Sunday in Halifax, Nova Scotia (Canada)

On Sunday I woke up and decided to go for a run so I could better explore the city of Halifax and know what I wanted to check out later in the weekend. I asked the concierge for a good running route around the city, and he pretty much gave me the worst directions ever. He sent me towards a park called Point Pleasant Park which I would have enjoyed...if I didn't get lost, if it wasn't 3 miles away (that makes 6 total to go there and back), and if the route was actually scenic. He basically led me into these random residential streets with weird futuristic looking houses (like what you would see in Japan or something) and then I missed the right turn and ended up going ever farther than the park. However, I did see some cool railroad tracks on my way that were in this great divide looking thing with cliffs on each side. It looked like in a western movie. The park was really beautiful though, and if I could have driven there and then ran all through the park that would have been nice because there were awesome views of the ocean and a few old forts. The smell of pine was overwhelming on the trails. So as I trudged on back to my hotel I was dying of hunger so I stopped at the first place I saw that had breakfast food. Luckily it was Sunday and a bunch of places had brunches. I had eggs benedict in a old-timey-looking bar whose sole patrons were five elderly couples. It was so random.

Later on I went to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, which was super cool because I'm a nerd and I feel like I know stuff about sailing now that I took that one little sailing PE class. They had a bunch of old wooden sailboats, tugboats, a Titanic exhibition, and an exhibition on the Halifax Explosion (which is really depressing by the way).

History Lesson: The Halifax Explosion was the largest man-made explosion before the atom bomb and was almost as deadly. Basically during WWI one small boat collided into a large munitions boat carrying TNT, gasoline, and gun powder (pretty much a sailing bomb) and the friction caused a spark which set both boats on fire. Then a few minutes later, when all the people in Halifax were outside watching this huge burning ship, it exploded with almost the force of an atom bomb killing 2000 people instantly and wounding over 9000. People would be blown like a mile away and not realize what happened to them until they walked back to town. Some people would be asleep in bed and wake up with their house blown away, with only their bed remaining. One boy had all of the clothes he was wearing blown off by the blast, but somehow his backpack stayed securely over his shoulders. They’re all pretty crazy stories. Almost the entire town was destroyed, but the city of Boston came to save the day by supplying them with medical supplies and helping them build the city back up. Now, Halifax donates a giant Christmas tree to the city of Boston every year for all of their help.

Sunday night I really wanted to meet some Semester at Sea people that were already in Halifax so I just went to the lobby of my hotel hoping to go to dinner with someone. Luckily there was a group there that was going out so I ate dinner with them and then we all went out to an Irish pub later that night. At dinner one of the guys asked for beer in a to-go cup when we were paying the checks, and then proceeded to say "but it's Canada" when the waitress refused...priceless. So I hate beer, but I tried whatever Canadian beer this guy had and it was GOOD! They had fruit flavored beer such as apricot and apple which did not taste like beer at all. P.S. The drinking age in Canada is 19. After meeting a few new Semester at Sea people at the pub, I headed back to the hotel to get some sleep for sightseeing the next day.