Day: June 20, 2008

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Uncategorized

Hearst, On TV!

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After seeing Palmer & Mike (our two newborn Stars from the North) being extras on a kids TV show, it seems like TV productions are getting more and more interested in the small Northern Ontario communities/residents.

Assuming there’s a lot of people from Northern Ontario reading this blog on a regular basis, I thought this might interest a few. Here is a press release about a new TV show starring Hearst in one of their episode. (read bellow)

-Sudbury, Ontario, le mardi 17 juin 2008 – Le samedi 21 juin, la Première Chaîne de Radio-Canada présente une émission spéciale mettant en vedette la ville de Hearst et ses habitants.

LES INVINCIBLES GAULOIS DE HEARST raconte avec humour l’improbable histoire de cette ville ontarienne où pratiquement tous les citoyens vivent en français malgré les centaines de kilomètres qui les séparent du Québec.

Pourquoi cette ville de 6000 habitants a-t-elle sa propre université, son conseil des arts, son journal, sa radio, sa librairie, ses festivals? Pourquoi dit-on qu’à une certaine époque, elle comptait le plus haut pourcentage de millionnaires au pays? Pourquoi affirme-t-on que c’est une ville western et qu’elle est la capitale mondiale de l’orignal? Pourquoi y sert-on des rôties tartinées de beurre dans un authentique restaurant chinois? Et que fait donc Hearst sur la carte météo du Téléjournal de Radio-Canada?

L’histoire de Hearst est racontée par l’animateur ÉRIC ROBITAILLE, en compagnie de ses nombreux invités dont GREGORY CHARLES, JOCELYNE BLOUIN, JEAN FUGÈRE, JEAN-MARC DALPÉ et plusieurs «invincibles Gaulois» aux surnoms surréalistes… Ne ratez pas LES INVINCIBLES GAULOIS DE HEARST, le 21 juin, sur les ondes de la Première Chaîne, partout au pays!-

For those who are not familiar with French, it seems like CBC is now interested in the mystery of small francophone towns located in Ontario.

My first reaction: Cool! For once they’re going to talk about us somewhere!

But what caught my attention the most are the questions they’re asking themselves about my hometown. They seem to wonder why is that small town of 6 000 population has the highest percentage of millionaires in the country. Of course, there are plenty of factors to take in consideration, but two of them are worth to specify here. One thing they might need to mention is that, a few years ago, Hearst was the town that had the biggest percentage of illegal drugs in Ontario. Would there be a correlation between drugs and money in the town? Some might think it’s a possibility.

Here’s something I always asked myself on that issue: Would the people, including the police department, be afraid of busting the drug dealers knowing it would bring the economy way down? I just remember a case when I was a bit younger where everybody in town knew this supermarket owner had a big drug dealing industry going on top his supermarket roof. If the cops would have busted that owner, everybody knew the other supermarket would have no competition anymore and would therefore take advantage of the population by putting their prices way up. And knowing that that owner wasn’t the only one owning a business as well as having a drug industry on the side, everybody kept their mouth shut.

An other reason why the town would have that many millionaires is the fact that the town is so excluded from big cities. We therefore need to have our own pharmacy, radio, newspaper, University …etc. And since the population is not very big, well, half of the population owns those businesses and gets rich out of them!

The next question the TV production is trying to resolve definitely put a smile on my face: “Why do they serve toasts in their local authentic Chinese restaurant?”. Really, I’m not sure about the real explanation to this, I guess the owner thought it would make people full faster… I just remember when the first time I made Chinese food at home, The Palmer didn’t understand why I would always make toasts as well. I thought all Chinese food came with toasts…..

Anyways, just to say that this show should be interesting. Wonder what kind of answers they will come up with.

LES INVINCIBLES GAULOIS DE HEARST
Saturday 21st June, on Radio-Canada (CBC)
at 6:00p.m.

Categories
Trips

Day 7 – BC Trip (Vancouver)

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Vancouver is amazing.  Truly amazing.  I want to return there now.

We hit the road early in the morning and made the early ferry ride back over to Vancouver.  We found our hotel in Richmond which is close to the Vancouver airport and decided to head into downtown.  Mom and Dad had a bad outlook on Vancouver after spending a night there the week before after the cruise returned.  Turns out that they ended up staying in the worst spot of town and there were a bunch of haggling homeless people (one person asked Dad for $2 instead of the $1 Dad gave him!) and vomit lined the streets.  Needless to say, not a good experience!

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I am glad they got the opportunity to see what Vancouver has to offer in the daylight.  It was beautiful.  Downtown is situated around the water, near the forest and next to the mountains.  The architecture there was quite different than anything I’ve seen before.  I’m assuming it was Asian-inspired from any films I’ve seen in Asia.  Very modern looking.

Downtown was beautiful and the sun was shining and all was well in the world.  We headed to GasTown which is a strip of downtown where there are nice restaurants and shops.  We headed to the Old Spaghetti Factory for lunch.  We then picked up some good souvenirs.  You can’t go wrong with a $10 sweatshirt!  In hindsight, I don’t even think I bought myself anything while I was out there, but at least I got a couple of t-shirts from my parents from their Alaskan trip.

I wanted to check out the Art Gallery as I read about an exhibition on comic books, video games and other multimedia.  I was excited to see what it was all about but when we got there, it would have cost $20 each to get in and I knew very well that I would have wanted to stay there for a few hours at least and the others wouldn’t have been too interested.  In the end, I realized that I would rather go with them to the Capilano Suspension Bridge so I decided that the exhibit would have to wait another day!

We took a quick drive out of downtown to the Capilano Suspension Bridge.  I am scared of heights so I did not know what to expect.  In the end, I wasn’t freaked out too much by the bridge.  I had envisioned a bridge out of an Indiana Jones movie where it was rickety.  This bridge had 75 people on it and was in no fear of breaking.  In fact, at one point, I read how a tree had fallen onto the bridge during a giant windstorm a few years ago and they said the root ball was 60,000 pounds and it still didn’t break!

I really enjoyed the Capilano park as you go through this wooded area and you can walk from tree top to tree top along these bridges.  We spent a few hours there and I would have to say that it was the highlight of the trip as we got to see how big the trees where (as legend holds it) and got to find out things about the forests around BC.  We even got a certificate indicating we made it through all the checkpoints!

After heading back to the hotel, we went to a restaurant called White Spot which seemed very popular around Vancouver.  It was good food and reminded me of Moxie’s.  In the end, we retired for the night after a night cap and unfortunately, I don’t think Troy and I got much sleep that night before the flight.  Maybe my mind was racing with the fact that we had to get up at 3:30AM to catch our flight the next morning.

Let me tell you, there’s no sense in rushing to an early flight.  We got there and the ticket counters weren’t even open!  Once they were, we went to security and they weren’t even open!  I was dozing off fast.  I slept most of the way on the way back and watched Jumper (which is a decent flick if you enjoy the sci-fi.)  We got back into Toronto where Uncle Richard and Aunt Dinah graciously dropped off my car and then we headed out to London ON for the rest of our vacation.