date night in Charlottetown

although we spent most of the day shooting the newest Scary Bear film on the beach, in the evening rob and i decided to have a romantic night in Charlottetown, doing our favourite activity, dinner and a show. we had dinner at Sims Corner Steakhouse and Oysterbar, where rob and i managed to drop almost the same amount of money as we did in Quebec City. the place was expensive but delicious. Rob likes to play food critic when we travel. he was pretty impressed with what we were served, although my chicken cordon bleu was technically not a chicken cordon bleu, since they replaced my ham with bacon....but who complains about accidental bacon?


i ordered ONE oyster, just to have a taste. i don't normally eat oysters, but this one was doused in cream and bacon, so how could i say no to that?


that's a lot of meat. rob ordered the steak, which was beef raised locally on the Island.

afterwards we went to Baba's Lounge to see a couple of bands playing, including Toronto's Andy Swan, and local bands Racoon Bandit and the Drea McDonald Band. It was a cute venue, a small attic nestled on top of a restaurant right on University. i enjoyed the music, although i wish everything started up a bit earlier - the music didn't begin until 11PM and the main act didn't come on until after midnight. but it was a Friday night - maybe Islanders party later. it's not like i don't get ten hours of sleep a night plus a daily siesta.

the dead seal is still lying on the beach...

Canada Day 2010

yesterday we spent Canada Day in the birthplace of Confederation (as folks round here call it).


Charlottetown's Province House, location of one of the first Conferences for the founding of our country.


John A. was totally up for celebrating with me.

During the day, Rob and I wandered in and out of several Charlottetown bars, watching the entire population of the Island slowly make their way into town. we passed the time drinking local beers, counting visible minorities, and eating overwhelming portions of PEI specialty foods.


Seafood chowder! Potato skins!

I like Charlottetown. The downtown core is really small, and you can easily cover it on foot in a short period of time, but there still were a lot of interesting unique shops (like the vintage & vinyl store - what a genius idea), and the harbour is as pretty as, well, a picture.





the whole area just has this cosy and friendly feel to it. i sneezed, and a man standing a block away from me said "bless you". i wondered out loud about how to pay for parking, and a woman who happened to hear us told us we didn't have to. the local newspaper sends off their local indie bands leaving to go on tour with the same well wishes that a mother would give her kids. that's just nice.

the support for the small but surpisingly talented music scene was especially evident when we saw Paper Lions performing as part of Summerfest in Confederation Landing Park near the wharf. I've heard Paper Lions a few times on CBC Radio 3 before, but as a PEI band, there was something particularly special about seeing a band play in its hometown with the support of their friends and families, on a gigantic stage during a primetime spot that no Toronto band of equal fame would be given in its hometown.



I was impressed by their performance overall. they definitely knew how to put on a show. they had an extended drum solo featuring the drummer playing with his bare hands then slowly adding drumsticks until he was playing with four sticks. he later on played a conga solo that almost, almost rivaled my own percussionist Brian's performance during our Mock Trial show. in the middle of their song Sheriff, they broke into an impressive four-part rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, which is not an easy song to cover.

then they announced that Anne of Green Gables would sing the national anthem. i thought they were joking.



they were not.

it was a surreal but moving moment. a fat guy with very hairy arms wrapped his arms around me, singing "don't be a stranger in my place" (he was still singing a Paper Lions song), the Japanese tourists apparently knew all the words to our anthem, and folks switched to the French version at the appropriate moment with no hesitation. but most importantly, freakin' Anne Shirley was singing the national anthem.



fireworks followed, synched up with music, all of which were, for some reason, songs by British bands. we didn't have the best view for the fireworks, since trees partly blocked our sight (this wouldn't have been a problem in Toronto, since they cut down the trees downtown in security preparation for the G20). Even so, it was still impressive - supposedly the second biggest fireworks display in Canada (you can guess where Number 1 was).

afterwards, there was the biggest crowd that i'm sure Charlottetown ever sees, all year round.

gloria of green gables

some men from the government came about the dead seal yesterday. they pulled up in a car full of stuffed owls and bald eagles and blue jays and ducks, props they had been using for a talk they had just given at a summer camp. they came and looked at the dead bloated body on the beach and realized that the 300-pound thing was not going to fit into their little car full of endangered species, even if the seal was headless and tail-less.



yesterday rob and i went for a long drive around the island, taking what our map labeled as the Blue Heron Coastal Trail. this route took us all around the central part of the island, through Brackley, Rustico, Cavendish, Malpeque, Kensington, Summerside, Cape Traverse, and back to Cumberland again.


