Halifax So Far

Date: June 12, 2008
Location: Halifax, Nova Scotia

Well, my trip abroad has finally started. I’ve landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It’s a pretty interesting town. It’s a pretty interesting mix of old school brick buildings and high-rise, skyscrapers. It’s still sort of surprising to see all these flags flying yet not seeing Old Glory up there.

My family is still tagging around with me. It’s nice having them here, but I’m really looking forward to getting out on my own. We went out to a variety of beer pubs, which were really nice. Canadian culture is really hard to put a finger down on. It’s an interesting mix of British and American culture. For one thing, it’s really interesting seeing people following the UEFA soccer championship extremely hardcore when it’s only an afterthought in America relegated to ESPN2 and ESPN360.com.

We also went out to see the Halifax Citadel. It’s a pretty large fort designed to protect the harbor back when Halifax was a major naval base for the British Empire. Its star shaped and it’s pretty slick. It’s kind of funny how pretty much every regiment of the British Empire served at the Citadel yet the tour guides depict the highlander regiments who served at the Citadel for a few years out of many.

There are a lot of great sea food places up here. The food’s been real good, the beer too, I’m not starving up here, but it still feels like the preseason, I want to get going on the voyage.

Date: June 13, 2008
Location: Lunenberg, and Halifax, Nova Scotia

Today we woke up pretty early (around 8:30, my parents called it sleeping in, I did not) to go visit Lunenberg, Nova Scotia. The tour guides said it’s famous for its beautiful blue rocks. I for one am not a huge fan of beautiful blue rocks; rocks just look like rocks to me. Maybe the geology class I’m going to take next semester will change that, but right now, I can’t tell a difference.

We did get some good food in Lunenberg. We were going to go to a kind of tourist trappy style seafood restaurant but when we saw a load of Japanese tourists pull in we decided not to go there after all. Instead we went to a far classier establishment that we got some fish and chips at. Lunenberg was a pretty nice little town. It had a beautiful view of the sea, though it was pretty windy out. Lunenberg is probably around a good 35 or so miles away from Halifax so it was a decent drive. The drive was nice looking, there were lots of good views of real blue water and clear blue sky.

When we got back to Halifax we visited the Maritime Museum. This was a pretty neat place; they had a ton of information about the Titanic, like a few actual artifacts that were recovered from the water by rescuers and then kept as family heirlooms and eventually donated to the museum. They also had a ton of neat ship models; these were the high end kind like sailing ships that actually have the rigging faithfully recreated. They had a lot of other neat exhibits. Especially about the Halifax Explosion, an ammunition ship was hit by another ship causing a fire. This eventually caused the ship to explode, destroying half of Halifax in 1917. Apparently it was the biggest explosion on earth until Hiroshima was nuked.

We also toured the Alexander Keith’s Brewery. This was pretty funny. The tour guides got into character of people who worked at the brewery in 1863. They did a pretty good job of involving everyone, plus we got two cups of beer, which was nice.

Watching the news up here is real interesting. On the front page of the newspaper was a picture of Obama’s wife talking about if it was proper for candidates to target their opponents’ spouses. This struck me as really interesting. This was only further reinforced when I saw the local news that spent maybe half of the show talking about US politics. I can’t even imagine the US spending anything more than a slight footnote towards other nations’ politics. The only way they get mentioned is if there’s a coup or there might be a coup. Who knows, they might even run a little box out of the way a few pages past the fold about a peaceful election, but I wouldn’t count on it. I guess it pays to be number one, when something happens with you, the world pays attention.