A/n: Hullo all, it's me! I know you were all very worried when I left for a week to go to Quebec, but I had so much fun, I must share with you the amazing funny situations my friends and I managed to have. All a true story, before you ask. ^_^ J'adore Quebec, and please excuse my grammar and spelling.

Ominous Hackysack... *shudders. I suck at playing hackysack.

The girls sat in the restaurant, quiet as mice. Well, I was quiet. Everyone else was complaining.

"I can't believe it! Why did Mrs. O'Hare take us to a restaurant, for dinner, that serves ONLY CREPES?!" moaned Katelinde, who was on my right. Megan mumbled her agreement.

"It's not even real food," growled Jen, poking at the salt shaker. "We're going to starve."

Olivia, of course, said nothing. She never says anything. Ever.

"Hey, look, they have fries!" Amaresa said happily. After getting over the shock that Amaresa actually found her menu and read it, we all scrabbled for our menus. It was true. For two measly dollars, you could have a bowl of rice, or a bowl of fries.

The six of us looked at each other. Except Olivia, of course.

Jen looked at Amaresa. "Want to split a bowl of fries?"

"Sure."

"I'm getting rice, want to share?" I asked Katelinde.

"Then I'll get fries for me and Olivia," offered Megan. Olivia stared in the air pensively, like there was something important to think about.

"Right. That's settled. Waiter, we're ready to order-"

I decided to be brave, and so, along with my rice, I ordered a crepe.

Fifteen minutes later, we were all bored and still waiting for food. So the ever-prepared Megan broke out her pack of cards, and soon three- quarters of the table was playing Egyptian Ratspack. Me and Olivia were on the end, and plus I didn't know how to play, so we just watched.

Apparently no one else knew how to play either, and they still managed to play it for another fifteen minutes. I was lost. I still don't know how to play it.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, our waiter appeared with food. It was like, weird, dude. So I received my crepe, and my milk, and rice. It was kind of funny, because the rice and the fries came in these tiny bowls, so we were all sharing with the people sitting next to and across from us, like it was a big communal dinner.

The rice was heavan on earth. I liked it.

"What are you doing to your milk?!" asked Olivia.

"er... Pouring maple syrup into it," I said awkwardly.

"But why?"

"It... tastes nice," I explained.

"That looks disgusting."

"It's maple-syrup coloured," I argued, stirring it vigorously with my knife, since they had forgotten to give us spoons.

"It. Looks. Disgusting," she repeated firmly.

"Well, so does my crepe," I said simply. It was true. The crepe had been made with egg whites and spinach. It was hideous.

I ate some of it, and then turned to glare at Megan.

"Liar."

"Wot?"

"You said I would like crepes!!!"

"Ha ha ha..."

"You- you scoundrel, you!" I declared, and tried to ignore the gigantic crepe in front of me for the rest of the meal.

We finished dinner suprisingly quickly. I don't know how, but the fries and the rice just went really fast. In the meantime, I had forgiven Megan.

"Ooh, lookit the chef," Megan said, pointing to where the chef was located. I obliged and looked at the chef.

"I'll call him Colin," I decided firmly. "He looks like a Colin."

"Is he wearing a hairnet?! Think of the gell it took to fix THAT into place!"

Katelinde waved her hands excitedly. "Guys, look, another one's come in!"

"He's a Kevin. Colin and Kevin. I like their names. Oh, look, Colin's watching Kevin bend over, the saucy lad!"

"Casey, shut up and take his picture."

"In a minute. Heh, look, now Kevin's watching Colin bend over-"

"TAKE A PICTURE, DAMNIT!"

Alas, Kevin returned to the kitchen before I could snap the photo.

"Fuck. And he was so hot, what a waste..."

(Pointer to all guys: We American girls think foreign accents are incredibly sexy. Really. We do.)

"Colin must be lonely."

"Oh, shut up, Casey."

Amaresa stood up quickly. "Well, we're done, let's go outside!"

We all paused. Oustside was the street, packed with civilian Quebec folk and tourists, and it was getting dark out.

"Okay!"

So we went outside, heedless of everyone else, and stood on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant window. Amaresa took out her famous Hackysack, and began to idly play with it, bouncing it off her feet with great success.

"Eh, nock it over here, I want to try something!" I said excitedly.

Amaresa flipped it towards me with her heel, and I leaped into the air, lunging forwards to hit it with one of my elbows.

