A distressing amount of maple syrup
So if you can believe it, despite my last name I've never been to a Saint Patrick's Day parade. Seattle either has an insufficient quantity of people who purport to be Irish or it's just never been on my radar.
But this part of Canada though is just swimming with people of Irish descent. I believe at one point they briefly outnumbered francophones in Montréal.
I guess the most interesting thing about this parade was (1) the considerable collection of flags and (2) the fact it didn't appear to feature like a thousand cops.
Canadian, Ireland, Quebec, Scotland, Ukraine, and yeah even the UN flag. I suspect many American's would not even recognize it unless they had recently watched The Expanse.
I didn't snap a picture fast enough but there were quite a few floats that had both Canadian and American flags. That was kinda wild - often when one sees an American flag at an event outside of the United States it is moments before gasoline is poured on it. But hey, if you live close to the border - any border - it isn't a bad idea to own both flags just in case shit goes down. The Colonial Army did manage to occupy Montréal for like five minutes during the Revolutionary War.
On my way home from class - navigating the tunnels that make up a substantial portion of the UQAM campus - I encountered a job fair. Besides begging the folks at the Immigration Ministry to work on their fairly painful website pro-bono, I stumbled upon the Canadian version of the NSA:
Speaking of that class; the good news is that French is going well overall, the bad news is that I've unlocked the cheat code to be considerably more insufferable:
The course material continues to give me a great deal of pleasure. If these are a secret way to get me to improve the vocabulary for dunking on things, it's working.
We played a kind of in-person but hosted online game (Kahoot!) in a form similar to Jackbox but with the professor producing the (vocabulary) questions. We were asked to use pseudonyms. If you like these here is the name generator I made with a lot of really dumb ones.
