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After a day of painting we went to the “La Cité des Art du Cirque” for the annual Falla. A Falla is a wooden sculpture that is set in flames as a cleansing ritual. Falla-burning is a centuries-old Spanish tradition, where carpenters would burn their wood-shavings in a bonfire as a tribute to their patron saint San José. In this case it also involved some fire juggling and fireworks.

We at first couldn’t find the terrain because I had forgotten to look up directions. So we spend a good half hour circling around an old quarry in the North of Montréal, while the “circus city”, built around a big theatre of the “Cirque de Soleil” was in fact in another old quarry, a couple of blocks to the west. Anyway, we made it in time and went for a tour of the circus-theatre first and then saw the ritual burning. The fire department put a sort of water curtain in the air to protect the neighbourhood going up in flames, and were succesful in doing so. My car however, that was also parked leeward of the fire, was covered in ashes. But it’ll wash of with the next shower.

Alison and paint, a much better combination.

Pepe and paint, not a good combination.

Alison is Employee of the Month and got a digital gift certificate. She said that I had to redeem it but when I tried to go to the gift certificate company secure website at https://www.giftcertificates.ca I got this warning. I thought it was pretty funny.

I ignored it and they will send me a certificate by mail.

I’m repairing the ceiling of the kitchen. The leakage left some nasty spots and at some places the plaster came off. So I remove the loose plaster, fill the holes and apply a very stinky barrier coat so the brown doesn’t come through the fresh white paint.

When that’s finished we’re finally going to paint the kitchen, something that was due for almost two years after I made the new kitchen cabinets [links to entries in Dutch, but with pictures]. The old colour, yellow, doesn’t go very well with the orange of the kitchen, according to Alison.

Pepe declined to comment.

I finally managed to clean up the mess in the bathroom. While I was in the Netherlands and Alison was in the U.S. the pipes of the upstairs neighbour thought it was a fun idea to break. It wasn’t a pretty sight according to Alison. She cleaned it up but it took a long time before the owner went in to fix the pipes. In the meantime our neighbour, who just moved in, had no water. Half the roof of our bathroom had to be removed and also the walls need to be repaired. I’ve no idea when that’s going to happen. The damage in the basement, where all the water eventually ended up, was luckily not very big because nothing valuable was stored underneath the bathroom.

I’m still not recovered from the usual depression that comes with my jet-lag. It takes much longer and is much more severe than usual.

The small Bombardier aircraft I fly from Toronto to Montréal is made in Québec. It’s definitely no business-class, I have hardly room for my head, and I’m by no means a tall person by Dutch standards.

I have a window seat and since the plane is flying over our house during the landing I can snap some shots. They are not very sharp because the sun is almost set, but the red circle indicates our house. To the left is the little park in which Poupoune loves to fetch ball, and in the back you can see the high-rises of downtown Montréal. The green area in the top right is ‘the Mountain’.

Just one day before I’m about to fly home a strike of the caterers and baggage handlers of British Airways in Heathrow grounded 100s of planes and stranded 70,000 passengers. Since I’m flying British Airways (yes, again) over Heathrow I’m fucked. But because I read the Internets I find out about this strike quite early. I call up BA in the Netherlands (only a 10 minutes wait) and they advise me to avoid Heathrow and try to book a seat on another airline. They promise they will reimburse my single ticket. I don’t like this very much since I had planned to spend a day in London by taking the first flight in the morning on Saturday. I also have to cancel a meeting with a Londoner I met on a mailing list. But since I don’t have very good experiences with Heathrow lately, to put it mildly, and don’t want to spend a night on a chair in a crowded airport I decide to follow their advice.

I immediately try the website of Dutch national pride KLM, but they only have business class tickets available for 2500 euro (3680 CAD) for a single to Montréal!
I try Air Canada but they also have only business class available on Saturday and Sunday. And I’ve already said good-bye to all my friends and don’t want to stay any longer in the Netherlands. I’m kind of looking forward to coming home.

But when I reload my browser I see they suddenly have one Air Canada Club Class seat available for not too much money, ‘only’ 1100 CAD. I immediately book that flight, only to find out later that this Air Canada Club Class is almost as luxurious as business class.

Granted, we don’t get any whiskeys in real glasses and the cutlery is still plastic, but the seats are widely spaced and have more legroom than I need. Too bad it’s a day flight and I don’t have to sleep. Because I could sleep very well in this seat.

My flight is over Toronto and I have a layover of two hours. So I eat and drink something in the Air Canada Maple Leaf business lounge and enjoy their free Wifi access and a nice lemon sherbet.

Now I only hope British Airways will indeed reimburse my ticket, even though it’s not and Economic ticket, otherwise this will be a very expensive trip.

Went with Marijn, who finally could detach himself from his girlfriend, to the Parade, a theatre festival in tents that travels in the Netherlands during the summer. We saw two short plays, one bad and one okay-ish and then went to the Silent Disco.

The Silent Disco is a tent were every visitor is given a good quality wireless headphone and can listen to music played by an old fashioned DJ. Old fashioned in the sense that he talks in between the songs and not only wants to create his own music. The music is a mix of everything, from old-ballroom, to seventies, eighties and modern drum and bass. And I have to admit: It works. I danced for more than an hour and unfortunately had to stop because the laws in Amsterdam required so. Which is rather stupid, because this disco is silent. You could have it in a shopping mall, in a train, in a park. You could have it everywhere, without disturbing other people. It sounds all very gimmicky, but after the gimmick wears of is still very nice. In some venues they program more than one channel so you have a dance-floor with a mixed crowd: Some people are dancing to one tune, and others are listening to another. Another benefit is that you can easily converse with someone, just by removing your headphone. Ideal to make contact to new people, which is very hard in a ‘normal’ disco.

The Silent Disco was started by a friend of mine, so I might be a bit biased. I even wrote some software for him, to facilitate the DJ. But this was my first time experiencing the show myself, and I liked it a lot.

<plug>Interesting parties can book the Silent Disco at 433fm.com. They can handle crowds of up to 1000 people, so it’d be very nice for one of Montréal’s many festivals.</plug>