The remains of my list
31. Joey's Pizza
The life-line of studying students in Sackville, and the default place for groups of people to have dinner, Joey's made a living off of Sackville's students and they knew how to cater to us. Their garlic fingers were delicious (and came with the intriguing option of caesar dressing instead of donair sauce!) and they kept special hours during exam time, for students who needed brain food at two in the morning. But they also had a decent range of non-pizza fare. I have a lot of great memories at Joey's - Palmer girls eating there after a Film Society movie, cast parties collecting food and drink, and my most recent memory is going back to Sackville with Benn. He was still so shocked at actually being with me that whenever people walked past the big picture window as we ate, he kept gesturing and going "I'm with her!".
32. Palmer Hall
Now torn down, Palmer was the site of the first Mount Allison building and one of the oldest buildings on campus. It peered out from under tall pine trees with an almost Gothic appearance, like a castle. It had burned down several times in the past and been rebuilt and it was STILL incredibly old. An all-girls residence, Palmer housed the lesbian/nun/slut population (Jon's first words to me ever were "Oho! So you're a Palmer girl!") although my main reason for choosing the all-girl's res was it's abundance of single rooms. My room in first year was tiny, but it was private. I was a third floor girl, and while we third floor girls got along well, and we also were very friendly with the first floor girls... there was something in the water on second floor. Second floor girls spent most of their first year developing new Palmer cheers. I think that tells you everything you need to know.
Anyway, I spent two years in residence in dear old Palmer, and I have never wished for a moment that I had chosen another residence. Ther'es something about an all-girls residence which gives it a totally different culture from other residences. Palmer was fairly small and close-knit. When one person made popcorn, everyone could smell it and would come looking for a taste. Campbell Hall folk, you don't know what you missed.
33. Strawberry Season
If there is a strawberry season in Vancouver, I totally missed it. But in rural Nova Scotia, you can't miss it. Everyone starts serving strawberries with everything. There are strawberry shortcakes, and strawberry mousses, and strawberries in your yoghurt and on people's ice creams and in pies and tarts and jams. On weekends people go strawberry picking. I can taste the shortcake now. Mmmm....
34. Blueberry Season
...And then it's blueberry season and now suddenly you can't go anywhere without people pushing blueberry pie or blueberry grunt under your nose. There's even a restaurant out in Canning which is entirely dedicated to blueberries.
35. The Oxford Blueberry
And that reminds me of the Oxford Blueberry, that enormous plaster monstrosity which is the only notable thing about Oxford. My bus would always stop there on the way to and from Mount Allison. My coworker Keryn was showing me pics of her trip accross Canada and said "look! There was this big blueberry..." and I said, "Yup. That's Oxford, all right."
36. Windsor Theatre
I was trying on Saris at Keryn's house the other day, to see if any of her sari blouses would fit my broad shoulders and pendulous boobas (they didn't) and as I was taking off my shirt, she was like "uh, do you want me to close the door so Mike doesn't see you if he walks by?"
Thanks to Windsor Theatre, I totally forgot to be self conscious about taking off my shirt when there is a man in the next room. Now, mind you, Keryn's Mike is different from a random man. I have an established platonic relationship with Mike which leads me to think of him as an entirely separate entity from that of a random man/would-be rapist. But even that level of comfort is entirely due to changing in Windsor Theatre's green room.
I met so many awesome people through Windsor Theatre, and I miss them all. Thom - "A little violence never hurt anybody!", Genevieve -"What's funnier than a dead baby?", Eleanor - "Carol Lynch... is losing her hair.", Ian... no, you know, I can't even begin to quote Ian. If it isn't said by Ian, it's just not as funny. I can't explain what is so hilarious about Ian Mullan, just that he's frigging hilarious. Drew, who I still associate with Windsor Theatre even though I met him through Jonathan - "I'll be out in a minute, I'm just changing... into a man eating lizard!", Devin Upham and his ripped jeans... you know.... this could be a very long list. I'm just going to stop. All I can say is, Windsor Theatre, you ROCK.
Oh yeah, and Benn. I met him there too. I like him also. :-p
37. Hall's Harbour
Hall's Harbour was a common day-trip for me and my friends, especially Naomi. We'd go throw rocks on the beach, explore caves, and marvel at the cute little boats sitting on the bottom of the harbour during low tide. My parents invariably took visitors there for lobster. Hall's Harbour is just so quintessentially Nova Scotia.
38. Family card nights
My Dad's family likes to get together and laugh and joke and play cards. When I was with Jonathan, we'd get together with his parents and play cards. When Benn and I lived in Halifax, we'd go up to his parents' place and... you guessed it... play cards.
