<font color="purple">...and was secretly hoping to meet ledgewood somehow

In any case, it was really fun.
We did ALOT of activities, so I was still sore, even a few days after we came back!
I'll post some pics after I get a hold of my friend's memory card for her digital camera- I only took a few pictures before my camera battery died....

It was pretty scary though sometimes, I took Spanish instead of French (it was a trip for both language classes) and thus 99.9999% of the time, I couldn't really talk to anybody, or read any of the signs, or well...anything, sadly, my attempts at speaking french sounded more like broken English hen anything else. Whoever said that french is like Spanish or english is full of bologna (Oscar Mayers to be exact)

The whole point of the trip though was to expirience the culture of another country. Personaly, I wasn't really culture shocked. The area where I live was settled by the frech anyways and was later taken by the english (unlike most of new york, which was settled by the dutch first before being taken by the english) the only diferences that I found were:

1. The language
2. People seem to be more openly affectionate (I remember my friends and I were pretty awestruck when we saw a gay couple walking down the streets...holding hands. That is something that you would probably never see here)
3. Most people actualy LIKE winter. (I would too if we actualy had something to do around here)
4. There are alot more "adult" shops
5. The tour guide actualy wanted to take a girl to the hospital because she had a fever and was a little sick. (here- you either suck it up/ take a tylenol or something) but...maybe that wasn't so much culture as it was trying to involve some kind of trouble with the parents </font>

AWESOME! I love it when people visit my dear old Montréal I can't wait to see the pictures... I've probably been to many of the places you went!

Did you see any crazy hockey fans on your trip?

The language can be a bit of a shock for people... I have friends from France who visit my friends and I in Québec sometimes and even they have a hard time getting past the Québécois accents

We're very loving here in la belle province, and the gay Olympics are actually held in Montréal, so seeing gay couples openly hold hand or be together is really not that strange. Downtown you may have even seen a lot of shops with rainbow flags in the windows.

I can't speak for the entire population but I love winter If you went up north in Québec you're see some real great weather... although -20s C isn't for the faint of heart!

Oh, the adult shops... downtown Montréal we're very... fun-loving and easygoing I've heard it called a North American Amsterdam

I hope you had a really good time Québec is a great piece of Canada and sometimes gets a bad reputation because of language and political issues. I'm glad you visited!

[splitimage]

Montreal and Quebec are awesome. I remember in highschool, 3 girlfriends and I lied to our parents about what we were doing and snuck off to Montreal for the weekend. We had a great time wandering around.

I'm actually an ex-quebecer, I mostly grew up in this little tiny town called Buckingham which is about a 45 min. drive north of Ottawa. I'm anglo but spoke french with all my friends and when I went to university and took french in first year, the teachers' only comment was you've got a great vocabulary but we have to do something about that accent.

Glad that you had a good time.

--splitimage

sounds fun!

<font color="purple"> Well Ledgewood, we didn't meet any sports fans, but we did go ice-skating, the time leading up to this went a little something like this:

Tour Guide: Okay now, are you ready for a little competition? Tonight it is Quebec vs New York for ice skating!
Us: *looks of shock and horror as none of us have ever really ice-skated in our entire lives*

Though, most of us did at least try skating. I'm proud that even though I have balence issues and could barely walk in skates I still managed to not fall over once! (granted, my feet were so cramped up I was afraid they would commit mutiny) my only issue with skating is that my feet do not go straight at all, so when I actualy start to relax my feet go back to normal and I start losing control

I was praised alot though for being so determined.
Afterwards, it went a little something like this:

Tour Guide: Well, you guys tried real hard but Quebec still won! Yay!
Us: WHAT?! They had people falling over too!
Tour Guide: Yeah, but they were all tourists, so they don't count!

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