Three weeks ago I said I was going to write an update on my activities over the previous three weeks. That never happened. Oops.
There are some good reasons (well, reasons, anyway): I’ve been very busy. I’ve just finished working twelve days straight at Enzyme (lots of overtime pay – yay!); I’m still trying to write two essays before returning to Durham; I’ve been working on various projects for the JCR; I’ve discovered Weeds, and have promptly watched all 26 episodes; and I’ve been teaching myself how my lovely gorgeous new MacBook works.
But here is, at the very least, a brief update. First things first, thanks to everyone for your birthday wishes. Strangely, being 21 doesn’t feel much different to being 20. There’s nothing (I think) that I can do here that I couldn’t before (I can’t stand for the Canadian parliament anyway).
This weekend is Labour Day weekend, so there’s no work on Monday – woo – so I’ve taken myself off to Quebec City to do some sightseeing (I’m blogging this using the hotel’s free Wi-Fi). It’s a bit of a strange city, to tell the truth: it’s the capital city of the province, but Montreal has all the financial/commercial clout, so all it has to do is the governing. Quebec City is the only fortified city in North America (think York, British people), and is, I believe, a World Heritage Site. It also has the oldest stone church on this side of the world. Like York, it’s full of tourists.
On Thusday, the mayor of Quebec City, Andrée Boucher, died. She was, apparently, ridiculously popular. Her funeral was today, in the centre of Quebec City (from now on, I’m just going to type Québec – it’s shorter) – so there were huge (-er than normal) crowds, lots of important people, and a saturation of policemen. I got off the train this morning knowing nothing about this (I knew she’d died, but not about the funeral and crowds), and was a bit bemused by the fact that all the flags (and in Québec there are a lot of them) were at half-mast.
I’ll upload photos of Québec as soon as I can. And, with any luck, it won’t be another three weeks before my next blog. And I may talk about some of those things I meant to talk about…