I don't have family to play cards with here. It feels like something is missing.
39. Lobster Dos
I think every family in Nova Scotia has at least one day during the summer when they gather en masse, and the women fuss around laying out potato and macaroni salads while the men send lobster after lobster to its doom in a massive, steam-belching pot. Then the whole family tucks napkins into their shirt fronts and gets cracking. Me, I stick to mussells, but I still love a lobster do.
40. Guitar Jam sessions
Just as traditional as lobster dos and card games, it seems like out of every ten Nova Scotians you gather together, at least two will have guitars with them. Then they sit down and pick out tunes to sing together. If they're young folk, they pick out Great Big Sea songs, or try to turn Nirvana or Fingers Eleven or Nickelback into acoustic guitar. If they're older, they play Gordon Lightfoot and Stompin Tom Connors. But the guitars always come out, I can guarantee it.
41. Celtic music at your local pub
Even if you just go down to the pub for a drink, chances are that there'll be a group of local musicians in the corner with fiddles and flutes and Bodhran drums, jamming it up Celtic style. They aren't paid to be there - they're just guys who like Celtic music, jamming in a pub.
43. Nova Scotia fiddling
Nova Scotia fiddlers are commonly found, too, at local festivals and farm markets. My Dad plays background guitar for a fiddling group. Nova Scotia fiddling is a highly distinctive sound. All the songs sound a lot alike to me, and I wouldn't listen to it for pleasure, but it's a sound that I associate with summer and people gathering together and just... Nova Scotia.
43. Not being mocked for my accent
My friends out here tease me occasionally about my Nova Scotian accent. It amuses them that I pronounce things like a stereotypical Canadian. I say "oat" instead of "owt" and "caar" instead of "cahr". But man, they don't know how mild my accent is. That South Mountain accent? Whew. I couldn't reproduce it if I tried. And Cape Breton accents are abouot as truly Canadian as accents come!
44. That Ron James clip reminds me... Tim Hortons. Sure, they have Tim Hortons here, and people like it. Especially since the economy crash, Tim Hortons is growing in popularity. But in Nova Scotia, Timmies, like Alexander Keith's, is not so much just a commercial product - it's a way of life. The size of a town can be directly measured by how many Tims it has. You tend to get about one Tim Hortons per three to five thousand people. So Wolfville is a one Tim town. But a slightly bigger town would have two Tims. Halifax has one every two or three blocks. Any further than that, people start getting faint and passing out from Tim Hortons withdrawal.
45. Small Town intersections
I know this isn't a pure Maritime thing, since BC has lots of little backwater towns too, but I miss living in a small town. Towns like Sackville, where there is ONE stop light, and it actually has, as part of it's normal sequence, a red light at all four corners so that pedestrians can cross on the diagonal. I miss crossing on the diagonal, dangit! Or Wolfville, where putting in a single stop sign in the centre of town causes mass confusion.
46. Bluenose Ghosts
Nova Scotia is old, and where you get history, you get ghost stories. Of course, most Nova Scotian ghosts are actually ships. Like in Mahone Bay, where people occasionally claim to catch sight of the Young Teazer burning in the bay, while the crew scream in the riggings. Or the Mary Celeste, originally the Amazon, and built in Canning back when Canning was on water, which became a famous ghost ship. When I worked in the Canning library, I actually met a man named Bruce Spicer, who was descended from the men who built the ill-fated Mary Celeste, and he showed me a photo of her. The photo was back from the days when she was the Amazon, but looking at that faded photo, while pondering her mysterious fate, really chilled me.
All BC has is Ogopogo, and who is scared of Ogopogo? Ghost ships are way creepier than second rate Loch-Ness Lookalikes.
47. Vogue Cinema
Best movie theatre ever. Sure, there was only one screen, and it was small, and if you sat in the back or up on the balcony it looked even smaller, but man, I loved that place. The popcorn prices were reasonable, and the midnight Toonie movie couldn't be beat for a cheap fun drunken time. Oh, Vogue, I love you.
48. Hennigar's Farm Market
Going to Hennigar's for an icecream in the evening sunlight of a summer evening is part of Wolfville life. I don't eat ice cream, but I'd buy some fudge and then look at the goats and rabbits. And Mmm... then we'd bring home a pie...
49. Atlantic Theatre Festival
Now bankrupt, the ATF was an amazing theatre. I can't think of a single play I saw there that I didn't enjoy. They picked great plays - lots of Wilde and Coward and Ibsen and Shakespeare and then put them on wonderfully. The thrust stage made for an excellent experience, and the actors were just so much fun. I miss going to ATF plays.
