nawl

It's very cold here. There is this strange white stuff that seems to fall occasionally from the sky and then sit on the ground. Its primary purpose seems to be as something to throw at Kevin. People seem to think I'm wimpy because I walk around wearing a shirt, two sweaters, a winter jacket, two pairs of pants, two pairs of socks, hat, gloves, and a scarf done up to my eyes, and I'm still cold. I think they're crazy for living here. Today my braids froze into solid sticks after a 15 minute walk outside. That can't be good for my hair.

I am still on California time, which means that I go to bed at around 6 am and wake up at around 3 pm. Today we managed to get out of the house before 5, which I thought was pretty darn impressive.

Kevin has many geeky friends. In one night we played many games across multiple houses: some strange card game where you say things like "these are 10 8s" and get away with it, a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit (Canadian Edition), this game with colored lizards on them that was called Coloratura or Coloretto or something like that, and then watched a video game that involved some scantily clad fantasy-style Charlie's Angels running around and changing outfits and casting a spell or two at big scary monsters. I've been informed it's called "Final Fantasy 10-2". I dunno, any game that gets preteen boys of all ages into costume changes must be pretty cool.

Today we walked around downtown Toronto, only we never actually ventured outside. A huge section of the downtown area is traversable by way of these underground tunnels, which are sort of like a cross between a labyrinth and a mall. You can take the subway in, get off in a station, end up in a (real) mall, cross the street in a covered walkway to a department store, descend some floors, and go around underneath office buildings and banks until you're in an entirely different part of the city several subway stops later.

We had dinner "outside" on the "patio" of this "Marche" which was kind of like a food court where you paid with stamps. The "outside" was a sectioned off area of a massive glassed-in structure with a huge cathedral ceiling that you could look through and see distorted lights from the skyscrapers above, and pretend that it wasn't below freezing outside. The big glass structure also, for reasons not entirely apparent to me, contained the big stone facade of some bank building that was more than a hundred years old.

Lots of things are in French here, but often it seems pretty silly. I mean, freeway signs have to be twice as large to accomodate the repetitive "North" "Nord" "East" "Est" and so on. I mean, isn't that stuff obvious enough? Kevin says "you don't understand the subtleties of Canadian language politics." Sure I don't, but come on, you kids are supposed to have learned both languages in school. Other than that, it hasn't been too exciting language-wise. The only really deep hoser accent I heard was from the airplane pilot on my flight from Chicago to Toronto, who also seemed to speak French pretty well, but with *exactly the same accent*.

As for future plans, well, I suppose we could venture outside for once in the downtown area. Maybe I'll get to go to Waterloo, which I refuse to pronounce the Canadian way, which is with an accent on the "loo" and not the "wa". Or maybe I'll just hide inside away from the evil cold and continue reading "Aha! Paradoxes to amuse and confound". That's not actually the title, but you get the idea.