As far as possible, the photos fit the text of the posts, but I chose to put the photos from my arrival at Winnipeg into the Winnipeg post even though that post actually starts the next day and my arrival is described in the second Peterborough post.

When I was done, I had a few photos left over that I didn’t want not to post (pardon the double negative), so I’ve included them here instead. They are pretty random. Feel free to use this entry to send me your comments pertaining to any of my Canada photos

I’m in Valby, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Back in the Old Country.

I’m trying to debrief myself onto this blog before the last part of my head comes with me back from Canada. I should probably skip Thursday and Friday and go straight to Saturday, which I remember as the best day of my vacation because it was packed with activities.

Friday evening, Lawrence drove me up to Winter’s family cottage on Falcon Lake to meet with her uncle and cousins. It was about a 2 hour drive from St. Malo, and the night was spent playing Cranium and drinking with the neighbours. I may be generalising too much in either direction, but it seems to me that the Canadians use their cottages for the opposite purpose cottages are used over here: we leave the cities and go to our cottages to get away from people, whereas it seems like the Canadians come to their cottages to be around other people with cottages.

In the morning, we were joined by Winter and went swimming off a tiny, almost private beach. Then we went horse-back riding. Winter used to work at the nearby ranch, so we got a private ride for the price of a normal one, meaning the four of us went alone with a guide. The trail was really beautiful, taking us through coniferous forest, down into an old gravel pit, into deciduous forest, through the water of a marsh area, and over the rocky ground of the Canadian Shield. It was later brought to my attention that I looked quite amusing whenever we went into a trot, but at least I had no problem staying on the horse, so I suppose I’ll just have to learn proper trot technique next time I get a chance to ride.

After the ride, we went down to the lake again to go swimming off a rock outcropping (covered in seagull shit and bits of dead crab – all the more incentive to go into the water). For reasons of squeamishness, I’m not a fan of swimming in the sea, so I really appreciated this chance to frolic in a nice, clean fresh-water lake. As we’d returned to the cottage and dinner was being prepared, a friend of the family came by in his flashy new speed boat and took us for a sail around the lake at unreasonable velocity.

That, my dear friends, is how you enjoy your vacation.

Now… the problem with travelling is that so much time is spent getting around. Flying is fast and convenient, but it’s not fast enough, and it’s not very pleasant. If there’s a less interesting way to spend a whole day than sitting on a transatlantic flight for 9 hours, I have yet to discover it. When the flight takes you towards the east and the hours almost literally fly right past you such that you arrive at an 8 am that feels exactly like 2 am, you know you’ll enjoy the after-effects of your trip for another 2 or 3 days at least.

Jetlag aside, this trip was just what I needed. I return blonder than I left, and with much healthier skin for some reason (I guess sunlight doesn’t just give you skin cancer, it can benefit you a lot in moderation). After several summers idled away in front of my PC monitor at home or at work, it feels great to finally get out of the country and do something genuinely worth-while. It was my first vacation of more than 2 weeks, and it was my first time ever out of the European Union. I know this vacation is going to stay with me for the rest of my life.

Canada, in very short, as seen through the eyes of a Dane, is: huge and mostly empty, American but friendlier, wealthy but modest, beautiful and varied, and has truly awful infrastructure – seriously, even if you find a home where you’re blessed with both Internet access and a cell phone signal, you’ll be truly lucky if any buses go there, and you can count trains right out. I would love to get a job at BioWare and live in Edmonton, but I suspect I will miss my dark rye bread and my bicycle. Hopefully next year, I’ll be able to come back and attend Lawrence and Winter’s wedding. And maybe I’ll continue on to British Columbia afterwards, and see some of those Canadian Rockies that everybody pictures when they think of Canada.

Tuesday, Lawrence took me back to Winnipeg for a bit of a tour. We started at the Manitoba museum, which had some pretty nice dioramas including a full-sized replica of the 1600′s ship Nonsuch that you could walk around on (the whole thing reminded me of Thief: Deadly Shadows). Then we went to the Forks, the slightly touristy area where the two major rivers of Winnipeg meet, and walked along the partially flooded bank of Red River to Manitoba’s ridiculously extravagant legislative building.