50. The Back 40
The woods in back of my house was like my own private domain when I was young. It was my Narnia, my Terebithia, and I would hurry back there after school in the fall and spring to meet up with my own imaginings. There was the ravine to explore, the bluff overlooking Blomidon, where I could sit and watch the sunset, and horses to visit on the neighbour's border. My own secret world, which is waiting for me and wondering where I went.
51. Main Squeeze Pitas
It first was the Main Squeeze, and then the Pita Shack. I don't know if it's still there, but oh man, their club house pita was something amazing which I have never found replicated anywhere else, ever. It was drippy, chewy, garlicky deliciousness. My mouth waters just thinking about it. And BIG! Each pita was two meals.
52. Walking on the dykes
The dykes were such a great place to walk and talk with friends. It's peaceful to a troubled soul, and to a really troubled soul the SPLAT of rocks being thrown down to the mud flats during low tide was especially cathartic. You could see forever, so you knew your conversation wasn't being overheard, and you could just let the dogs run while you walked and walked. Sunset is best.
53. Ted and Christian
My boy-cousins, who are like my brothers. I miss them. They need to move out here so my kids will know who Uncle Ted and Uncle Christian ARE. Plus I need Ted to fix my computer problems, and Christian to make awkward and delightfully offensive jokes. Can't wait to see them.
54. Girl's nights with Suman and Maeghan
Carbs, movies, giggling, and careful dissections of romantic relationships. It's just not the same with anyone else.
55. PS2 nights with Jenn.
Man, sometimes I'd stay at her house until 2 in the morning, killing Iraqi soldiers in horribly trite and offensive war PS2 games and we'd just be having a ball. Then I'd stay an hour longer and we'd talk about everything under the sun.
Why don't they make Katamari for the Wii??
55. Home
My bedroom, frozen in time with a Titanic poster still on the wall and... no, I think the pictures of first year university, including many shots of Jonathan, have been taken down. I THINK. But it's filled with my old books, my old photo albums, my old stuffed animals friends. It's mine, and I miss it. And downstairs, Mum is clattering dishes to make dinner, and Dad's playing guitar in the basement, and strains are wafting up through the air vents.
Home. I'm going there.
The life-line of studying students in Sackville, and the default place for groups of people to have dinner, Joey's made a living off of Sackville's students and they knew how to cater to us. Their garlic fingers were delicious (and came with the intriguing option of caesar dressing instead of donair sauce!) and they kept special hours during exam time, for students who needed brain food at two in the morning. But they also had a decent range of non-pizza fare. I have a lot of great memories at Joey's - Palmer girls eating there after a Film Society movie, cast parties collecting food and drink, and my most recent memory is going back to Sackville with Benn. He was still so shocked at actually being with me that whenever people walked past the big picture window as we ate, he kept gesturing and going "I'm with her!".
32. Palmer Hall
Now torn down, Palmer was the site of the first Mount Allison building and one of the oldest buildings on campus. It peered out from under tall pine trees with an almost Gothic appearance, like a castle. It had burned down several times in the past and been rebuilt and it was STILL incredibly old. An all-girls residence, Palmer housed the lesbian/nun/slut population (Jon's first words to me ever were "Oho! So you're a Palmer girl!") although my main reason for choosing the all-girl's res was it's abundance of single rooms. My room in first year was tiny, but it was private. I was a third floor girl, and while we third floor girls got along well, and we also were very friendly with the first floor girls... there was something in the water on second floor. Second floor girls spent most of their first year developing new Palmer cheers. I think that tells you everything you need to know.
Anyway, I spent two years in residence in dear old Palmer, and I have never wished for a moment that I had chosen another residence. Ther'es something about an all-girls residence which gives it a totally different culture from other residences. Palmer was fairly small and close-knit. When one person made popcorn, everyone could smell it and would come looking for a taste. Campbell Hall folk, you don't know what you missed.
33. Strawberry Season
If there is a strawberry season in Vancouver, I totally missed it. But in rural Nova Scotia, you can't miss it. Everyone starts serving strawberries with everything. There are strawberry shortcakes, and strawberry mousses, and strawberries in your yoghurt and on people's ice creams and in pies and tarts and jams. On weekends people go strawberry picking. I can taste the shortcake now. Mmmm....
34. Blueberry Season
...And then it's blueberry season and now suddenly you can't go anywhere without people pushing blueberry pie or blueberry grunt under your nose. There's even a restaurant out in Canning which is entirely dedicated to blueberries.