I missed completely and went splat.

".... You aren't supposed to do that," Amaresa said, eyebrows raised. Everyone else was too busy laughing, and trying to get out of the way of some angry pedestrians.

"Come on, I want to try again!"

Amaresa wouldn't let me for strictly ethical reasons, and instead launched it over to Katelinde, who stuck our her foot and also missed it completely.

After numerous attempts to hit it correctly, Katelinde gave up on it, and just randomly lifted her foot in the direction of the hackysack, wherever it was. It turned out that none of us, except Amaresa and possibly Julia (from the other table), were any good at hackysack, but we all insisted on being in the sack circle. Of course, the pedestrians weren't too pleased, but we dealt with them serenely.

In a few short minutes Amaresa had thwacked pretty much everyone with the ball, striking them all out. "You guys suck at this," she complained, and then she accidentially hit a pedestrian man with the hackysack.

Impossibly, this person knew how to play hackysack and how to speak English. He tossed it back, and was about to leave with his other guy friend (they were both about forty), when I did one of those special Casey things.

"Hey, come and play too!" I yelled, bouncing up and down.

"All right!" he said with equal cheerfulness, and the game began! Amaresa and he tossed the ball back and forth and I actually got the ball a few times; so did Julia.

"Ha! Got you out!" he yelled, thwacking Julia with the ball.

"NO fair!" shouted Julia (as always). "I demand a fair warning-"

But then Amaresa thwacked her, so she shut up.

"I'm going to call you Pierre!" I cried gleefully, once again trying my patented elbow technique and failing miserably.

"Okay," he said, and then he thwacked Katelinde, and I got to serve it and I passed it to Amaresa, and then Pierre stole it and thwacked Megan, and so on.

A couple of times I accidentially hit the ball into the middle of the road, and Pierre got it for us. A few other times it hit cars going by, but it was no one we knew, so that was all right. Everyone was laughing and having a good time, and Pierre's friend was having a good time too. Pierre was actually British, but that's all right.

Eventually, Pierre had to leave, so he thwacked us all out, and we all moaned.

"Bye, Pierre!" I squealed, and flung myself into a hug.

"Bye, Casey!" He said with a smile, and then he and his friend went on down the road.

"Casey, we met a man who is three times our age, you invited him to play hacky sack with us, in a foreign country no less, on the sidewalk of a shopping street, and you then Hugged Him. Are you completely insane?" was what they MEANT to say, but you see, they couldn't really form words, because they were laughing and commenting on how we never actually knew his real name. But they did call me slutty, which wasn't very nice.

By that time it was completely dark, so along with the rest of the girls who had just finished eating, we skipped down eight flights of wooden stairs, down a few cobblestone roads, down hills, dales, and mini mountains, and finally when the moon was out we had walked to the dock, and we all rode the ferry across the river and back again.

It was fun.

Except for the part where everyone left me alone on the upper deck, and it was windy and cold, and the sea was whispery about some bad thing under the water. I found out later that a titanic ship had exploded there and killed thousands.

Oh well. At least I was happy earlier that night.

Also I was upset because I was not part of the main group. They were laughing and talking about old times, and the other girls had gone off in their own cliques, so I was alone at night on the ferry. It was not very happy. And when we walked back I could not find the store which had been selling medieval clothing.

My mood was shaky. I think I should have been taking my meds, but for some reason I could not force myself to take them. I wanted that day to be me, just me and my own brain and my own feelings, not the artificial seratonin from the 150mg of effexor. I didn't take them for most of the trip, actually. It was nice, not having to worry if my feelings were really my own, for a little while. Then again, I was much more emotional, and I got hurt very easily while not taking the pill. I just don't know.

The rest of the trip to Quebec was nice, too, though I'm telling the story out of order. Going to the crepe restaurant was on the third night; on the day we got there, we went to the festival of Saint Jeanne Baptiste, and everyone, all of the teenagers, was out on the streets. It was fantastic.

Everyone on the street was drinking lots and lots of beer and smoking cigarettes and maybe pot, and you could smell the alcohol and the burning weed in the air like a fume wherever you went. It was amazing because everyone was nice and polite, and people were having a great time at the huge field full of people waving Quebec flags, and lighting off fireworks from little newspaper fires in the ground, and listening to music in French; I heard on the news that there were over 200,000 people there, and it really felt that way; there were more people than stars in the sky! It was amazing, because no one got hurt and nothing got broken, and absolutely everyone was drunk.

