Eastern Canada

On the morning of New Year's Eve, after staying up all night packing and hanging out with Will and Courtney, I lugged my belongings through the snow to catch a cab to the shuttle to the airport. I watched several movies with America as the villain and didn't sleep at all, which means that I was going off of about 50 hours without sleep as I landed at the stroke of the new year in St. Johns, Newfoundland, at the extreme Eastern end of Canada (it was pretty cool to see fireworks across the city as we were landing). I then proceeded to go to a party for a few hours with Alanna to ring in 2010.

Over almost three weeks we saw a number of beautiful capes with amazing waves, some WWII era bunkers protecting the St. Johns harbor, played a bunch of boardgames, met up with Real Lindsay and Thomas who we'd worked with in Korea, and generally decompressed from our intense teaching schedules. We also worked on the pre-course homework for the Teaching English as a Foreign Language certification class that we had signed up for in Montreal. The plan was that we would spend February and March in Montreal doing the course then buy a car and make a journey across Canada then down the Left Coast to Portland in time for Renn Fayre. Suffice it to say that this didn't occur.

Instead I boarded the plane to meet our friend Mad and Jeff in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Alanna did not do so. Mad and Jeff thought I was joking when I said that I came by myself. Good times.

I toured the area around Nova Scotia with Mad and Jeff and some of their friends in the area. We saw a dance recital of one of their friends as well as an awesome play about Leni Riefenstahl, the film director for the Third Reich. It's awesome when art you go to because you know someone in it (or in this case the people I was staying with knew someone involved with each show) is actually really good.

We took a trip out to Peggy's cove, a pretty spot where the lighthouse bears this sign:


Note that most of the rest of the pictures involve us clambering over snow-covered boulders and generally ignoring that sign.

On the way back we stopped by a town with some picturesque old houses and churches and an awesome old (but still functioning) elementary school on a hill with a cemetery. Thus I have now officially been in Canada by the Eurasian Hobos standard:


I spent quite a bit of my time planning where I would go from there. I was in the enviable position of having the means and will to go anywhere in the world I wanted. I considered going to South America, particularly to see Machu Picchu, but I decided that if I was going to travel to a foreign country with no time for planning I should go somewhere where I speak the language and where I didn't need to decide which type of malaria medicine to get. This turns out to be a wise decision since a few days after I would have arrived there was massive flooding in Peru and all of the tourists at Machu Picchu had to be rescued by helicopter. I missed out on a great anecdote, but it's probably for the best.

Instead I bought the Lonely Planet guides to Iceland and Britain (amusingly, LP has guides of about equal size for Europe, the United Kingdom, Britain, England, and London) as well as some other gear I would need, like new boots and fleece lined mittens. Jeff and I went out to field test my new stuff by going camping. In Northeastern Canada. In January. Yeah, that sounds like me. We spent most of our time there finding, breaking up, and burning firewood. It was pretty fun, actually, though also cold enough that I was inspired to go out and also buy socks rated better than -40 degrees Celsius. (These socks are so thick that walking in them on sharp rocks feels like walking on thick fuzzy carpet. )

Having made my preparations, and having felt like I'd imposed enough upon Mad and Jeff's parents, I departed for Iceland (which, by the way, was not nearly as cold).