ottawa-gatineau

in school we learnt that ottawa is canada's capital, not toronto. that was about all we knew about ottawa before we decided to drive the two hours to go check the city out for ourselves. ottawa (in the province of ontario) and gatineau (in the province of quebec) are only separated by a river - a bit like budapest. we visited the parliament buildings - including a statue representing the historical moment when it was discovered that women are persons. the museum of civilization in gatineau is canada's most popular museum. it tells canada's history, including a very interesting part about canada's aboriginal communities. click here for some moving images. downloading 6,8 mb might take a while...

toronto

i had to be in toronto for a big trade show in the construction field, where my company had hired a booth. four very busy days - from building up the booth to doing pr with show visitors. after one of the show days we had dinner with my colleagues in the cn tower's famous revolving restaurant. from up there the views of the city and lake ontario at night were just beautiful. since i was in toronto - and since pieter was in philly 'for work' - i decided to stay for the weekend to do some tourist stuff.

free wheat

"hope and adams" by the band wheat was one of the soundtracks of my student years in leuven. the wheat guys have a new album ready to go, but also decided to put their first two albums online as a free download, together with a bunch of bootlegs and demos. an opportunity to have a listen to gems like "don't i hold you" and "body talk part II".

brunch

we organised a sunday brunch at our place and invited our montreal friends. the amount of food was huge, but then again so was the quality - jolaine's banana bread, gen's lemon cake, aline's quiche, jen's coffee, bruno's orange juice and armin's spanish tortilla.

têtes à claques

the "têtes à claques" website has been the hype in quebec for a couple of months. this site features humoristic clips made by a couple of guys just for fun. it was created last august, and already has 1.000.000 clip viewings a day now. pretty impressive! unsurprisingly they have now added some advertisements to the site (only one per hour though). the clips give you a pretty good idea of the quebecois language and habits, including the swearwords. the "willi waller" is our personal favourite.

baptiste

my friend jean asked me to join his seven piece band to play a couple of gigs in montreal. as jean he's a nasty soccer player, as baptiste he's a great singersongwriter, style ben harper and damien rice. check out the high voice at the end of "constance", it's him too. pictures were made at theatre corona by martin girard.