Port-La-Joye/Fort Amherst, where you can learn about all the things that aren't there anymore, namely Mikmac Aboriginals, Acadians, and the fort.


Lobster boats.




Summerside

obviously along our route, we had to stop at Green Gables. because, as my friends from other parts of the east coast point out, what else is there to do in Prince Edward Island?



Personally, i've never really understood the point of visiting Green Gables, despite everyone's enthusiasm for it (including my grandfather's). First of all, Anne of Green Gables is a fictional character, so it's not like you can say "This is the spot where she used to sit and dream about what it would be like not to be red-headed." Second of all, Avonlea is a fictional town, so it's not like you can go to the spot and say "This is where Anne would have dreamed about puffy sleeves, if she really existed." Third of all, while Green Gables did really exist, L.M. Montgomery has herself said that when writing about it in her books, she did not stick to facts at all. So. my educational background in cultural studies questions the authenticity in paying eight dollars to visit Green Gables. However. Anne of Green Gables is one of the biggest hits to happen to PEI, so who am i to deny them their tourism?


For example, this would have been Anne's room, if she existed, if Avonlea existed, and if Green Gables was like this.


sometimes i wonder if the tour guides here wonder the same questions as me.






It was still pretty cool to visualize how the setting would have looked like in the book, and the whole area was a lovely place. i was a little disappointed that there weren't any hordes of Japanese tourists that usually hang around Green Gables. Green Gables seemed incomplete

later on, Rob and i stopped at a Cavendish boardwalk and had fish & chips with clam chowder for lunch. seeing how PEI is an ocean island whose main export is potatoes, the fish and chips seemed like the way to go.

by evening time, i could no longer resist my craving for ice cream, so we stopped at Cows Creamery, native to PEI (although my first Cows experience was actually in Nova Scotia). There was a lot of giggling at the t-shirts. rob and i realized that we had forgotten our six year anniversary last week, so we congratulated each other with celebratory ice cream cones.

day 1 in prince edward island

i woke up yesterday morning to the sounds of cockatiels musically imitating my cough, the ocean gently lapping against a carcass on the red dirt shores, and the grunts of alpacas grazing on the front lawn. the cottage here seems like it comes out of another world. so much ocean. so much red dirt. and rob's parents' herd of alpacas who just hang out chewing the grass in the field all day. PEI life seems pretty relaxing in general, but i think the alpacas have it best.



we took the alpacas for a hike so i could explore the area, stepping carefully to avoid the slugs lying on the grass after the rain.


this alpaca was not a big fan of Rob.


I, on the other hand, had a special moment with this one.

i found myself interested in the daily concerns of cottage life, which were not too different from back home. Rob's dad showed us the skunk holes that had been filled up but the new holes where a weasel had moved in. The neighbour mentioned how something had killed the fox that the alpacas like to play with, probably a coyote. one problem in particular caught our interest: the big dead seal that had washed up on shore.


that's a pretty big problem....

it's going to be interesting, figuring out how to get rid of it...



in the late afternoon, it was low tide so rob and i went walking along the red sandbars, trying to avoid stepping on the washed up jellyfish (which i have been culturally trained to view as delicious) and the snails (also culturally delicious to a Korean) while trying to throw the dried-up crabs back into the ocean to save them. we were fascinated by the shallow pools formed around the beached seaweed, where hermit crabs and little nymphs like to hide and play and fight, like a natural mini-aquarium. rob and i spent some time throwing the red clay rocks down the cliffs and watching them explode into tiny pieces. when i was little, growing up in rural upstate New York, my sister and i used to play on the dirt hills around our house, smashing rocks against other rocks, where we developed the idea that if you threw a rock and it broke, then it wasn't a real rock. following my childhood rule, none of the rocks here in PEI are real rocks.


low tide.

near Charlottetown we saw a car with a very simple license plate number: 2. i kind of like the pace of the island here. Rob's dad told us how when he was younger here, they erected a streetlamp in Charlottetown which was the first streetlamp in Prince Edward Island, and folks drive in from all over the Island to "try out" the new streetlamp. There's similar excitement going on around here with the new roundabouts that they're installing in Charlottetown. to ensure that people learn how to navigate the roundabout properly, they've set up a fake roundabout in a mall parking lot nearby so people can practice driving through a roundabout, and folks drove in from all over to try it out.

