Airbnb & Eurotrip

This winter break I will be going to Europe to backpack across the continent. I plan to hit up Spain, Portugal, France and Germany.

My plane tickets have all been bought and paid for. Since I will be out of my apartment from December 9th-January 14th I decided to try to rent out my apartment on Airbnb. Airbnb is a website similar to couchsurfing but you can charge your guests money! Normally I would have just used couchsurfing if I was actually in town but since I am not Airbnb seemed like the next logical choice, and it will also help me with the cost of my Eurotrip. A cool service that Airbnb provides is professional photography of your house for free! I had one done and the results were pretty amazing!
tell your friends!

Peace from Quebec.
You can find the listing here: https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/1769067

New York Trip (October 11th-14th)

This past long weekend I went to New York! It was a school trip with my friend Kate's school. They had extra space on the bus, so a bunch of the language monitors went. Overall it was an ok trip, not great just ok. But it did allow me to find out what type of travelling I don't like to do - big groups!

So a little bit of background. This trip is organized by my friend Kate's school. There was only one bus for the trip and about 30 people came. About 1/2 are students while the rest are language monitors or teacher chaperons. When I imagined the trip I thought it was going to be my friends and I splitting off from the main group and doing our own thing, but due to lack of planning or leadership, we kind of just tagged along for the ride for most of the trip and that caused a lot of wasted times.

So on Friday we all hopped on the bus on Levis side, me Kelly, Kate, Maryse and Lynn. After a long 10 hour drive we finally arrived in New York city on Saturday morning at 9am. We were dropped off in Manhattan while the driver took our stuff to our hotel which was all the way in New Jersey (off to a bad start). So we checked out the bull of wall street, china town and some other stuff. But because it was with the big group of people it was a lot of "oh look at this famous thing", [take some pictures], off to next destination. I realized quickly I hated this type of travelling. Around 10:30 we were picked up by our bus driver again and dropped off back at our hotel in Jersey about 1 hour away. So we didn't really get to experience NYC at night at all.

I tried to broach the subject of splitting up from the main group with my friends but everyone seems pretty intent on sticking with the group simply because it was easy. Perhaps they were also scared to get lost in the big city. Back in our hotel room, the fire alarm was pulled and we had to go outside at 1am when everyone was just getting into deep sleep. Some not so nice words were said about what we would do to the person who did this - mostly by me. (At least the Francophone kids will get a real taste of Anglophone swearing, hows that for a cultural lesson).

The second day in NYC was better, we checked out this really massive cathedral and amazing sculpture, Grand Central Station, Times Square and met J-roc. J-roc is a janitor who works at the Marriot just by Times Square. We were up on the 8th floor lounge admiring the view and I took a little look around on the upper floors. As I was taking pictures three janitors came around and asked if I was the guy. Thinking they were just messing with me I decided to play along. J-roc took me to this room and started to explain some painting lols. Anyways, sensing an opportunity I asked if they had access to all the rooms in the hotel. They said yes only if I bring girls. Haha why not. A gentlemen's agreement was made and my friend Maryse, Kelly and I got access to the upper floors of the hotel and a decent view of Times Squre. Pimping out my friends ftw!

At night time I broke off from the main group with my friend Kelly and we checked out NBC studios and found an amazing sky line. And we all randomly camp upon a movie shooting. Apparently it was for the new spider man.

The last day or what I think was the last day, since I am now writing from memory I checked out Central Park on a bike by myself cause I am a bad-ass like that. It was cool but I think the park in HK was way cooler in it's architecture. But the bike part was definitely a good idea, since it was such a huge park. We also went to Chelsea market where I splurged on a boiled lobster - it was amazing! And finally we took a ferry to Staten Island and saw the skyline of Manhattan again along with the Statue of Liberty.

Kelly getting her hair caught in things.

Spiderman movie shooting

Really cool sculpture of Good vs Evil. 

The 3 people behind were sarging, the guy in the monkey mask tried a pick up line on Kelly lols: "Are you Jamaican? Cause you are Jamaican me crazy!" I told him a better one was: "Nice shoes, lets fuck." Proceeded to get a high five, like a boss. 

Top of the Rock view. 

NBC studios

My new pals J-roc and Junior

Grand central

Times Square

Peace from Quebec

Tadoussac whale watching and Levis Dinner

I am so tired after a weekend of whale watching at Tadoussac in Quebec city, dinner with friend and language exchange.

I went with some of the other Odyssey participants and the coordinators to Tadoussac for the weekend. Needless to say it was le awesome - got to meet some other cool people from all over the world and saw some whales!

Tadoussac is a small village at the fork of St. Lawrence and the Saguenay river. Because of this Whales come back every year to feed on the fish that are trapped in this area. 

I was picked up in Quebec city by some friends who came from Shiwinigan, which is a small town close to Trois Rivier. We got into the hostel late at night and walked in on the nightly performance of an awesome band for the evening. Unfortunately we couldn't catch the whole act, but afterwards we all hanged out around the camp fire and met some really cool people. I did notice however that there was a lack of marshmallows for the camp fire - a mistake I was determined to correct for the following night.

The next morning we went to hike around the mountains in Tadoussac and because of the fall season coming in, it was beautiful in all different shades of yellow, red and green. In the afternoon we all donned out wetsuits and jumped into the Zodiac for some whale watching. The Zodiac is a small speedboat made of rubber and moves extremely fast, thus it was great for whale watching because we can be at many places in a short amount of time. As our guide puts it - the key to whale watching is patience. Luckily for us we didn't have to wait long, within 5 minutes of getting into the water we saw our first whale and proceeded to oooooohhhh and awwwwww all over the boat.

The water was freezing though, even with the wet suit and boots my feet were frozen solid. At one point I was afraid I was going to have hypothermia because I couldn't feel my toes. Pro tip: wear trip layers of socks.

After coming back with the car pool my friend Kyndra from Levis messaged me and invited me to her dinner party. With free food on the line I couldn't say no! Plus I had no other food in my fridge since I was gone for the weekend. So I gladly took her up on her offer. This was the first time that everyone in my group all gathered together in one places. Usually someone was always missing. A great dinner to end of the night - or so I thought.

After dinner I caught a bus back to Laval, and it turned out my friend Rebecca and Glenna were at a cafe by my house having a language exchange with their partner Shahim. So again taking them up on the offer I went to the cafe with my backpacking backpack and tested my newly accquired French. We also chatted with the table beside us and I met a new friend, Johnathan who is going to be my language exchange partner. 










Good end to a great weekend.
Peace from Quebec.

First whale of the day. So close to the boat.

My car pool driver Anna from Shiwinigan

Dinner party pic with the Levis group