August 21st: Poutine Prized

Today mum and I managed to try the Canadian classic - poutine (fries with gravy and cheese). This was so-so. I was not taken with the cheese and gravy on chips combo. Its best feature was that our entire poutine dinner only set us back only four dollars. The other Canadian classic sampled today was Sangria. Now I don't know why, but practically every Canadian restaurant I walk past advertises its sangria. And every person in these restaurants is drinking about a litre of this glorious drink. So today, mum and I ordered a demi-litre! How daring (for us), but this was probably a weak effort by Canadian standards!

I have tried Canada's other national food bit - Timbits! These are the middle parts of the doughnuts at Tim Horto's. This was terribly exciting, but terribly embarrassing - I was so demented. I went up to the register, and asked for Timbits. The lady at the counter waited for my next instruction. I looked at her blankly, expecting her to get out the Timbits boxes (like a happy meal box) and start loading it with alleged Timbits! Finally the silence was broken, with "what did you want?"
"Timbits", I said again,
"ohhh-kay what flavour?",
"there are flavours!" I asked
"yes" and she pointed at rows and rows of Timbits - there were way too many to name.
I panicked and asked for chocolate, and then came the question of how many!!! Now I don't know how many Timbits the average Canadian eats, but you can buy 40 for $5. So I must have seemed very weak when I asked for two, and was charged $0.47! Oh well, a learning Tim experience!

After these nourishing Timbits, we wandered down to McGill to check out the action on campus. At the gates, there were girls selling McGill t-shirts (HARVARD - America's McGill). That gave me a chuckle, until it was revealed that you would have to pay to wear this message! I have been loaded up with my McGill ID card, which is much nicer than my ANU blob, and had me superimposed in front of an attractive McGill building. I also have been loaded up with billions of pamflets, booklets, and McGill lolly pops - which have the logo on the lolly! McGill is very self indulgent. We went inside the book shop. There is every form of McGill clothing available. Yes, there's jerseys, jumpers and t-shirts. Then there's track-pants, pajamas, underwear, g-strings, mugs, water bottles, gift-wrap, key chains, hip flasks, socks, jocks, umbrellas, license plates, licence plate frames. If you can think of an item, it's got a McGill logo on it! There's even a range of clothes for the pretentious parent; McGill mom, McGill dad, McGill grandmom and grandpop jumpers, mugs and key-chains. Then there was the baby wear, don't even get me started on how much baby wear there was!

There were lots of exciting tents being set up around the uni, but these are for the weekend and next week when the Frosh begins. I am a little bit excited! Apparently there is more poutine available at the Frosh, so I'll be able to compare and assess if I actually like poutine, or if it is just bad everywhere!

The rest of the day was spent shopping; sheets (my bed is a double, so my single sheets made a nice around the world trip for their own amusement!!!), phones (which are crazy - I am charged for incoming and outgoing calls, incoming and outgoing text messages, caller id, voice mail and just about every feature on the phone has a charge attached! I'm going to be broke) and all sorts of housing goods were sussed. There will have to be more shopping done when I move into my house, as otherwise there will be too much to carry down to my apartment! I have a rich full weekend of moving into my home for the next four months!