Charlottetown, PEI (By Shannon)

Wow, Charlottetown is a beatiful city/ country town. It has a great historic feel to it with some amazing old buildings that have been beautifully kept. It reminded me a lot of those small Southern Highlands towns that have been preserved and attract plenty of tourists.

On our way there we got ice cream at Cows, and awesome store that has put a bovine spin on everything. 'Mootube', 'Guitar Heifer', 'Mooey Griffin' and 'Edward Cowllen'-they had t-shirts, hats, pens, posters- you name it they had it, a very cool store.



No trip to PEI would be complete without a Green Gables visit.
Unfortunately it was raining some of the time, but that didn't worry Suz, who practically danced around the farm house.

Green Gables:


Shannon of Green Gables:

That evening we got to our host families- my host family, the Tedfords, held a dinner for us.

Vocational tour the next day- I went to The Guardian newspaper. I spent the day with Wayne, the paper's chief political reporter. I met the Premier! Totally weird but cool. In Australia there's no way you'd get anywhere near a Premier, let alone a minister most of the time, but we pretty much just walked into his office, he had a free moment between meetings and before I knew it we were shaking hands and discussing Australian movies.

Newspapers in Atlantic Canada are quite different to our ones back home. The biggest thing I've seen is major lack of colour- all but the first page and the back page are black and white. Every editor and journalist I've shown our papers to just gush about the colour on our pages.

The other thing is that they don't use many images/photos. Our Australian papers focus a lot of visual items to draw the readers in- big pictures, images, re-creations, sketches etc, but in Canada they are more focused on the editorial. It's been interesting to speak with editors and journalists and swap ideas.

The next day we fought a bitterly cold wind (there are photos of us all rugged up to the hilt) for a walking tour of Charlottetown. We saw some of the beautiful buildings, including Confederation House, where the fathers of confederation (head honchos of each individual state that is now Canada) met in 1864 and mooted the idea of forming one nation. Today it is still at the forefront of PEI government, housing the Legislative Assembly. It's also a museum.


We had a free afternoon then- Suz and I went to see a horse breeding farm. It was totally awesome for me and I think Suz enjoyed it, but it was specifically dressage horses, so I was in my element.





The next morning we flew to Halifax, then onto Deer Lake, Newfoundland. We've been warned about Newfies, they're the Australians of the Northern Hemisphere..........


- Shannon