Spring is almost here! Look! Greeeeeeen!
This is greatly exciting. Yesterday we went to Mont Saint-Hilaire for a field trip to measure (hug) trees and snowshoe around in the forest. As much as I love Montreal, it was once again lovely to get out of the city and get a gurt bit o' nature in me soul.
January flew by in a still-recovering-from-fall-semester-and-Christmas way, starting with a wonderfully relaxing time in Toronto with Alanna and her delightful family. I taught them racing demons - a dramatic, quakerly-competitive card game with silly additions that is always played when my fam get together - so it definitely felt like a family holiday to me. They taught me an equally silly game which I impolitely and accidentally won, but I paid them back with flapjack, which here means pancake, as in american pancake not a crepe pancake, and which they call oatmeal, but it's oh so much more than just oatmeal....The conclusion was that they must come visit England, and test out their impressive cockney accents on real live Londoners. I also popped over to Niagara Falls (very impressive but also insanely cold) and experienced Igloo Fest. It's an outdoor club in Montreal for 4 weekends in January, which we passed on the night that was -34 degrees in favour of a tropical temperature of -8 degrees the following weekend. Drinks served are mulled wine and hot chocolate with unidentifiable alcohol, and, as ever, dance to get warm. Freakin awesome.
February flew by, or should I say 'swam by' *snort laughs*, in a flurry of fish as my research project got underway. Photos of stickleback followed me everywhere: I felt awkward if I ate tuna in front of them. But now the data is collected and collated and cleaned nicely, ready to put it into some sort of legible scientificness, very exciting. Midterms also came and went within 4 days which, while technically wasn't the most fun I've ever had, did involve long hours in library with fellow biologists, and I bagged me some brand new shiny friends. It's all about bonding over the characteristics of cnidarians and calculating entropy values.
And in between all that, I went to Arizona! I cannot express the pleasure of stepping outside wearing but one layer of clothing after so many weeks of double layers of socks and leggings and various scalp-warming accessories. Alanna and I stayed with her incredibly welcoming and generous grandparents (yes I think this post should be dedicated to Alanna and her incredible family!) for a week of sun, eating, museuming, safari-park visiting, sun, shopping, eating, wandering, sun, swimming, eating, sun, and appreciating the incredible views. I had never before seen surroundings like that: rust coloured mountains against the bright cloudless sky, with cacti three times the height of me piercing the desert. Sunset turned the mountains pink and the sky truly purple. Boulders perched precariously on top of one another, so you are almost convinced they will crash down as you drive underneath them, even though they have presumably been there since the glacial retreat around 18 million years ago. I was, if you can believe it, rendered speechless by the beauty, which is in no way reflected in the following photographs.
Arizona science centre is possible the best one I have ever been to, with more hands on stuff than @Bristol, video clips of brain surgery, and a multi sensory stage mimicking extreme weather including rain, earthquake trembles, wind, and heat lamps. At the safari I saw a large portion of a horse being thrown to a resuscitated lion, and two tigers playing with three humans as a house moggie would. A super musical instrument centre where you can listen to clips of music and see instruments from all over the world could have kept me entertained for hours, if we didn't also want to go home and whip up some macarons. And an incredible Van Gogh exhibition (look out for it because it is travelling everywhere) portrayed in a truly original and stimulating way. Nevertheless, the roads rarely smaller than 5 lanes wide, the enormous distances between anywhere meaning that it really is necessary to drive everywhere, and the huge amount of polystyrene still used where, it seems, most other places use cardboard to attempt to save the planet a wee bit, means that the US of A continues to boggle me. I returned slightly less pale, with my mind blown from the kindness, culture and a lot of fun.
I have been wanting to share my thoughts on differences in education systems, but that will have to wait for another time. It is a beautiful day out, and I must go run around. It seems like the an-awful-lot-below-freezing temperatures of January are behind us, and we are up into the positive temperatures. This has supposedly been the mildest Canadian winter for many years, although it still seemed pretty cold to me. You can tell I'm foreign because I still wear my snowboots and fat coat when it is above -5.
Huge love, hope all is fun wherever you are and whatever you're up to. Bisous.
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