Road Trip

For Father's Day, my dad and I took a road trip to Calgary for the Rough Riders' pre-season game against the Stampeders. Now: I'm not a huge football fan but I enjoy going to the games now and then, and spending time with my dad. Why do we follow the Saskatchewan Rough Riders, you might ask? I may be an Island boy but my dad is from SASK, so I'm a convert.


We left Vancouver Island on the 8:30 ferry, early Friday morning, and drove all the way to Golden where we stayed our first night. On the way up we stopped at the historic site of the location where the last spike was placed in the railway that joined east and west. I guess they had workers building toward each other from either side, and this is the spot where they met. It seemed to me, a rather strange thing to build a monument to.

On the second day of our trip, on our way to Calgary, we stopped in Lake Louise and made the three-hour hike up to the Lake Agnes Tea House. The view was picturesque, and he glacial waters of the lakes amazed me with their...blue-ness. It's hard to describe. Glacial silt makes water bluer than you'll see in most places. There were also a lot of other tourists at the lake that day, and by their accents, I'd say they were mostly French and German.

We made it to Calgary by evening and the lady at the hotel told us that the place to go for fun in Calgary was 17th Ave. I read on wikipedia that 17th is sometimes called "The Red Mile" because of the Stampeders' fans that flood the streets in their team colours before the game. Dad and I thought we might be inviting conflic if we went in our green, Rough Riders clothes, so we went in street clothes instead, but we were suprised to find that the only people in team colours that night were in a special Rough Rider's bar, decked out fully in green!

Our trip home was more direct than our drive up because we had to gt back for work, but I had a really good time, and the days of driving through the interior of British Columbia and the Rocky Mountains filled me with a sense of wonder and reminded me why I love this beautiful province of ours.

The Grind

How's summer going for everyone? I guess it's not really summer yet, but it's that time of year here students have months to spare. I have a hard time keeping connected with people over the summer, because my job is camp work and I'm away for eight days at a time. What is it like for you?

On my days off I try to plan lots of fun things to do and make up for what I've missed, but my schedule doesn't always match up with other people's. Last time I got in to see a movie though. The Prince of Persia. It was alright. Very much the same tone as Pirates of the Caribbean: just some fun. There's been a lot of talk regarding the lack of Persian (Iranian) actors in the film, but I have a lot of Persian friends, and I'm told that Persia was originally an Aryan culture, so Jake Gyllenhaal could fit right in with his brown hair and green eyes. The only problem is the English accents; I realize that in the video game it was based on, all the characters had English accents too, but it still seemed wrong. I went with a friend of mine who is Persian, and after the film we were joking around, and she repeated some of Jake's lines in her mother's Persian accent. We then realized that American audiences would probably have thought it too funny.

I'm really hoping the weather will turn up soon, so I can do more out-doorsey things instead of watching movies and playing video games. I'd love to spend a day up at Englishman River Falls, or Rathtrevor Beach in Parksville. We live in one of the most beautiful places on earth (and I've traveled), and it's time to enjoy it!

Keeping the Good Times Rolling

Last week I met with a couple of my friends to have a bit of a writing workshop. Obviously, it was also a social call, but I think these things are important.

I don't know what it is like in other departments, but for creative writing students, I think it is very valuable to keep meeting over the summer. We develop all of these skills for critiquing each other's writing, and it would be a shame not to keep that workshop environment alive.

What happens after university? Maybe it's important to build these kinds of working relationships with our contemporaries. Look at writers like Tolkien who kept in correspondence with C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden for much of his career. I think visual artists do this too. I wonder if Visual Art students get together in the summer to critique each other's art. What other departments have similar concerns? It can't just be the Arts.