The first week of our vacation is already over, so it’s about time I’ll check in here. I’ve been online almost every evening for a few minutes, but mostly just to read my mails, check the weather forecasts and some details for next day’s trip, read some blogs and such.
We’re having such an amazing time in “the new world”. I have to admit, I was pretty much underwhelmed by Montreal. Maybe it was the jetlag and the nasty weather (rain and max 15°C, one of my first souvenirs was a knitted hat!), but I had expected something more like Toronto. Montreal didn’t feel like a big city to us. Maybe we were just not hanging out in the right places? The Centre Bell, the hockey arena of the Montreal Canadiens was impressive though. We didn’t manage to do a tour of the building, but we did visit their hockey hall of fame, spend some time in the amazing fanshop and most of all outside on the plaza. Such a cool place for a hockey fan.
Ville de Quebec was our next stop and it was such a contrast to Montreal. Beautiful city, with a lot of historic sites and it all really felt like one city. And the weather was wonderful most of the time, which was a big plus. It was raining when we were heading to New Brunswick on the next morning, but the sight of the beginning foliage on the side of the roads made up for it. In Frederiction we also finally found a bookstore at a mall, where I could by “The Exile”, the first graphic novel from the Outlander series. I actually liked this new addition to the story a lot, but it felt a bit weird to “read” a graphic novel. Well, there’s a first time for everything, I guess…
We spend the next two days on Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton, where we followed the Cabot trail. The weather was unbelievably marvelous these days. sunny and 25 – 29 °C. I was not prepared for temperatures like these. Remember the knitted hat I mentioned above? But it also was very windy, so the temperatures didn’t bother me that much. On Prince Edward Island we visited “Green Gables” of course. I loved those books when I was a kid, ever since I first got to know Anne via the TV mini series. Of course I had to buy the complete book series in English and now at least I can read book 7 and 8 of this series, which never were translated into German. There was not a lot of fall foliage visible on Cape Breton yet, but maybe that was just as well, because the view of the magnificent wild coast was quite impressive all by itself. It might have been too much to handle for our minds, had there also been a vast amount of fall colours :-) Seriously, the views on this trip were so awesome so far, I’m afraid there might not be enough storage on my mental harddrive at the end of next week :-)
What more is there to say? The Canadian people we have met so far were incredibly nice and helpful and just lovely. I like the amount of icehockey on Canadian TV :-) I’m not even watching at the TV right now but it’s on, showing some college hockey and I just love the sound of it in the background. Talking about college, we are in Antigonish, New Brunswick at the moment and St. Xavier University is not just a beautiful campus, but also has quite the commited cheering fanbase at their various sports events this weekend. We are not used to events and atmosphere like that from German universities, so this is quite the experience.
I watched Grey’s 7.01 on my netbook on the flight last week and 7.02 with my friends on TV last night. It’s really strange to watch Grey’s the moment it’s actually broadcasted :-). I liked both episodes quite ok, but I was disappointed with the lack of real MerDer moments in yesterday’s episode. There would have been a lot of issues they could have actually talked about and all we got was a hug? I like the Meredith/Cristina friendship, so I didn’t mind that their story got a lot of screentime, but I still would have liked an equal amount of screentime for Meredith and Derek. Especially Derek. Even though his hair still sucks :-)
We’re off to Hopewell Rocks and Saint John tomorrow and after that we’ll enter the USA and I’m really looking forward to all the beauty and sights of the New England states. It’s a bit sad, that we will miss the Dempsey challenge by two days, but there was no way we could have squeezed that into our trip.