quebec

I love quebec. I love having the opportunity to pretend I know french. I love having old men yelling at me in french and being able to say je ne comprends pas. I love the montreal jazz fest. Hopefully i'll be catching more of it next week. We're in quebec city right now, which is gorgeous. I explored the chateau frontenac today. Definitely got into some places I shouldn't have been. But couldn't find the way into the cute little courtyard in the middle.

It's been a long time since i've written and so many things have happened. I must tell about the awful week we had last week. Up until last monday we had been able to mostly stay in people's houses, expect for one night we spent in a starbucks parking lot. They were very hospitable and we went to a rec centre the next day to shower and swim and relax. So that was nice. But last week we were stuck staying at rest stops or truck stops with no showers. The weather was unbelievably hot and humid. We left st. catherines on monday morning, drove eight hours to ottawa, slept in a rest stop on the way back to toronto, drove back to toronto the next day, and then drove back to montreal the next day. That's a lot of driving in horrible weather with no showers. We felt so gross. It was only three days but felt like eternity. And the van kept breaking down on the way to montreal that last day. By the time we got there we were so worn out, and the guy who was putting on the show was just a complete douche bag. He either had no social skills or was just a jackass. He kept on threatening to cancel the show that we had driven all the way to montreal for, with no valid reason. One was because we were late for our 2:30 sound check. The show started at 8:00! Who needs 5 hours to sound check? And our van broke down, what were we supposed to do? Then he hold us we sounded muddy and gross and he couldn't hear a single lyric. This despite the fact that we were playing especially quiet, with the vocals turned up. He went into a explication of how why we needed to turn the bass down so we wouldn't keep adding to our muddy noise. All he had to say was the bass is too loud.

The end of that horrorshow went like this. He wanted all of our addresses and personal information. Originally it was so he could send us recordings that he was gonna make for us, but we were late so that couldn't happen, and he still wanted this info "for his records." Jer asked why he still needed those, and he started into his big jerk routine: "Jeremy, Jeremy, let's just keep this simple." Jer told him we'd keep it really simple, pack up our things and get out of there. So we drove to montreal for nothing. We were all feeling pretty low except for Jer since he at least got to tell Zeke off. But he told his dad about our horrible week, and his dad offered to put us into a hotel for two nights. So that was awesome. We felt so rejuvenated being there, being able to shower. And it was real close to the jazz fest which worked out really well. All in all, it was a nutso week.

While i have time i might as well mention our stay in midland at my aunt and uncle's. It was awesome. When we got there Aunt Loreen pulled out some pork chops and other great foods. The pork chops were declared the best we had ever had. We played at their nursing home and it was super great to play for such a captive audience. Haha. They really did seem to like us and that was cool.

There's too many stories to tell to tell any of them properly. Jeans.