De Retour du Quebec

Today has been good so far. I woke up far too late (Corb Lund apparently needs to be loud to be an effective alarm) and hustled to class, then went to the gym with Mary from the cross-country group. We had a pretty good little workout, several sets of "half-lap hard, half-lap easy, half-lap hard, whole lap easy" on the bizarre and pitiful 230m square track in the fieldhouse. Then we did a few minutes of abs, and I think it's going to be painful tomorrow. Yesss. A little soreness is such a wonderful feeling. It reminds you that your body is there and that it's mad at you for making it do stuff. And then I read for environmental studies, an interesting chapter about the semiotics of place. Very cool.

Lovely weekend at the MOC house. Friday I took the bus to Montreal with Jacob and Veronica (a new Outdoors Club member) and had dinner with Jacob's hyper friend Mariette, then went to a party at her neighbours'. At the party we ran into Faye, Jacob's ex, the McGill club's VP External, and a woman of consummate fantabulousness. She won us over with promises of an alarm clock, so we slept over at her house. In the morning we rose far too early for my liking and took the bus up to the MOC house with the rest of the McGill club (about 50 people in all). Once there, we hung out and did some getting-to-know-you, name-learning types of games and a scavenger hunt. Faye and Jacob wisely took naps; Veronica and I pressed on. In the afternoon I went cross-country skiing for the first time since an aborted attempt in my early years. The trails around the town were very pretty and the day was warm, turning the snow into near-slush. I embarrassed myself by being worse at skiing than the Irish members of the group. Not a proud day for Canada. However, I'd never skiied, had had about four hours of sleep the previous night and my heels were getting blisters, so I'll excuse myself this time around. It was still quite fun and I'd try it again. In the evening we played violent games and some people did body bouldering, an impressive acrobatic pursuit involving climbing down a standing person's torso, between their legs, and up their back again without touching the ground. Quite a few of the climbers succeeded, actually, which amazed me no end. Veronica spent a lot of time talking with a Polish guy who turns out to be from the same smallish city as her grandmother. It was a pretty international group, actually, with students from France, Poland, Russia, Mexico, and Columbia as well as Canada. The proceedings were fairly restrained (nobody was trashed) and by the conversation it was clearly a party of outdoorspeople.

Sunday was brilliant: three brutal and vicious rounds of tackle capture the flag in the early afternoon. People launched themselves through the air to take down the opposing team and ran like crazy to get resurrected by getting a fresh yellow or orange armband. I got my head driven into a tree branch during a wrestling match. I stealth-attacked and was stealth-attacked. I clutched someone's foot as he dragged me for a good four paces. I fell in the snow. It was genius. Also, my team won all three rounds. Go, Team Yellow!

And then we cleaned up and took the bus back to Montreal, stopping before our Ottawa bus for incredibly dense, delicious hot chocolate. The bus took three and a half hours instead of two and a quarter because we got stuck in behind a few snowplough patrols in der Mittelkeinwo. This gave me a chance to catch up on law readings. Eventually we got home, tired and foul-smelling but happy. I walked in just in time to call the fambly and watch Grey's Anatomy. And that, I think, is a good place to stop. Au revoir!