35. The Oxford Blueberry
And that reminds me of the Oxford Blueberry, that enormous plaster monstrosity which is the only notable thing about Oxford. My bus would always stop there on the way to and from Mount Allison. My coworker Keryn was showing me pics of her trip accross Canada and said "look! There was this big blueberry..." and I said, "Yup. That's Oxford, all right."
36. Windsor Theatre
I was trying on Saris at Keryn's house the other day, to see if any of her sari blouses would fit my broad shoulders and pendulous boobas (they didn't) and as I was taking off my shirt, she was like "uh, do you want me to close the door so Mike doesn't see you if he walks by?"
Thanks to Windsor Theatre, I totally forgot to be self conscious about taking off my shirt when there is a man in the next room. Now, mind you, Keryn's Mike is different from a random man. I have an established platonic relationship with Mike which leads me to think of him as an entirely separate entity from that of a random man/would-be rapist. But even that level of comfort is entirely due to changing in Windsor Theatre's green room.
I met so many awesome people through Windsor Theatre, and I miss them all. Thom - "A little violence never hurt anybody!", Genevieve -"What's funnier than a dead baby?", Eleanor - "Carol Lynch... is losing her hair.", Ian... no, you know, I can't even begin to quote Ian. If it isn't said by Ian, it's just not as funny. I can't explain what is so hilarious about Ian Mullan, just that he's frigging hilarious. Drew, who I still associate with Windsor Theatre even though I met him through Jonathan - "I'll be out in a minute, I'm just changing... into a man eating lizard!", Devin Upham and his ripped jeans... you know.... this could be a very long list. I'm just going to stop. All I can say is, Windsor Theatre, you ROCK.
Oh yeah, and Benn. I met him there too. I like him also. :-p
37. Hall's Harbour
Hall's Harbour was a common day-trip for me and my friends, especially Naomi. We'd go throw rocks on the beach, explore caves, and marvel at the cute little boats sitting on the bottom of the harbour during low tide. My parents invariably took visitors there for lobster. Hall's Harbour is just so quintessentially Nova Scotia.
38. Family card nights
My Dad's family likes to get together and laugh and joke and play cards. When I was with Jonathan, we'd get together with his parents and play cards. When Benn and I lived in Halifax, we'd go up to his parents' place and... you guessed it... play cards.
I don't have family to play cards with here. It feels like something is missing.
39. Lobster Dos
I think every family in Nova Scotia has at least one day during the summer when they gather en masse, and the women fuss around laying out potato and macaroni salads while the men send lobster after lobster to its doom in a massive, steam-belching pot. Then the whole family tucks napkins into their shirt fronts and gets cracking. Me, I stick to mussells, but I still love a lobster do.
40. Guitar Jam sessions
Just as traditional as lobster dos and card games, it seems like out of every ten Nova Scotians you gather together, at least two will have guitars with them. Then they sit down and pick out tunes to sing together. If they're young folk, they pick out Great Big Sea songs, or try to turn Nirvana or Fingers Eleven or Nickelback into acoustic guitar. If they're older, they play Gordon Lightfoot and Stompin Tom Connors. But the guitars always come out, I can guarantee it.
41. Celtic music at your local pub
Even if you just go down to the pub for a drink, chances are that there'll be a group of local musicians in the corner with fiddles and flutes and Bodhran drums, jamming it up Celtic style. They aren't paid to be there - they're just guys who like Celtic music, jamming in a pub.
43. Nova Scotia fiddling
Nova Scotia fiddlers are commonly found, too, at local festivals and farm markets. My Dad plays background guitar for a fiddling group. Nova Scotia fiddling is a highly distinctive sound. All the songs sound a lot alike to me, and I wouldn't listen to it for pleasure, but it's a sound that I associate with summer and people gathering together and just... Nova Scotia.
43. Not being mocked for my accent
My friends out here tease me occasionally about my Nova Scotian accent. It amuses them that I pronounce things like a stereotypical Canadian. I say "oat" instead of "owt" and "caar" instead of "cahr". But man, they don't know how mild my accent is. That South Mountain accent? Whew. I couldn't reproduce it if I tried. And Cape Breton accents are abouot as truly Canadian as accents come!
44. That Ron James clip reminds me... Tim Hortons. Sure, they have Tim Hortons here, and people like it. Especially since the economy crash, Tim Hortons is growing in popularity. But in Nova Scotia, Timmies, like Alexander Keith's, is not so much just a commercial product - it's a way of life. The size of a town can be directly measured by how many Tims it has. You tend to get about one Tim Hortons per three to five thousand people. So Wolfville is a one Tim town. But a slightly bigger town would have two Tims. Halifax has one every two or three blocks. Any further than that, people start getting faint and passing out from Tim Hortons withdrawal.