Unfortunately we missed a guided tour about all the masonic traits of the building, but we took a quick walk around by ourselves and found a painted star on the floor where if you stand there and speak, every surface of the room is designed to reflect the sound right back at you to sinister effect.

From there, we went back to the Forks, bought some candy at a store inside an old train car(!), I bought some stuff for my parents, and we had mediocre dinner at a pub because the great Italian place downstairs was full of people. After a trip to a burned-down cathedral where a new church has been built inside the old stone walls (which looked quite striking, photos will be added later), we took a short walk around the French quarter, and then picked up some stuff for the house on the way home.

If it’s acceptable to pass judgment on the town based on a one day trip, I’d say that Winnipeg is a very nice city. It seems not a lot larger than Peterborough, but it has a bit more of a large city mentality because it’s a provincial capital – ie. it actually has a few skyscrapers. Compared to Toronto, it’s a tiny and far less interesting town, but it has more space and much more pleasant air – it’s actually a nicer place to be.

The city tour set me up nicely for a more nature-oriented Wednesday. After a nice breakfast and a few hours of feeble attempts to help Larry’s family around the house in preparation for his mother-in-law’s wake tomorrow (I really want to help, but I’m terrified of all the spiders in the old boxes), Larry and I took the canoe out on the river that runs right past his house. We went about half an hour up the river and then back again, with the intention of going in the other direction across the lake to the beach. Unfortunately the wind on the lake was pretty bad, so we returned to the house after around an hour out. It was super fun to get to canoe again though, which I haven’t done in 8-9 years by my estimation, and it was great to get some sun and some exercise.

Instead of taking the canoe up the river to the beach, we jumped into the car with Lawrence’s fiance Winter and her cousin Jennifer and drove there. Another first-in-a-while for me, as it’s been far too long since I’ve had a good swim. Around Copenhagen, we have a nice selection of beaches, but it’s all salt water, and I’m not a fan of swimming in the sea. This was my first chance in quite a while to dip into a beautiful clean fresh water lake, and there was much water-based frolicking.

To finish off the day, we got changed and went directly from the beach out to a farm near Larry’s house to have dinner with some friends of the family. The farm is roughly 35,000 acres, and I got an introduction to one of the enormous combine harvesters, feeling a little like a small boy in awe of all the massive farm equipment. The barbeque dinner was great, and we stayed for a while for drinks and conversation.

I gotta say I wasn’t expecting a proper country vacation when I decided to come over here, but that was mostly from lack of research. It’s pretty clear that Manitoba is mainly farm country, and I’m easily getting the dose of nature that I was hoping to get out of Canada. It may not make for very interesting reading, but it sure has been very pleasant so far. Here’s hoping I won’t feel like too much of an interloper at the wake tomorrow.

I’m in St. Malo, near Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. More importantly I am writing this from within the house of Lawrence Jonathan Laxdal.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In terms of getting out and seeing things, Warsaw Caves turned out to be the high point of the Peterborough chapter of my vacation. I was hoping we could go to Burleigh Falls, but due to our dependency on finding a driver, as well as the need for spectacular weather in which to go swimming, our plans never panned out. Instead, we consumed more alcohol than I suspect I have ever consumed in my entire life.

Peterborough isn’t actually that small a town; if you count its outlying areas, it apparently has somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000 inhabitants, which is alledgedly the amount of people living in Copenhagen proper. The difference being the greater Copenhagen area has a million people, most of whom work or study in Copenhagen and have most of their social life there. Peterborough definitely feels like a small town, and when you go out, it seems impossible not to run into somebody you know – at least when you’re in the company of an old local party animal.

There’s a certain sort of pre-establishment 20-something social circle that you occasionally encounter in North American fiction, for my part most recently in the (Canadian, as it just so happens) Scott Pilgrim books, which I haven’t had any personal experience with. I’m not sure if this is because circles like that don’t exist in Denmark, or if it’s simply that I fail to get out enough to become part of one. Either way I got a fairly solid idea of what it’s like after meeting what must be every 20-something in Peterborough and even living with a couple of them for a week. It’s fun, and it’s interesting, but it’s also kind of taxing – I’m just not that social; I managed it because I’m on vacation, but I doubt I’d be able to keep it up all the time.

