally headed into the city on Wednesday, and I actually saw quite a bit of downtown Toronto. The CN Tower proved to be a good way to navigate oneself. The city felt a lot like Melbourne. Lots of streetcars; a fairly relaxed vibe; lots of artsy stuff. After walking around for most of the day, my feet were killing me, so I stopped at Chinatown for some early lunch. I ordered a large of one meal, which turned out to be rather massive indeed. It filled me up enough for a late lunch and early dinner.

I had a rest when I got back home before going out late at night to catch the last screening of (so as to avoid the crowds) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for opening day. It was a pretty good movie, and kind of makes me want to read book six and the soon-to-be-released final book of the series.

"You don't have to be a sailor to be part of the crew"

That Illawarra Yacht Club slogan was stuck in my head after we went sailing in Lake Ontario on Thursday. Terry, Shelley's friend who I met a few times in Panorama, was a member of the sailing club, so we didn't have to pay to go. We went on a boat that was about big enough to fit six people comfortably. I hadn't gone sailing before, and it's actually on my list of things to do, so it was a pretty cool experience. It was made even more exciting when some storm clouds in the far distance came roaring in, causing a short storm, but one long enough to get us soaked as we pulled into the harbour.

Friday the 13th

It was the day of my birthday party, so naturally it was the day people decided to pull out. In the end, only Shelley, Shane (Shelley's friend) and I went out to celebrate. Despite the low amount of people, we still had a high amount of fun. We first stopped off for dinner at a place called the Rhino, whereupon I had some tasty and relatively affordable steak (as it is the birthday tradition to have some steak). Afterwards, we went to the Gladstone to do some karaoke. We spent the rest of the night there, drinking and singing along to a lot of songs. Shane was nice enough to let us crash at his place for the night.

Dark side of the moon

The reason I didn't have my birthday celebration on the day of my actual birthday was that I had previously bought tickets to see Roger Waters in Toronto on the final show of his Dark Side of the Moon 2007 tour. The show was, as most shows usually are, at night, so I had all day to spend in the city. Before the 1 o'clock check-in at the nearest hostel to the Rogers Centre (where the concert was to be), I wasted a bit of time watching Transformers at the movies.

Being a Transformers fan of old, I did like the movie despite its shortcomings. I admit that I was wrong when I thought the robots looked stupid, although I still stand by my original statement in the case of Starscream, who looked stupid in robot form. My main gripe with the movie was that it focused way too much on the humans and not enough on the Transformers. In fact, the character development for the Autobots was minimal, and the Decepticons was almost non-existent, making them very one-dimensional. And I still don't understand why all of Michael Bay's action movies have to have a romance sub-plot. It was totally unnecessary. On a positive note, Bumblebee not being a Volkswagen Beetle didn't bother me as much as I thought it would have.

I walked back (in the rain, as the skies had opened up during the movie) to the hostel and took some time to have a rest. When I woke up, I went to a ticket office close to the CN Tower to get some tickets to We Will Rock You (the Queen musical that I first saw back in London) for today. However, upon arriving there, I found out that they were close, so I had to walk to the actual theatre at which the show was playing to get some tickets. I was in a bit of a rush since I thought that the Roger Waters concert started at 7.

It turned out that it started at 8, so I got there pretty early. Still, you could tell that the concert was on that night due to the almost excessive amount of people walking around wearing Pink Floyd shirts. I noticed it even as I was walking to get the We Will Rock You tickets. When I got there, the stadium still had a lot of empty seats, but that all changed when Roger Waters and his band took the stage.

They started off playing In The Flesh to thunderous applause, and went on to play Pink Floyd and Roger Waters singles before taking a short break then playing the Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. The light show throughout the entire concert was spectacular, but particularly so during the Dark Side of the Moon set. The light show and the accompanying video was a lot like what I had seen in the P.U.L.S.E. DVD, but modernized quite a bit. The best bit was at the end, when a prism appeared atop the stage. There was one bright white light shining from one end, and coming out of the opposite end were several lights in the colours of the light spectrum, so that the prism resembled a 3D version of the cover of the Dark Side of the Moon.

The prism rotated, shining the lights around the stadium, and kept doing so during the five-minute encore break, in which the applause did not let up one iota. The lights went down, and the band took the stage for the last time in the world tour to play Another Brick in the Wall, Vera, and Comfortably Numb. The crowd once again held their applause after the final song, but the lights went on, signaling the end of the show. However, I don't think anybody left the stadium unsatisfied, as it was a great concert indeed.

Dead cities

I left the hostel before check-out time and headed over to the cinema to see another movie and waste some time before seeing We Will Rock You, but the cinema wasn't open yet, which was surprising because it was 10:30. I knew it was Sunday, but it was still a bit annoying to have very little open. The city was pretty much a ghost town, with few people walking around and fewer cars on the road. I'm used to big cities in Australia, where Sunday would regularly be a busy shopping day with plenty of people out by 10. Instead, I read a bit of Coraline, Neil Gaiman's short novel, which I had bought after seeing Transformers yesterday.

When the stores finally opened, I played a bit of Lost Planet at EB and did a bit of reading at the bookstore before meeting up with Shelley for the show. We Will Rock You was as good as I remembered it, with the script being localized to appeal to the Toronto audience, and updated to include a few subtle changes in dialogue, such as reference to Britney Spears' shaven head. I must say that I liked the English version better, but only because I got more of the pop culture references in that one.

