The Joys of Being Canadian in France

Oh the Olympics. First off: Amazing. Secondly: being Canadian in France was a funny one for the Olympics. It started off with my red Canada mitts, and Guillaume making fun of me. They really do think they are the dumbest things they have ever seen, and I LOVE them. And the fact that Vancouver was seriously lacking snow didn't help either. Canada was the joke of France for a while, because for the first time in years, Lille got snow. Now when I say snow, I mean like 2cm, and it melts by the end of the day, but to them that's huge. They were all joking around about how they could host the Olympics better than we could, and maybe they should be nominated for the next winter games - all in all it was fun though.

Our game place was Cally's house. He had a flatscreen....aka his laptop but that was alright with us. We bought 24 beers for less than 5 euros for the semi-final rounds and we honestly just gathered around. Mainly Canada/USA gathered around to watch. To be honest, not that many people were into the Olympics. One of our friends from Brazil didn't even know it was the Olympics until he saw the google icon. Brilliant.

Now the real story comes for the men's gold medal game. Unfortunately being 6 hours ahead of Ottawa time, and 9 hours ahead of Vancouver, its a mega pain in the ass to watch events. Half of them for us are in the middle of the night. Right. As much as I debated just not having a life and watching TV all day, there wasnt that much to watch. You see we have a TV in the apartment, however, the Olympics was the first time we have turned it on all semester. We don't have a 'living room' either, so an extra mattress was put in our front hallway to sit on and watch. But back to the Sunday night, men's gold medal game. It aired at 9:15 our time which was fantastic. We had bought 5L of beer for 4.50 EUR.....pardon? Repeat? Okay: 5L for 4.50 EUR. Waddddd up? Needless to say we were set.

And crafty doodle Laura had cut up her red fleece blanket to make us the most kick ass shirts ever. We knew we needed a costume. But we didn't want to spend a ton of money, slash its not like they sell Canada flag iron on's here. So Laura came up with the brilliant plan of cutting out the two red rectangles and the maple leaf and we could stick them to white shirts. She aced it. They looked insanely good. So there we were, drinks in hand, costumes on ready to watch the game. There wasnt a big group of us. 3 Canadians, 1 American, 1 German and 1 Mexican. Awesome crowd right? I know.

We had some of the normal drinking games, but we decided we needed some hockey related ones, so we made our own. We had simple rules: drink for everything...icing, fights, penalties, goals you had to chug a bit (don't worry - we were safe). And oh yeah...the losers of the game had to eat chile peppers. A little extra shabang at the end.

We spent the night screaming and yelling, pouring drinks and all on the edge of our seats. The game was amazing and we were loving every second of it. When Canada won - we went bananas. But boy oh boy did we earn it. Now everyone has seen the famous picture of number 25 drinking straight from the bottle as her friend pours champagne in her mouth. We decided to re-enact this picture. I mean c'mon...we did win.



Not quite the same, but man did we have some laughs taking this damn picture. And as promised, the Americans ate their chile peppers...and suffered. Paddy was like a raving lunatic trying to find something dairy in the kitchen to kill the spiciness. She found some milk in the fridge...and it was empty. She found some bread...and it was so rock hard it was a legal weapon in the USA. I was peeing my pants laughing, meanwhile taking pictures every 3 seconds like it was my job.

The walk home that night was fantastic. We held our heads a little higher knowing that Canada had rocked these Olympics, and we were really proud to be Canadian. Paddy wasn't so thrilled to listen to us rant, but she did anyways. I mean after all - Germany rocked the Olympics too...just not quite as many golds as us. Oh snap.