12.17.2009

Description 75 - Be...In This Place

And that place would be New Brunswick, an underrated province where I spent a beautiful, breezy and fire-y Canadian Thanksgiving. Includes music by The Monoxides, a mangling of history and stringy red seaweed you eat.

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Associated links
beinthisplace.ca
VIA Rail Ocean train from Montreal to Halifax
City of Moncton: Our Tide Is Rising
Woodstock: New Brunswick's First Town
(You're starting to get the idea that people in New Brunswick are good at slogans.)
Woodstock Sanctuary House
George's books @Google Books and his books @Amazon.ca
History of New Brunswick @Wikipedia
The Acadians @CBC.ca
Meduxnekeag River Association
The Best Dulse!
Paris 1919
The Monoxides: @myspace, @Facebook and @ReverbNation
The Monoxides Annual Holiday Show @Facebook
Iron Giant @myspace
Thanksgiving (Canada) @Wikipedia
Tourism Saint John
Irving Nature Park

The person on the phone ended up being my birth grandmother: one of the people who would call and know who I was.

The photo for this episode was taken at a convenience store on the way down to Saint John. I had seen those flags on houses as the train was heading along the east side of the province, only I hadn't seen the stars on them, so I thought they were French flags, which my hosts thought was strange in that the Acadians are not so crazy about the French French that they'd go around flying their flag. After some discussion and Wikipedia, we determined they were Acadian flags. On the whole trip, I had kept my eye out for an image of New Brunswick I couldn't get anywhere else, and it turned out to be the display in this convenience store.

I have two major regrets about screwing up the sound for the soundseeing tour of Woodstock. One is that my birth mother's arms almost falling off from the cold came to no purpose. Another is that I didn't get to mention Fusion Coffee Company, which we went into briefly. It's a really wonderful licensed café with coffee and food and drinks and music (sometimes live) and a very nice atmosphere. It serves as a creative hub for the small town, and my birth mother goes there often. When we went in there, I met the owner, who knew who I was and could not have been more welcoming. It's the sort of place that a lot of people in small towns wish they had, but usually don't, so I wanted to give this one all the support I could. Hopefully, I'll have other chances to do that audio-wise. But, hey, at least it can get more Google juice in text form.

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