despite being smaller than St. John's, Charlottetown is not as small as you'd think, though. i found a Korean grocery store here, and expect to hit it up sometime in case i get a kimchi ramen noodle craving in the middle of the night.

in the evening, rob and i went to a drive-in movie theatre near Brackley Beach, which we haven't done since we went to that one in Perth a few years ago. the movies we saw (Knight and Day, the A Team) were kind of awful, but awful in a fun way, probably because we were watching them in a car, spilling popcorn on the seats while wrapped up in sleeping bags, kind of like the way our grandparents used to. well, maybe not my grandparents because they were living in pre-industrialized Korea, but someone's grandparents.



today, today we try to get rid of the seal.

road trip, first stop: Quebec City

our first stop on our road trip across Eastern Canada was Quebec City. I suppose our reasoning was that we wanted to get as far away from the chaos of Toronto's G20 as we could, so why not go to the last place the G20 summit was held in Canada? Quebec City was every bit as lovely as the last time i'd seen it. we only had one night to enjoy the city though, so we had to do an express touring of Quebec, distilled to its best things - mainly, walking around the old city and eating yummy carnivorous French food.


Quebec City is really old

people always talk about how Quebec City is great because it's so old and European. I myself never really understood why any European tourist would come to Quebec City to experience Canada. It kind of strikes me as being similar to Chinese people coming to Toronto and hanging out in Chinatown. Yes, there are similarities but I'm sure every European visitor can't shake off the feeling that something is a little off, a little weirder than home. maybe it's the lack of North African vendors selling delicious ethnic food on the streets; maybe it's the way the streets are clean, too clean, except for the VIVE LE QUEBEC LIBRE graffiti scrawled on random stone walls. despite all this though, Quebec City certainly is Canada's most European city and certainly is a lot cheaper to visit if you don't have the money to hop a plane to France.

our favourite part, however, was the food, of course. especially since rob is a French-trained cook.


Quebec: Good at food...okay at wine.

we ate dinner at Aux Anciens Canadiens, a restaurant at the heart of Vieux-Quebec and obviously popular with tourists, given their tourist-rate prices. despite their staggering prices, i appreciated this restaurant because of the menu choices, a veritable Canadian Noah's Ark of wild game. between rob and i, for example, we ate pretty much every animal that could be found in the Quebec wilderness.


PETA's nightmare - on this table you will find: elk, bison, deer, buffalo, caribou, pork knuckles, and some other things that I didn't translate properly from the waitress.

between all that and the bottle of wine (no, we didn't spring for the $5000 bottle), we went to bed early, too stuffed full of meat while anticipating a long drive the next day. we did make sure we stopped by a creperie for breakfast the next morning, however.


Rob and his French toast...or, just toast, as they call it here.

today was spend following the rain make its way across the whole country, as we took on the rest of Quebec, and across the entire New Brunswick to get to Prince Edward Island. Canada is really really big. it was a long drive, getting through New Brunswick, especially when you foolishly decide to take the back roads where the truckers used to go to avoid getting weighed. we passed the time by naming all the animals we saw narrowly escape death under car - shrews, coyotes, crows, chipmunks, porcupines (actually, the three porcupines we saw were already dead). it was a long drive, like i said, and a lot of nature. i was particularly struck by the bright yellow of the canola fields in New Brunswick, which became quite the contrast with the bright red dirt of Prince Edward Island. it was all definitely things that I have not seen before.

eventually we made our way over the glorious Confederation Bridge, the longest bridge in Canada, and into Prince Edward Island, where we only got a little lost. unfortunately, by the time we got to the cottage, it was dark (after eleven hours of driving!) so i haven't had much of a chance to see the Island...but that will all wait for me tomorrow!


obligatory cute couple shot

Scary Bear in Korea

In case you want a recap of our trip to Korea, here's a horror film i made from Scary Bear's point of view:

Prince Edward Island

Today we're setting off on our summer road trip across Eastern Canada, ending at Rob's family's cottage in Prince Edward Island. Our first stop will be Quebec City tonight. Stay tuned for more updates!