45. Small Town intersections
I know this isn't a pure Maritime thing, since BC has lots of little backwater towns too, but I miss living in a small town. Towns like Sackville, where there is ONE stop light, and it actually has, as part of it's normal sequence, a red light at all four corners so that pedestrians can cross on the diagonal. I miss crossing on the diagonal, dangit! Or Wolfville, where putting in a single stop sign in the centre of town causes mass confusion.
46. Bluenose Ghosts
Nova Scotia is old, and where you get history, you get ghost stories. Of course, most Nova Scotian ghosts are actually ships. Like in Mahone Bay, where people occasionally claim to catch sight of the Young Teazer burning in the bay, while the crew scream in the riggings. Or the Mary Celeste, originally the Amazon, and built in Canning back when Canning was on water, which became a famous ghost ship. When I worked in the Canning library, I actually met a man named Bruce Spicer, who was descended from the men who built the ill-fated Mary Celeste, and he showed me a photo of her. The photo was back from the days when she was the Amazon, but looking at that faded photo, while pondering her mysterious fate, really chilled me.
All BC has is Ogopogo, and who is scared of Ogopogo? Ghost ships are way creepier than second rate Loch-Ness Lookalikes.
47. Vogue Cinema
Best movie theatre ever. Sure, there was only one screen, and it was small, and if you sat in the back or up on the balcony it looked even smaller, but man, I loved that place. The popcorn prices were reasonable, and the midnight Toonie movie couldn't be beat for a cheap fun drunken time. Oh, Vogue, I love you.
48. Hennigar's Farm Market
Going to Hennigar's for an icecream in the evening sunlight of a summer evening is part of Wolfville life. I don't eat ice cream, but I'd buy some fudge and then look at the goats and rabbits. And Mmm... then we'd bring home a pie...
49. Atlantic Theatre Festival
Now bankrupt, the ATF was an amazing theatre. I can't think of a single play I saw there that I didn't enjoy. They picked great plays - lots of Wilde and Coward and Ibsen and Shakespeare and then put them on wonderfully. The thrust stage made for an excellent experience, and the actors were just so much fun. I miss going to ATF plays.
50. The Back 40
The woods in back of my house was like my own private domain when I was young. It was my Narnia, my Terebithia, and I would hurry back there after school in the fall and spring to meet up with my own imaginings. There was the ravine to explore, the bluff overlooking Blomidon, where I could sit and watch the sunset, and horses to visit on the neighbour's border. My own secret world, which is waiting for me and wondering where I went.
51. Main Squeeze Pitas
It first was the Main Squeeze, and then the Pita Shack. I don't know if it's still there, but oh man, their club house pita was something amazing which I have never found replicated anywhere else, ever. It was drippy, chewy, garlicky deliciousness. My mouth waters just thinking about it. And BIG! Each pita was two meals.
52. Walking on the dykes
The dykes were such a great place to walk and talk with friends. It's peaceful to a troubled soul, and to a really troubled soul the SPLAT of rocks being thrown down to the mud flats during low tide was especially cathartic. You could see forever, so you knew your conversation wasn't being overheard, and you could just let the dogs run while you walked and walked. Sunset is best.
53. Ted and Christian
My boy-cousins, who are like my brothers. I miss them. They need to move out here so my kids will know who Uncle Ted and Uncle Christian ARE. Plus I need Ted to fix my computer problems, and Christian to make awkward and delightfully offensive jokes. Can't wait to see them.
54. Girl's nights with Suman and Maeghan
Carbs, movies, giggling, and careful dissections of romantic relationships. It's just not the same with anyone else.
55. PS2 nights with Jenn.
Man, sometimes I'd stay at her house until 2 in the morning, killing Iraqi soldiers in horribly trite and offensive war PS2 games and we'd just be having a ball. Then I'd stay an hour longer and we'd talk about everything under the sun.
Why don't they make Katamari for the Wii??
55. Home
My bedroom, frozen in time with a Titanic poster still on the wall and... no, I think the pictures of first year university, including many shots of Jonathan, have been taken down. I THINK. But it's filled with my old books, my old photo albums, my old stuffed animals friends. It's mine, and I miss it. And downstairs, Mum is clattering dishes to make dinner, and Dad's playing guitar in the basement, and strains are wafting up through the air vents.
Home. I'm going there.