logloglog

Just before Christmas a car was parked in front of our house. On top of the car were some styrofoam boxes placed and two people were pacing next to it, trying to stay warm. I went outside to talk to them. It appeared that the parking spot in front of our house was one of the drop-off points of a fish smoking outfit from Kamouraska. I asked if they had some fish for me, but no, you had to order in advance. However, it didn’t happen often, but today somebody hadn’t picked up their order. If I wanted I could have some of the products they ordered. And so I did. I ended up with half a pound of smoked Anguille de Kamouraska (eel), half a pound of smoked of Omble-de-fontaine (a trout species) and in the little pot are some smoked Octopus in oil. They told me all of it was smoked just one day before. It was excellent.

If one of you want to get some, call or email them. I think they deliver once per month or so, in various places in Montréal.

La Boucanerie
111, rue Principale
St-André de Kamouraska

(418) 493 2929
email: laboucanerie@videotron.qc

If you wondered why it was so quiet here: I was very busy renovating one of our apartments. Among other things I redid the plumbing and the electricity, and re-enforced the kitchen floor. None of that will be visible to the new tenant. But she they will see and hopefully enjoy the gorgeous new kitchen and bathroom. I went a little overboard so it took 3 weeks longer than I had planned. It’s hard to be your own client for a perfectionist like me.

Update: We found tenants through CraigsList, our friends’ network didn’t yield any interested. Let’s hope things work out and they are good tenants.

More photos:

For the first time as a Canadian, I just voted. It has been 7 years since the last time I voted in the Netherlands.

This year’s Montreal municipal elections are very exciting. There are three parties fighting for our votes and the mayoral candidates (there are also elections for borough councillors) all stand at around 30% in the last polls. A very tight race.

The candidate I voted for, Richard Bergeron, is inexperienced as a politician, a bit of a dreamer but has some good ideas about how to clean up the mess that is Montreal politics at the moments. Canadian current affairs magazine MacLeans called Montreal the most corrupt city in North-America and they might well be right.

Bergeron is an outsider and that’s probably the reason why his poll results are so high. People are fed up with the ruling class of lying crooks that we have now.

[Update 2 November]

The results: our incumbent Mayor strategy of “nobody of the people near me told me they were corrupt” worked and he got re-elected.

Our borough’s Mayor is the candidate for the seperatist party. I briefly spoke with him while he was canvassing, and he is very young and was quite convincing why I should vote for him. I didn’t but a slim majority did.

The city councillor elected in my borough was the candidate I voted for, François Limoges of Project Montréal, the party of Richard Bergeron! (This never happened, I have a track record of voting for the losing candidate.) I wish him good luck. I wish all elected candidates good luck, they’ll need it.

Google’s Street View finally made it to Montreal.

This is our street.

And the photo above is the origin of Montreal.

It’s the point where Google did start and stop. Note that the view at this point is from a parked car, and not from a driving car. If you move back, the cars, the weather and everything else is different than if you move forward.

I made a photo of the Google Street View camera car when it was parked at that spot, but I can’t find it. My best friends live very close to that spot.

Yup, I’m now officially a passport carrying Canadian.

I feel like James Bond, who also has a stack of passports. Only difference: his are fake.

I guess I have to make a trip abroad now…

On the last day of our holiday we take a long walk along the beach of Vancouver until we reach Wreck Beach, Canada’s biggest official nude beach. And even though it is March and quite chilly we actually saw some people skinny dipping.

I also saw these big floats of giant logs. I had eyed them on aerial photos (like here on Google Maps) but now I saw them in reality. The trees get felled in Northern British Columbia, the logs are dumped in the river and then, when they reach the sea, they are collected and assembled into big floats that are pulled by tug boats to this sheltered bay.

These logs were once giants hundreds years old and it’s a real shame that most of this wood is going to end up as toilet paper or cheap plywood.

So, and this was the last post on loglog. I thought a post about logs was an appropriate end.

But wait, there is more. Loglog is going to move and get its own domain. Loglog is dead, long live logloglog! Fifty percent more log for the same price!

( Important note from your admin: in a few days your old RSS feed will cease to work. If you still see this post as your last entry, head over to the new site and re-subscribe to our spanky new feeds!

Thank you!)

We’re leaving Vancouver Island and now finally we have a day of foul weather. We do a short hike along the rocky point of Ucluelet, and the storm and rain makes it even better.

Then we head back to Victoria where we’re going to spent the night in a Moter Inn, have breakfast with someone from A.’s high school in Nigeria (who she hasn’t seen in 28 years), drop off our rental car and then go take a bus on the ferry back to Vancouver.

Today we took a float plane to go float in a hot spring.

We’re in Tofino, an old hippy and surfer community, discovered by resort developers and the rich tourists and thus getting too expensive for the original inhabitants. They haven’t all left, a lot of them try to make some money off those tourists when they aren’t surfing and smoking dope. So there are almost ten boat companies that take you on a small boat for a whale watching trip that can also be combined with a visit to some natural hot springs on an island nearby. It sounded all very nice to me, but it was rather expensive and as you might know by now, me and boats don’t go very well together. While we were getting ready to leave the “Budget Bed & Breakfast” where we booked a room, we overheard that the three young Swiss tourists that stay in the other room have missed the last boat and are since they are leaving tomorrow missed out on their last chance to see the whales. Good, so I’m not the only one.
We go visit a parade consisting of all emergency trucks and boats of the village with blaring sirens and a couple of kids dressed up as whales. After that A. and I pass the local float plane airport and A. wants to go inside and enquire for prices. We find out that if we charter a plane and split it in five it is only slightly more expensive than taking the overpriced boats. So I call the Swiss and after some convincing, some frantic running to fetch towels, camera and swim wear, and some shopping for food we are airborne twenty minutes later. The plane is a De Havilland Beaver float plane built in Canada in 1954. Despite its old age it flew perfectly. It didn’t crash but the noise was almost deafening despite our ear protection. It was a rather bumpy flight but I apparently can stand bumpy aircraft better than bumpy ships.

The views from the air were spectacular even though we saw neither whales nor sea otters. After a 20 minute flight we landed near a dock in a small bay and the plane took off and left us there by ourselves. From there it was a 45 minute walk through a very beautiful old growth rainforest to reach the hot springs. A boardwalk with lots of stairs was built to protect the trail from being overgrown and to protect the rainforest from the visitors.

The hot springs were indeed very natural. The hot springs in Jasper had been closed because it was winter but from the pictures I had seen it looked just like a normal swimming pool. This one surely didn’t. At first we couldn’t even find where we could bathe because we only found a stream with very hot water (more than 45 °C), but nowhere was there a place deep enough to immerse ourselves. Then another girl, a passenger from the first boat that had arrived, came and showed us some small puddles around a big boulder, where the stream ran through just before the very hot water mixed with the cold sea water. According to an information panel these hot springs have the biggest flow of hot water in Canada. It was very nice.

After lunch and smoking a cigar overlooking the Pacific Ocean we walked back to the dock and took another bumpy flight back to Tofino, were I now sat next to the pilot. The views were even better this time.

Sometimes it does matter.

After spending two days in Victoria we rent a car to explore the rest of Vancouver Island. It’s raining cats and dogs but halfway on our way to Tofino, in the middle of nowhere, I really have to pee. I pull off at the first parking and luck is with me. It’s not raining as hard anymore and there is even a real composting toilet. But hey, the trees surrounding me are really big… I accidently stopped at a major tourist attraction, one of the few remaining stands of century-old Douglas fir.

I go back to the car and tell A. that even though it is raining she has to put on her shoes and coat and get out of the car. We walk around in the rain in a rainforest and it is great.