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c9I love Canada Day. Always have. I spent ages 10-19 in Ottawa, which is truly the only place to be on Canada Day. Everywhere else I've been has always paled in my mind. The city has hundreds of thousands of people downtown. They close all the downtown core (about a 10-15 minute walk to cross it) and everyone can wander. There are low-quality tshirts being hawked at tourists, face painters, clowns, events everywhere, and a huge fireworks display. And everyone's smiling. The intense, universal joy is so rare in life (think Pride Day in a big city, or during a wedding reception when you're close to the couple, that sort of thing). I was saying to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
leapfish yesterday that I've sort of resigned myself to not enjoying Canada Day to a certain extent, because it's just not Canada Day to me without all that.
In Kitchener, Canada Day is... subdued. In tne entire city of Kitchener, the only event listed on the City's website was a firefighters' competition a couple blocks from our place. The sister city of Waterloo gets the Canada Day celebrations, over at the University of Waterloo. As near as I could figure, it's only just barely a civic event and more of a university-funded and -organized event. In our neighbourhood there was nothing. No flags evident, no honking horns (except for Portugal's World Cup win), and just the same blah Kitchener always seems to have. This gets me pretty down as the day wears on and I fully grasp that the fun isn't going to suddenly appear.
But yesterday turned out fun, in a low-key and very different from what I'm used to kind of way.
On Friday I went to see KWLT's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in St Jacob's, and I biked there and back. I didn't realize how long the show was: 20:10 --> 23:38, including two 15-minute intermissions. Kudoes to the cast -- just four people having conversations on a set stage for the whole period. I got home rather late, at 00:30, and was really tired. I haven't biked 26 km in over a year. We slept in, and I was exhausted in the morning. We sat around, then headed for the Kitchener Farmer's Market as we do on Saturdays to get our groceries.
We bought all sorts of things, but the primary purchase seems to have been peas. It was $3 for not very many peas, so we bought a flat for $23. Turns out this was maybe too many peas. We spent at least two solid hours shelling them, and ended up with almost six tupperware containers full. Anybody want some organic fresh peas? PLEASE?
We went to Ye's Sushi for lunch, the new all-you-can-eat sushi place that opened just around the corner from us. Two sushi restaurants opened since we moved into the neighbourhood. Did our reputation from Halifax precede us or something? Yummy and ate too much, as always. Their ordering system has a few bugs. Little pieces of paper with numbers written on them seems fool-proof, but I guess someone went and built a better fool, as they say.
leapfish made his famous hummus, and we took the bus with various crazies over to Steve & Kevin's townhouse. The crazies were going elsewhere, luckily. Sat around, chatted, ate, played a game of Scrabble as notable for its creative approach to spelling as it was for its dirty angle. Still more people showed up, and an actual party broke out! It was a sit around and chat party for sure, but still. Met many new people, some of which I could even handle as friends. We played an amusing game I like to call "go back inside because it started raining again, only once we're inside the rain will stop again." It's not a very catchy name.
We had BBQ, ate Canada-Day decorated cake, and listened to the neighbours all around setting off fireworks (poorly). High townhouses and hedges made most of them invisible, so that was a bit different. Very relaxing night. We finally walked home (35 mins) at 1. Collapsed into bed pretty quick.
So that was my Canada Day. I spent yesterday morning gathering Canada-themed usericons just so I could post all sorts of Canada Day things, and I ended up not posting the whole day. Oh well.
I think I do need an Ottawa Canada Day again though. So my current plan is for us to be in Ottawa for Canada Day 2007. Anybody want to come? Let's have a fun day of soaking in the festivities!
leapfish yesterday that I've sort of resigned myself to not enjoying Canada Day to a certain extent, because it's just not Canada Day to me without all that.In Kitchener, Canada Day is... subdued. In tne entire city of Kitchener, the only event listed on the City's website was a firefighters' competition a couple blocks from our place. The sister city of Waterloo gets the Canada Day celebrations, over at the University of Waterloo. As near as I could figure, it's only just barely a civic event and more of a university-funded and -organized event. In our neighbourhood there was nothing. No flags evident, no honking horns (except for Portugal's World Cup win), and just the same blah Kitchener always seems to have. This gets me pretty down as the day wears on and I fully grasp that the fun isn't going to suddenly appear.
But yesterday turned out fun, in a low-key and very different from what I'm used to kind of way.
On Friday I went to see KWLT's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in St Jacob's, and I biked there and back. I didn't realize how long the show was: 20:10 --> 23:38, including two 15-minute intermissions. Kudoes to the cast -- just four people having conversations on a set stage for the whole period. I got home rather late, at 00:30, and was really tired. I haven't biked 26 km in over a year. We slept in, and I was exhausted in the morning. We sat around, then headed for the Kitchener Farmer's Market as we do on Saturdays to get our groceries.
We bought all sorts of things, but the primary purchase seems to have been peas. It was $3 for not very many peas, so we bought a flat for $23. Turns out this was maybe too many peas. We spent at least two solid hours shelling them, and ended up with almost six tupperware containers full. Anybody want some organic fresh peas? PLEASE?
We went to Ye's Sushi for lunch, the new all-you-can-eat sushi place that opened just around the corner from us. Two sushi restaurants opened since we moved into the neighbourhood. Did our reputation from Halifax precede us or something? Yummy and ate too much, as always. Their ordering system has a few bugs. Little pieces of paper with numbers written on them seems fool-proof, but I guess someone went and built a better fool, as they say.
leapfish made his famous hummus, and we took the bus with various crazies over to Steve & Kevin's townhouse. The crazies were going elsewhere, luckily. Sat around, chatted, ate, played a game of Scrabble as notable for its creative approach to spelling as it was for its dirty angle. Still more people showed up, and an actual party broke out! It was a sit around and chat party for sure, but still. Met many new people, some of which I could even handle as friends. We played an amusing game I like to call "go back inside because it started raining again, only once we're inside the rain will stop again." It's not a very catchy name.We had BBQ, ate Canada-Day decorated cake, and listened to the neighbours all around setting off fireworks (poorly). High townhouses and hedges made most of them invisible, so that was a bit different. Very relaxing night. We finally walked home (35 mins) at 1. Collapsed into bed pretty quick.
So that was my Canada Day. I spent yesterday morning gathering Canada-themed usericons just so I could post all sorts of Canada Day things, and I ended up not posting the whole day. Oh well.
I think I do need an Ottawa Canada Day again though. So my current plan is for us to be in Ottawa for Canada Day 2007. Anybody want to come? Let's have a fun day of soaking in the festivities!
