Music and a trip to Canada's capital

Hey all!

I’m still alive but the last weeks have been really busy because of university... We are writing midterm exams at the moment and in addition, there are lots of assignments to hand in. Yesterday, I wrote a whole exam (9 pages) in French for the first time =)

Nevertheless, there are some more interesting things to talk about.

My music course started three weeks ago and I really like it. This week, we really started the improvisation, before we were only singing and discussing theoretical stuff - quite hard to understand if you never learned the music vocabulary in French. I had not thought about that ;-) There is a very nice and cooperative guy from Cuba who showed me where I can practice at university. So now I’m going “à la Faculté de musique” to practice the clarinet. Sounds great ;-) And I really like being there, you can hear so many different instruments and styles of music while climbing the stairs to the 8th floor (where you have a beautiful view over the city). I think I’ll go there tomorrow after my course…

I finally had the possibility to see my flatmate Gabriel and his band on stage last Saturday. It was by chance that I got to know about it. I asked him if he knows a cocktail bar and he told me that he never drinks cocktails but that he knows a great show taking place that night… As I couldn’t convince my friends to go there, I went there alone. Thus, I happened to talk to a teacher who pretended to love German culture and literature ;-) And I enjoyed the show of the second band together with Gabriel, I even talked to the guy playing the saxophone and got their CD :-)

Last week, I had a cold and was freezing all day long as we haven’t started heating our apartment yet and it’s already quite cold. We had the first snow today, but nothing compared to Germany… the snow is melting as soon as it reaches the ground as it’s been much warmer the last three days.

Two weeks ago, I left the province Québec for the first time – I went to Ottawa with our outdoor club. The original plan was camping in a National Park but because of the weather forecast, we abandoned this project. Instead, we went hiking in the “Parc de Gatineau” which is located on the opposite riverside vis-à-vis with Ottawa. You can see Ottawa in the background of this picture.

We had the chance to see the Indian Summer on its summit, these intense colors are amazing!! (And don’t make fun of it, my dear brother!)

The second day was hardcore sightseeing ;-) We got up at half past seven as breakfast in the hostel (a former prison!!!) started at eight. We went to the parliament hill, took the river cruise, walked across the Byward Market and visited the National Gallery of Arts. Actually, Ottawa is a small city, wouldn’t be anything special if it wasn’t the capital of Canada ;-) Although it’s located in Ontario, it’s quite bilingual but contrary to Montréal, English is the main language.

It’s been a great trip as we had so much fun together. We were eight students, most of them from France, and although we didn’t know each other before, we could feel a kind of togetherness… Hopefully, I’ll see some of them again on another trip.

I finish with something that was really strange to me in the beginning:

You can find this kind of fountain for potable water in all public places like shopping centers, museums, at university, everywhere, actually as frequent as public toilets. People just take a sip of water when passing one of these fountains. Recently, I learned that they are called “abreuvoir” when someone asked me where the he can find one of these fountains. Two weeks ago, we discovered a bar called “abreuvoir” and now finally I understand the meaning of this name. It’s a cool place where you get 4 liters of beer for 30 bucks ;-)

Cheers et à la prochaine,

geli