Monday, June 19, 2006

Oh Canada!

Ok, six months have passed and the snow has melted by now, but I have finally got the photos of our trip to Phil's home, Montreal. The shoe-maker's children run barefoot and the photographer's girlfriend has to nag him for months for a copy of their photos.

The following photos were taken by myself (aside from the photos of me, taken by Phil) in Quebec, January/February 2006.

me (duh!):

Pretty sun in the woods:


Phil's family's cabin (an old converted school house) in the middle of nowhere:


The Man:


Phil packing our stash of 10 bags of coffee into zip-lock bags the night before we left for China again... 2.5 kilos of coffee grains must have x-rayed rather suspiciously in customs!

The One-Pin Wonder: me, showing unusual style and grace... moments before I more typically slipped over and landed on my back across two lanes, narrowly missing a bowling ball to the head from the kid in the next lane. We were escaping the cold with some good old competitive sport, and my body regretted it for days... I might be too old for these shennannigans!

A Snow Angel of a different kind, in an old country town cemetry:

And finally documentation of my endless facination with my own foorprints in the snow:

Missing photos
(but you can imagine it just as well):

  • me eating snow;
  • me freaking out when snow flakes landed on my naked eyeballs (Lou: "ARGH! What do I do??!!", Phil: "Just blink you idiot!");
  • me slipping several times on snow, ice or slush and landing on my butt;
  • Phil laughing too hard to take a photo of me slipping and landing on my butt time and time again;
  • me eating snow again when I think Phil's not looking;
  • me as a passenger standing patiently at the left side of the car wondering why Phil is laughing at me instead of letting me in the car, then remembering that they drive on the WRONG side of the road in Canada and I was at the driver's door;
  • me with an icecream brain-freeze after eating snow yet again;
  • me blinking rapidly, mouth agape like a stunned mullet everytime anyone spoke to me in Quebecois;
  • Me going nuts and flipping out completely after hearing the radio announcer declare that it was "fine and -5C... a nice day" ("-5C" and "nice day" do not by any definition belong together);
  • Me generally and continually making a fool of myself.
I hope you enjoyed the visual and mental images!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

...for me it will always be the memory of you going absolutely ape-sh*t screaming at the dashboard of the car (as were driving down an icy lane) screaming at the poor radio anouncer for saying that -5 degrees was a nice day. I mean you gotta agree that -5 and no breeze is better than blistering winds, -30 celcius and getting frostbitten within 3 minutes is MUCH better than a nice day with sun and ONLY!!! -5, no?!

Carbi Yarker said...

Wow, It's so pretty! REAL snow... not like the stuff we get in Bleakheath!! :)

Louise said...

Phil- Comparison, Schmomparison... Sadam is "nice" in comparison with Hitler.

Liz- Yeah it sure beats building a 3 inch high snow man with socks on our hands in "Bleak-Heath"!

Louise said...

It was gorgeous to visit, but I can see it would be rather ridiculous to live in for 6 months of the year: shovelling your car out of the snow just to get to work, watching mums drag prams through ice and slush, having to wrap the children up in so many layers you can no longer tell one child from another... it's exhausting just thinking about it.

But then the snow falls again and everything just looks pretty, and this Aussie forgets about the impracticality of the whole thing...