Except us, of course, we're underage anyway. But just breathing made us high, because, literally, the alcohol was in the air, there was so much of it in every single street down every lane, on every field.

Next morning we got up early to go tour the Citadel and watch the Changing of the Guard. This was actually boring, which I had predicted, having been to similar events in England, but no one believed me until it was happening. They did have a goat, though, wearing a Quebec goat uniform. They said it was because Her Majesty the Queen had once visited each garrison and given them goats for milk and cheese and later meat, and so now they always had a goat. We got to pet the goat. I thought it was very patient having to stand so still all the time.

At the Citadel gift shop they had letter openers, which are very small swords that you use to cut letters open with, and I wanted one, so that I could use it as a dagger, but I had forgotten my euros in the hotel. Rats.

Oh! I almost forgot. You see, before we went into the Citadel, we had to go past some of the fields where the celebration had been the night before, and guess what! At seven-thirty in the morning, people were still out there drinking! It was incredible. We met a drunk young man named Luc who lived there in Quebec; he had a can of beer with him, and he really looked like he had a painful hangover. Still, he was quite polite, unlike the rude American boys, and I got a photo of him. The girls' fondness for foreign boys was developing, to my delight.

Ahem. Back to the storyline. After the Citadel, we went down to the waterfront, where I got a picture of three boys in Quebec gear, sitting on the ground, looking smashed. We also stepped into a little candy store, which I didn't go into because my wallet was at home. Again, rats.

We kept wandering around, and Amaresa and me bumped into a Spanish couple! We were very suprised, because Mexico was to the south and here they spoke French, but they were tourists. Amaresa and I talked to them in Spanish! We actually used the language we had learned in school! This was most exciting.

Everywhere there were horse-drawn carriages; they went around cars and people, and the horses looked so pretty in ribbons and silk flowers. But we never got to go on a carriage ride, sadly, because there were twenty of us including the adults.

Finally we drifted down to the shops, where we looked around and did nothing, and we went and saw a video with special effects in 3-D about the history of Quebec. No one remembered any of it, except for the talking head and the water from the ceiling, but it was still fantastic.

For lunch we ate in a small cafe. Then we went along sightseeing, and looking around.

So many things happened, but I don't remember them in order. I'm sorry. It's frustrating. I'm trying as best as I can, but I may have to give up on chronological order. Oh well!

But my most memorable times were when we drove to and from Quebec. Driving to Quebec was incredibly happy. I was sandwiched in between two of my friends, and we were all sleepy and happy, and all the windows were open and the sun was shining like in a fairy tale, with sunbeams going everywhere, and there was country and mountains and farmland- lots of cows- and in all the other cars, the people were beautiful. That's a sad thing about America. The people are ugly.

We were driving, and I was sharing the almonds I had bought at the supermarket, and they were crunchy and good, and- I don't know. There was lovely music in french playing, piano, with a beautiful french boy's voice, a tenor, singing a simply happy melody. It was just so bright, and lovely, and it smelt like a dewy morning, and the back seat where I was was soft and it bounced as we hurried to the city. It was a perfect moment. I was so warm, I never wanted it to end. I could have just gone on like that forever, riding in the car, the sun shining, nutty taste of almonds, a fresh summery breeze, like spring, floating in from the open windows.

But the way back was the saddest time.

Quebec had a freak rainstorm as I was leaving, sitting alone with an emptry seat next to me. Quebec was crying, and I didn't want to go away, but we had to. The music was in English, and it was angry. It felt like everyone was angry with me, and I don't know why. For some reason they were irritated with me, because I am a loner in our big group. There was an empty seat because an inseperable duo, Genny and Marie, had had to go the the luggage car, because I wanted to be with the larger group.

It was kind of hostile. Everyone wanted Genny and Marie and not me and the empty seat, and they didn't even ask if Marie or Genny wanted to go in that car, they just wanted me out of it. So I left. It was dark, but comforting, in the luggage van. And when we got home, at ten, I went straight to bed.

Well, enough of that. I just wanted to preserve my memories of the best part of this summer so far; sorry about my verb tenses jumping around, for some reason I have gotten worse in that area lately.

Bye for now, my chicas and chicos! I'll write again soon.