Thursday we went out to a cabin owned by one of Alex’s old friends. It was by the lake and very pleasant all around, and we spent most of the time playing Ping-Pong or Talisman, watching Burn Notice, drinking heavily, and roasting things over a campfire. Sadly there was no swimming, as the water was a little icky and the weather kind of bland a lot of the time. We went home on Saturday in time to help our Peterborough hosts build a trebuchet out of the remains of an old staircase.

Sunday brought about some shopping (I found a very nice second-hand book shop where I traded War of the Flowers in for Red Storm Rising – kind of random, I know), some more work on the siege weapon, and a nice calm barbeque with some more of Alex’s old friends at a really nice apartment with a roof deck overlooking the whole downtown. I went home soon after midnight so I wouldn’t feel too bad when I had to get up to catch the bus back to Toronto the next morning.

The voyage from Peterborough to Winnipeg via Toronto took the whole day and was distributed across bus, taxi, airplane, and car, but I made it without throwing up, so that’s a good trip as far as I’m concerned. At first glance, Winnipeg looks about the size of Peterborough, which came as quite a surprise seeing how it’s the capital of the province, but apparently Manitoba is extremely thinly populated – even by Canadian standards. After dinner and my first ever, somewhat traumatic, visit to Wal-Mart, Lawrence drove us out to his house way out in hillbilly country.

I won’t hesitate to say it was the best drive I’ve ever taken. In fact it was probably the only good car ride I’ve ever taken. It was like the shortest road trip ever, just under an hour along completely straight country roads, through the flattest terrain I’ve ever seen – and I’m Danish, so that’s saying a lot. Honestly, I’d been told that Manitoba was mostly prairie, but I’d kind of written that off. How much prairie should I really expect in this modern age of thorough agricultural exploitation?

Well, I was partially right, every inch of land has been converted to farmland, but the whole countryside still emanates prairie. Especially since I picked a particularly fortuitous time to arrive, just as thunderstorms were rolling around the most dramatic sky I’ve ever seen, a spectacular light show flashing across the clouds throughout the drive. It genuinely felt like how America should feel, and it was very easy to imagine hard men on horseback herding cattle across the fields. With unobstructed views for miles in all directions, the sky has never seemed higher than it is in Manitoba.

Monday I took a Greyhound bus (confirming that they do in fact exist outside of the movies) to Peterborough, the “grocery basket of Canada” as the residents apparently call it. I’m here because my class mate Alex, with whom I worked on both Cometes and ParaDime, lived here for 8 years and so came back to visit his old friends over the summer. I was wanting to go to Canada anyway, to see the country and visit Lawrence, so figured I’d kill three birds with one stone and hang with Alex for a week as well.

So far it’s been completely different from Toronto in exactly the right way. Toronto was huge, smelly, impressive, huge, noisy, interesting, and huge. Even with a population of around 70,000 people, Peterborough is laid back and quiet. It feels like an actual vacation, with open farm country, calm lakes, small bars where everyone knows everyone else, close proximity to beaches and forests, and a charmingly derelict house with two very friendly cats and the largest St. Bernard ever (Huxley is a 10 months old puppy of 190 cm who destroys your foot completely if he steps on it). I’m sleeping on the couch in the attic next to a big TV hooked up to an Xbox 360, a PS3, and a Wii – I feel right at home.

Despite the title of the post, this part of the vacation has been really relaxed so far. Other than a fun night out yesterday, the most exciting thing we’ve been up to so far was going to Warsaw park, a forest with some seriously exciting geological traits. The “trail” we took was mostly made up of rocks aligned at odd angles. One of the areas we visited was full of “kettles”, completely circular holes in the rocks dug out with infinite slowness by expanding and contracting water, some of them big enough to fall through. Another area was full of caves, cracks in the rocks leading far into the ground. We weren’t equipped nor inclined to venture in there, but just sitting at the edges of the caves looking into the cold, damp darkness was enough to get the point. It was exactly the kind of thing I was expecting from Canada before I left.

Tomorrow Alex and I are heading with another of his friends out to a cottage by a lake where we can take the relaxation to the next level. There may or may not be canoes involved.