I'm not back at the house, and looking forward to having a breather after such a full second half of the week. The Internet situation sucks at the moment, so unfortunately there are no new photos online.

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.

Burlington

I'm now out of the French-speaking part of Canada, and am currently staying at Burlington, Ontario, which is just south of Toronto. Haven't really done a whole lot here so far, but I'm sure there'll be things to do soon enough.

Infected Mushroom

There was some kind of drum festival at Mont Royal, so Shelley and I checked it out in the afternoon. Unfortunately, the weather decided to be uncooperative, and rain was falling on us intermittently on our way to the mountain that is Montréal's namesake. We got there and didn't have to look too far to hear the sound of many drums beating away. We found a congregation of people either drumming, dancing, or enjoying the spectacle. We didn't stay too long as we feared the weather would start to hassle us again. For the same reason, we didn't stick around at the Jazz Festival, where we watched a short snippet of a couple of acts.

After dinner, it was time for one final deeply intellectual conversation with some of the fellow guests (oddly enough, ending with the mention of Snakes on a Plane), as well as one final jam session, before a few of us headed over to watch Infected Mushroom play a gig downtown. The show was great, but the timing sucked. Doors opened at 10, but Infected Mushroom didn't get on stage until about 1, finishing at around 3 (with no encore). This meant that we'd get less sleep than we would have liked before heading over to Burlington the next day.

Montréal overview

Days spent: 8
Bedbug outbreaks: 1
Money spent: More than anticipated
Theme song/s: Infusion - What Lies Ahead

Odd traffic patterns

It wasn't too bad getting out of Montréal late in the morning of the day after Canada Day, but after being a couple of hours into Ontario, we encountered a bit of congestion. The first sign of the business was actually inside a Wendy's at a highway rest stop, where the queue to get food cascaded back like a line in Disneyland. It was a similar sight in the next rest stop where we stopped (since the Wendy's line was far too long for us to bother), except that this time it was for Tim Horton's and the female washrooms.

After escaping the human queues, we progressed a bit before running into more queues, of the vehicular kind. What struck me as quite odd about these traffic tailbacks were that they didn't seem to accompany any particular roadwork or accident on the road. I guess it was just congestion due to the sheer volume of cars heading in the same direction. The jams eventually relaxed as the number of lanes increased, and traffic was flowing smoothly once we reached Toronto. We eventually made it back to Shelley's place at around 7:30 in the evening.

Sadly, I haven't uploaded any new photos, since I can only get a faint wireless connection at the moment.

Canada Day

Previously on Adrian's adventure, he was very irritated at disruptions to the hostel he was staying at. He was in the process of changing his plan amidst this development. And now, the conclusion...

Fumigation

A couple of staff members at the hostel seemed to be as set on kicking out a certain guest as they were on getting rid of these bedbugs. Now, I don't want to get into specifics about this conflict, but all I'll say is that I could see both sides of the story, so neither party was "in the wrong". However, one certain staff member seemed adamant on this guest leaving, and was a bit rude about handling the situation, which just made things worse. There was a huge argument about it, the police were called (though they didn't do anything), and in the end made for quite a spectacle.

The next day, they were fumigating once again, so I didn't end up doing a whole lot until the end of the day, when a few of us went to check out the first evening of the Jazz Festival. It was nice and relaxed until the first major outdoor act of the festival, when crowds filled up the main area to critical mass. I wasn't really a big fan of the type of music the band was playing, so I avoided the crowd and went to an outlying stage, where I watched a blues guitarist play a set that was much more to my liking. We were all separated by the end of the night, and met up again back at the hostel well before the night's festivities were over, as we were all fairly tired.

Circuit Gilles Villeneuve

I finally ended up inline skating around Canada's world championship F1 track, Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, which was on a little island, accessible via bike paths. I found somebody in the hostel to venture out to the island with me, and it took just over 2 hours to get to the track, go around once, and get back. Alas, the rental company charge by full hours, so we ended up just cruising along the pier before returning the skates. By this point our legs and feet were burning up, so we retired back to the hostel for some relaxation.

The relaxation turned into quiet beer drinking, which turned into "let's all go out to a club tonight". At this point, Shelley had finally made it through the traffic-congested highway from Toronto and arrived in the city. After drinking several more beers, we headed out to a nearby pub, and then wherever the night took us. I actually don't know where the night took us, I just went with people, and we all eventually got split up into really tiny little groups.

It wasn't so bad yesterday - we managed to stick together in the most part. I didn't do a lot yesterday. I got up with a huge hangover from the night before, got some greasy food from the Vietnamese restaurant I've been frequenting, and went back to bed until about 5 in the afternoon. After that, there was a nice little jam session outside in the courtyard, at which point we started drinking again, then headed out to celebrate the birthday of Laurel, one of the guests at the hostel. We hung out at the busy Crescent St. for the whole night, and didn't get back home until about 3 or 4.

Consequently, I'm now too hungover to start celebrating Canada Day until much later. I need some more greasy food before doing anything productive. I'll probably get some tickets to see Infected Mushroom tonight, and check out some other stuff... but apart from that, there's not a lot planned until late in the day.

Oh, and no photos uploaded yet. Too lazy.