Spectacle Viewing and Island Hopping

Some pictures from Summer in Montreal - the first is of the post-Just for Laughs spectacle, the last three from Ile-Ste-Helene and Ile Notre-Dame, the site of the 1967 Expo.

No he's not on fire - some people carried road flares which were deposited in a bucket after they were spent.

Me at the biosphere, initially part of the American pavilion, now a museum of the environment.

The former French pavilion, now a casino.

One of the many canals on Ile Notre-dame. The Jamaican pavilion stands next to one, and is being restored.

Island Lake, Old Montreal, and the Green Mountain State

I'm taking advantage of the holiday to write a panel paper proposal, a French travelogue of Vietnam, and to post some long-overdue pictures of the Summer so far.


Canoing on the aptly-named Island Lake, in Orangeville. Strong winds made for choppy water but it wasn't anything we couldn't handle.


My big triumph for the early part of the break was fixing my parents' DVD player following instructions I found on the internet. A new capacitor, some soldering and it was back in action. Before this I hadn't played around with electronics for years.


A photo of (most of) my Intensive French class, on a walking excursion of Old Montreal. Near this spot was the first Hospital founded by Jeanne Mance, one of the first hospitals set up by European settlers in North America. It's now the Hotel Dieu, near avenue Parc and Rue des Pins.


Saturday we took an adventurous trip to Vermont. Here we are in Newport, near the Canadian border. This was on our way back from a park where we tried, woefully unsuccessfully, to do some hiking without any bug spray whatsoever. Newport was a much more comfortable small town that had seen more prosperous days.


This little tugboat was moored at the public dock. The ropes kinda look like a mustache. I half expected it to talk to us.

On the main street was this old mansion, that may have been a sort of town hall at one point, but which had been turned into a library. Definitely one of the architectural highlights of Newport.


One resident apparently collected stuffed and mounted animals around the turn of the 20th century, which were treated with mercury and thus had to be handled carefully. His collection was on display in these cases in the library, along with old, hand-written labels for each.

Vermont was a little surprising, I guess simply because it's so rural and small-town, at least in the Northeast where we were. Next time we'll be much better prepared - Saturday was a series of realizations of how little we knew about what we were getting into, from venturing out into the great wilderness, to how long a stay in the US was required for a purchase at the Duty-Free. A bottle of scotch that we didn't want to pay the tax for awaits us at the border, to be retrieved on a future trip south of the frontier.

La vie en Montréal

French study continues with a friendly class and new activities each day. Montréal life is far, far easier in the summer, even though the temperature hovers around 22 during the day, and still gets chilly at night. I'm looking to finally complete my last term paper of the Spring semester (one month too late) and begin on a paper proposal for next year's AAS on Dai Jitao. My reading list is in its final stages, and only awaits a little more free time for me to get started on it. This weekend Eavan and I have the wonderful excuse of renewing her forms to get us on a picnic trip to Vermont. We've got a cooler, all we need is a car.

We don't have internet access at home - I'll try to write updates more often, if anyone is still reading. Unfortunately Facebook has made it all too easy to keep in touch with people, if only through single-line status updates.

This is the Final Boss of the Semester

The classwork for my semester is basically finished - on Monday I have a Japanese oral exam and my regular office hour, but now that the students have already handed in their papers I'm not sure what they might want to see me about. Two papers, a stack of essay marking, and a Japanese exam are the final bosses of the second level in PhD land. Recently I've had some insights into my dissertation topic brought upon by some 善友 good friends, which have opened some new questions but basically convinced me that I need to do some hard background reading to better situate it in the field. Luckily my reading list is in its final draft and I have the McGill library at my fingertips over the summer. I'm also looking forward to finally reading over some recent essays on Modern Chinese Buddhism, something which I should have been doing for a while.

Riverside Walk

Walked riverside park to about 70th street a couple days ago. Lots of people out jogging even though it was a little chilly.

Winter and Winding Down

Finals season is finally winding down for me. The past three weeks have been early mornings and late nights, caffeinated running around, eating what I can find and trying to juggle a multitude of tasks. With my term paper edited and submitted (The Revival of the Weishi School in Modern Chinese Buddhism), I only have a few more tasks before the semester is all wrapped up.

I've resolved to try to get a jump on my projects a little earlier next semester, so I'm not cramming what should have been a month of work into little over a week. I'm finding that the papers I'm writing nowadays are requiring more than the amount of research I've been putting in, and while each one can build on the work I've done for the previous one (uncovering handy sources, etc.) there's a lot more work that I could be doing for them. This is part of my New Year's resolution.

I'm so looking forward to a vacation in snowy Montreal, with lots of hills to be tobaggoned and lots of books in the McGill library to be read.

The Continuation of The Photo Series on Books

I've been surrounded by books lately, so I guess it's only natural that I'd want to take a couple snapshots of them.

Here's an interesting book I found, the title page is in English but the rest of the book is in Chinese. As you might have guessed, it attempts to debunk lots of Chinese "superstitions" from Fengshui to Buddhism. In each case Christian belief is offered as the correct version of these mistaken ideas. I have no idea how well it was received, but the polemic alone is worth the read.


This is Dai Jitao, "the man" as far as my recent work is concerned. He was a top official in the Chinese government in the 1920s and 30s, as well as a Buddhist layman. He was also known as a great weeper; apparently he'd break into tears at the drop of a hat.

Some old-stylely text from De Groot's The Religious System of China, a multi-volume magnum opus that I had copied when I was in Taiwan. I'm on the second volume, and it's good bedtime reading material, although lately I've been dreaming of graves, spirit tablets, and funeral ceremonies.

Finals period continues, even though classes haven't yet officially ended for the semester. Lots of reading, writing, and trying to help students draft their final papers. A couple more weeks and my brain will be fried from working 12 hour days; it'll be good to sleep in on Xmas morning...