Photos follow.

In the end, with my residual counter-aggression excised onto the Internet, my Friday was salvaged by a shower, a change of clothes, and dinner at a nice Indian restaurant name of Saffron Tree secreted away in Toronto’s otherwise uncharming hospital/university district. So far the portions here seem pretty much the same as what they serve in Denmark, but the food prices are consistently low, even despite the unfortunate exchange rate which means I’m paying a lot more for everything I buy here than I would have if I’d visited a year or two ago.

Saturday was set aside for Gelo. I’d quite forgotten, but Gelo reminded me that we met during my stint as a conscientious objector at Greenpeace, which by my reckoning was some time in 2005, which means I’ve known Gelo for 5 years and never met him in person – such is the way of the Internet, and of course this re(?)union will already be outdone when I visit Lawrence on the 26th, who I have known and worked with for 8 years without meeting him.

I was quite impressed and grateful that Gelo could find the time and endurance to make the 8 hour drive from New York City to Toronto, a drive which my mind was slightly boggled to realise took as long as my trans-atlantic flight from Denmark. Gelo had brought his brother and sister-in-law to make the drive more palatable, and we started out by having lunch together at a nice Vietnamese place where most of our dishes regrettably tasted of nothing at all. Whatever, we were there for the company anyway.

While the others went to visit the CN Tower, I had tickets for Gelo and myself to see the newly premiered Inception in an IMAX theatre. We have only one such theatre in Copenhagen, and its mandate seems to restrict it to showing nature documentaries, as it’s the centrepiece of some sort of science museum. Inception was my first IMAX feature film, and it didn’t let me down.

Aside from the obviously spectacular visual effects that most of the reviews seem to focus on, I was most impressed by how well the film explored its central conceit of shared lucid dreaming – it incorporated so many intriguing concepts and aspects of this imaginary technology without ever making it feel contrived. I was pleased to find that they’d wrapped all these ideas into a traditional heist movie, which made the film’s structure very easy to grasp and allowed the audience to focus on the mind-boggling traits of the themes it dealt with.

Whether the IMAX format itself did much for the experience, I can’t say – as I also experienced with 3D, once you’re engrossed in the film itself, it makes no real difference if you’re watching it on a 17″ computer monitor or a wrap-around IMAX dome with full surround sound. I do wonder though if this may not in fact have been the first IMAX theatre in the world, considering that the format was invented in Canada and that the film was preceded by a 4 minute self-aggrandising laser show not unlike listening to a really self-absorbed person going on and on about how great his computer is, even though it’s actually several years old and your own is a bit better (the IMAX theatre in Copenhagen, for all the limitations of its repertoire, is an actual wrap-around dome, unlike the one we went to in Toronto).

After the film, we met up with Gelo’s brother and sister-in-law once more for dinner (at the Saffron Tree, where I knew from the night before their food had taste) and then hastily parted ways as they wanted to get back across the border before the sun was down.

Today has been pretty relaxed; I have mostly spent it sampling the various benches along the harbourfront with a milkshake or a juice and a good book for company. I borrowed a great and very quirky fantasy book name of The War of the Flowers from my mom’s bookshelves before I left, written by Tad Williams and in some ways quite reminiscent of Planescape: Torment, not least in its roisterous subversion of cliches so old and dusty you barely recognise them as such until they’re turned around and used to ambush your preconceptions. It’s a good 800 pages long, and I had planned for it to last me all three weeks, but somehow I’ve ended up chewing through it and have almost finished it already.

I did find the time to visit the CN Tower (Canadian National Tower, as it’s apparently named in full, after the railway company) today, which Gelo’s tight schedule and my inconsiderate cinema arrangements didn’t leave room for yesterday. It’s… tall. I’m not sure what else there is to say about it, but I shall try to come up with something a little more interesting. I was very apprehensive about paying nearly $25 for an elevator ride (albeit a long one), but once I’d coughed up the dough, I was pleased to find a very small museum of sorts inside, along with a shopping gallery I had no reason to visit. Combined with the museum, the outrageousness of the whole experience was just about worth the money. The view from the observation area was stunning, prompting me to take a whole day’s allowance of photos in all of about 10 minutes, and their infamous glass floor that puts you on a window looking 370-something meters straight down was hard to stand on for too long at a time without getting a bit nervous. Even that overpriced elevator ride was an experience in itself, ascending nearly 400 meters in just 58 seconds, which I think is more or less what it takes the elevator in my hostel to get up to my room on the 19th floor.

