Fire on Duluth

Manifestation Montréal 2007

On New Year's eve I got together out in Saint Hubert with Julie, a friend who's been living in Belgium for going on 2 years now. She was back for the holidays and so I taxied over to her place at the last minute. The taxi driver didn't know the south shore of Montreal very well, though, so he and I had to stop on the side of the highway at 10 minutes to midnight and get out the road map to try to find our way. Finally, I got there at 12 exactly, just in time to pour myself some punch and clink glasses all around. The party wound down around 3am, and I was put up on the floor for the night, along with a few others who were stranded without the metro. The next morning, we were treated to a feast of waffles and fruit, and played some Cranium (Quebec edition) before heading home. As I left, Julie and her friend Laurence invited me to join them the next day for some shenanigans downtown. The idea was to stage a protest with no real specific raison d'être. It was more hilarious than that sounds, I promise. January second found the three of us on rue Sainte-Catherine with picket signs of various ambiguous sentiments, such as
-Pas contents! (Unhappy!)
-Ça pas de bon sens! (It's crazy/unreasonable!)
-On est contre! (We're against it!)
-C'est faux! (Lies!)
and, just for fun -Vive l'ambiguïté!!?
We spent a few hours walkind the streets yelling and picketing, nobody understood what was going on, we made some friends on the street, it was a pretty silly and fun activity to start off the new year. And on that note, here's the video and a happy new year to all y'all. PHOTOS

Montreal since September

Montreal has been treating me decently since September. It's less Chinese than Chengdu, but still French and fabulous, so I can't complain. Other things I can't complain about (at all):
-my cute little 1,1/2 apartment on Saint Denis, coin Duluth. It's jungle-themed, and it's on the street level, so people can just knock and come right on in through the window. Very sitcomlike.
-Laura has an (awesome) apartment, 10 minutes away on Saint-Dominique. So I just spend all day walking back and forth on Duluth, which is nice.
-Steph, Brendan, Alexia, Nicholas. Montreal friends.

I've been up to Ottawa a few times now, to visit my mom and some brothers. The thirteen pictures in this album are from either my apartment, or my mom's house in Ottawa, with Laura, Benjamin and Alan. The pool pictures are from a cold autumn day when we dared each other to jump in the pool. Work takes up a lot of time, but in between, Montreal is still a party.

Family Camp 2006

This year, like every year since 2001, I made it to Harrison, Maine to work at family camp. And this year, like every year, it ruled. The difference was that this year I was coming straight from China. Laura and I flew from Hong Kong to D.C. and I took a plane to Boston and caught a bus to Portland.
Laura couldn't make it, but Benjamin showed up for the second week, Nate Frederick was stirring things up both weeks after another whole summer at camp, and there were a whole lot of others, old and new. Speaking of which, props (propositions?) go to Evan B, for being totally new and totally... fantastic. Some combination of Lizzie L. and Liz T. convinced him to come up from NYC, I can't remember exactly. Sunny days on the dock, boat rides with kids, and more shenanigans than you can shake a stick at. Too many fun people to mention, so all the pictures are here. Ashley Penrose, who hadn't been seen in those parts since 1999, even made an appearance near the end, to top off 2 weeks of hilarity and hijinks. At close of 2nd week, travelling Cam Martindell went up to Grey Knob hut to be a mountain man, Benjamin drove me to Montreal which I hadn't seen in a year, and Laura met me there the next day, which is where we both are now. Posts from here on in will be Montreal fun in the autumn sun.

Pillow Fort

Douglas, pillow fort
Originally uploaded by miaowmatthew.

Ain't nothing wrong with pillow forts. And by that I don't mean they're just okay. I mean there's nothing wrong with them. They're entirely good and right, to make, to crawl into, and later to break by jumping on.

In this photo from March 2006, my friend Douglas models a living room structure in Chengdu, complete with tastefully contrasting red drapes and yellow pillows.

Hong Kong with Laura

My last stop in Asia was Hong Kong. I flew down to Guangzhou, took the train across the border, and spent 10 fun-filled, well-fed, brightly-lit and occasionally awestruck days being shown all around Hong Kong by Laura, who had been working there for 2 months and rooming at Hong Kong Chinese University in the New Territories. One of our highlights was hiking out to a secluded beach in 大浪灣 Tai Long Wan (pictured right). I know - I wasn't aware there were secluded beaches in Hong Kong, either, but the New Territories hold many secrets for the intrepid. Language points: I was all messed up while I was there. Almost everybody I met spoke Cantonese as a mother tongue, but I always had to guess whether their second was English or Mandarin, because a lot of times they knew one but not the other. In the end, they seemed to be about equally useful, English for stores and restaurants, and Mandarin in taxis, small shops, and off Hong Kong island. You know... rule of thumb. I didn't take that many pictures, but the ones I have are all here on Flickr. You'll see that they're a little more quiet-Hong-Kong than skyscraping-metropolis-HK pictures, but if you want those, Laura took plenty of beautiful ones, here.

Chengdu Bike Ride with Music

Another video memento of Chengdu. This is what it looked like to bike from my apartment to Tian Fu Square (天府广场) in the centre of town. In December.

The great song playing is by Mongolian 布仁巴雅尔 (Bu Ren Ba Ya Er). One of Natalie's favourites.

Bike Ride with Friends (video)

I'm going to share a video from this past May. Back in May I couldn't, but now I have a YouTube account so you all get to see my top top secret secret videos. Speaking of which, when something is really secret, you're supposed to put it on the bottom not the top. Just FYI.

This is Michelle (pink) Maria (red) Natalie (blue) and Brien (dude) riding home from ZhaoJue temple 昭觉寺 in Chengdu. It's about an hour's ride from the TV tower 电视塔。We played badminton there, until a monk told us to stop. Oops. Another monk had told us we were allowed!

All I Really Need Duet

My brother Benjamin has been working at a preschool in Ottawa for a while now, and since he left Ottawa this week, he got together with Doug from his band, The Fox and the Hound, and recorded (in only two hours) a CD of some of the songs he's been playing for the kids. One track mysteriously got deleted, however, and so when he came through Montreal yesterday he asked me to re-record it with him as a duet. The song is one I've played here before, "All I Really Need" by Raffi. We did a few takes and I'm posting the one where we cracked up because midway through the first verse, we both sing the same wrong line. So we went with it.