Day 22
Trip Start
Jun 30, 2008
1
22
Trip End
Aug 02, 2008
Quebec City, Quebec, Canada
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
After that we had lessons again, we got our mid-term exams back. I was really pleased, I thought I'd done pretty badly on the exam. It turns out that I got 96/100 on the writing part and 48.5/50 on the speaking part. On the oral I lost all of my marks on pronunciation, which was annoying but also good. I was just very surprised! In the lesson we also started work on five-minute plays that will count towards the final mark (like the grammar presentations). In my group we have Chelsea, Beth, William and Emery. Our story is based on a game of loup-garou that we played last week. The central theme is the love between a loup-garou and a villager, and the betrayal of the loup-garou that leads to his death. We also threw in a priest to make it more Québecois, and a voyante in the form of a grandmother (played by me). It's good fun, although it's quite difficult to write a play, and we have to include music too.
In the afternoon we had another outing with the class. This time we went to the musee des beaux arts. This was really interesting, we saw several exhibitions - one on general quebec art, one with riopelle (a famous quebecker artist) and an exhibition of inuit art (which is apparently a recent phenomenon). These were all quite different and interesting to look at. I think I would have liked to have a little more time in the various rooms, because our guide was fairly speedy when she was taking us round. My favorite part was just as you entered the museum, there was a room full of flashing lights. If you held on to some metal bars for a second the lights would dim for a second and then begin flashing again. The odd thing was that they didn't all flash in unison. Our guide explained to us the reason for this; as you touched the bars your heartbeat was recorded and emitted as a flashing light. There were one hundred lights in the room which mirrored the heartbeats of the last hundred visitors. It wasn't especially beautiful to look at, but the idea was so interesting that this was my favorite part of the museum.
Riopelle was enjoyable too. The largest part in his room was his three-part artwork dedicated to a woman whose name I forget, but who was a political activist in Europe and sent coded letters while she was imprisoned that looked like lists of things but were really instructions for plots and the like. The canvases were mainly filled with the silhouettes of dead birds that he had spray-painted over. There were also other random items, like nails, that had been captured in the same way. Some people were repulsed by the idea of all the dead birds (there were quite a few, and different types too). I quite liked it, even if I had no idea what it was really meant to symbolise - (it must have meant something because of the dedication, and because there was a specific direction in which to view it - it didn't seem to make much difference to me!).
After the outing, it was time for the weekly washing party again. This time we had maple-leaf biscuits to munch on as we listened to music and waited for the washing to finish. Again everything went smoothly and I managed not to shrink anything. I did however manage to lose a sock to the machine, which was slightly puzzling.
We finished the washing late, so there was no choice of food at the cafeteria, as a result of this I got some rather disgusting soup which I left most of and that was all. It was lucky we had eaten the biscuits!
After tea we rushed off to go to the obligatory activity for the evening. This time it was 'coup de foudre' this was basically a blind-date idea but it had a script and some quite weird characters. It was quite entertaining, not as good as some of the others, but it had itds moments!
We finished off the day with another toast party in the basement, this time with nutella too! There were some animateurs again and we had ice-cream and music this time too. It was a good toast party.