I even found the time to launder my clothes so I don’t have to go naked for at least another week. Now you must excuse me as I have to get back to my room and pack my stuff for the trip to Peterborough tomorrow. I’m not sure what the computer/Internet conditions will be like there, so you may hear less from me for this part of the trip.

Yesterday I left the city without leaving Toronto.

The Greater Toronto Area – the acronym of which I just can’t get over – is cut through by a series of ravines which have somehow been left alone just north of the downtown area, presumably because they would be too expensive to level out and build on (Toronto seems to be ruthlessly pro-development, they’re building new shit everywhere).

I took the subway up to Davisville station, walked through Mt. Pleasant Cemetery, which is indeed quite pleasant, entered Moore Park Ravine, and immediately forgot that I was in the middle of a city of 4 million people. Those ravines are simply fantastic: crooked little streams snaking between boulders, with cliffs on either side tall enough to block out all noise from the city. Once in a while you’ll walk under an overpass or a railway bridge so huge it makes you dizzy, and momentarily remember where you are.

My route took me through Moore Park Ravine to Don Valley Brickworks, an old quarry converted into a small natural reserve, into Park Drive Ravine, looping back across Mt. Pleasant Road through the Vale of Avoca Ravine up to St. Claire metro station. The whole walk took well over 3 hours and left me both rejuvinated and exhausted.

In the evening, I went to an extremely cheap grill party on the 23rd floor roof deck of my hostel (a student apartment complex in downtown Toronto which serves as a cheap hotel over the summer) where hotel guests could eat as much as they wanted for an astonishing $3. The food was pure junk, but at that price I would be an asshole to complain – plus, they served Salt & Vinegar crisps which are all but impossible to obtain in Denmark, so all else was forgiven.

The weather reports here have been eyebrow-raisingly pessimistic all week, reporting cloudiness, rain, or thunder every day despite constant scorching sunlight. I decided to spend my Friday in the Downtown area and check out some of the sights in Old York, such as St. Lawrence Market, St. James Cathedral, and the old post office.

My first indication that I had made a mistake when I got dressed was an oddly leering comment from a couple of random idlers on my way to St. Lawrence Market, something about a “black block” and some trouble last week. I didn’t at first know what they were talking about, so I just smiled and waved them off. A few paces down the street I realised they were talking about the riots during the G20 summit in Toronto last week – I was wearing a t-shirt with the word “anarchy” on it.

In Copenhagen, this t-shirt means very nearly nothing. People will notice my general appearance (no piercings or tattoos, generally well groomed and well dressed) and assume I’m either being ironic or that I have no idea what anarchy even means. Neither is true as a matter of fact, I happen to think anarchy would be a splendid form of (no) government, if it were at all possible to establish with our current crop of humans, which unfortunately it is not – the behaviour of so-called “anarchists” at events like G20 are more than adequate proof of that.

As anarchy is clearly not practical, I’ll happily settle for social democracy; I certainly wouldn’t start destroying storefronts and throwing rocks at the police in futile and misguided attempts to bring down a system that has served us as well as anything probably will for the foreseeable future. I’m an anarchist in the same way I’m a pacifist – it’s beautiful in theory, but unfeasible to put into practice.

Unfortunately that seems to be quite a bit more nuance than people can be expected to infer out of a t-shirt. I shrugged off the initial comments, though they did make me feel somewhat uncomfortable with my own choice of clothes for a while, but then an hour or so later, after enjoying a fairly nice iced vanilla latte from Starbucks in St. James Park, a fat drunk bum on Trinity Square groped me and tried to throw me into a fountain after making fun of that goddamn shirt.

It was intensely unpleasant, but it could’ve been much worse. Good thing he was drunk, slow, and stupid so I managed to stand my ground and dislodge myself from the asshole, because I doubt my precious camera would’ve survived a dip in the powerfully chlorinated water.

Once I’ve wrapped things up here, I’m heading straight back to the hotel to change my shirt. I’m struggling to focus on the beautiful old buildings and the atmospheric places I’ve visited today instead of the bullshit I’ve had to deal with because of my t-shirt, but I fear my Friday has been irrevocably tainted by ignorance.I realise this must seem like a bit of an overreaction, but I’m not used to anything remotely like this, and everything I’ve experienced of Canada so far has been so nice as to make me completely drop my guard.

It’s just a fucking t-shirt.

It’s pretty damn hot over here. Yesterday was one of those really unpleasant days where it’s super hot, but the sun isn’t shining – Damocles thunder hangs menacingly in the clouds, but it never seems to drop. There’s too little wind, too much moisture in the air; it’s stifling.

Today was all out sunny summer awesomeness. When the sun is out, the warmth is drier, and you can escape it by going into the shades. More temptingly, you can douse yourself in sunscreen and revel in it.

I walked down Yonge St. (officially the world’s longest street according to Guiness) to the harbour and caught the ferry to Toronto Islands. It was amazing – a series of sizeable islands covered in beaches, super well-groomed parks, and a couple of charming little alternative bohemian communities (also a small airport, but it’s not prominent). If it wouldn’t be such an enormous hassle to get the groceries, I would really envy the people living out there.

After chilling my feet in the shallow beach water, I rented a single-speed bicycle, unequipped my t-shirt, and cruised around the islands for a couple of hours. Pure bliss.

When I returned to Toronto city, I then walked up to the Baldwin Village and spent far too much money on dinner. I’m not sure I have enough energy left to get back to my hostel, I may just have to crash in this Internet cafe overnight.

(I haven’t decided what I’ll do about my photos – I don’t have the time or the software to add them while I’m here, so I may either add them to the posts retroactively once I get home, or I may just post a separate photodump entry. What would you prefer?)

Update: Photos follow.

I’m in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

First impression: um… did I accidentally take a flight to the US?

Very interesting city, very friendly people, very much like every depiction of America I’ve ever seen on film. Seriously, my first experience with Toronto was a huge network of the widest highways I’ve ever seen. Who needs six lanes of highway!? If they’d told me they’d flown me to Los Angeles instead, I would’ve totally believed them.

It has this stink of garbage everywhere except in the parks.

The major thing that seems very un-American is that they have quite a lot of bike lanes, which is awesome. They used to have a system called Bikeshare whereby you could get a one-year membership for $30 and then borrow bikes for free, which would’ve been perfect for me, but unfortunately it’s no longer active, so I guess I’ll have to rent bikes by the day

I bought a shitty pre-paid phone, so now I temporarily have a Canadian telephone number!

Also I’ve visited Best Buy for the first time in my life. It was scary.

That is all for now. Photos follow.

Last week, I went to Oslo to pitch a game for British student game competition Dare To Be Digital. If you’ve never heard of Dare before, the premise is that teams pitch a concept for a game and compete for the chance to get money and counselling to turn their concept into a game in 10 weeks over the summer. The competition accepts a single team from Scandinavia, as well as certain other regions.

Eight teams applied to the Scandinavian part of the competition, five of us were invited to pitch our concept to three industry judges (one from IO Interactive in Denmark, one from Swedish DICE, and one from Norwegian Funcom) in Oslo. We didn’t win, but we did have a fun 1-day trip to Oslo (at our own expense, but still). We also got to hang out with a bunch of other game students, three teams from Norway and one from Sweden.

I invite you to check out this post over on Morten’s blog (which has also been added to my sidebar), as it has lots of details about the game we pitched, including the feedback we got from the judges and our in-engine presentation and prototype, which runs in your browser via the Unity web player.

Due to the volcanic ash cloud from Eyjafjallajökull, we decided not to take our chances with the air-plane we’d originally ordered tickets for. Instead, we bought tickets for the Oslo boat, which is a cruise ship that sails between Copenhagen and Oslo every night. We may not have won the pitch, but nobody can say we don’t travel in style. Photos of the trip follow, click for full size versions with captions.

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