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PHP Conference Quebec ending

Yesterday was the last day of the PHP Conference Quebec 2005. Luckily, I will stay until sunday and therefore I had the chance to take part in some exciting events organized by the PHP Quebec people. The main conference was pretty much as every other one. It mainly consisted of hacking some stuff, talking to all those speakers and attendants and of course of holding my second session. So, business as usual, of course.

On the first day of the main conference we got out for the speakers dinner in the evening. It took place in a nice little French restaurant. Funnily one had to bring own drinks to that restaurant, since they got the license to serve alcoholic drinks in their, but not to sell it. So we first went to a wine shop (myself got to a super market nearby to fetch some beer, since I was not in the mood for wine) and then continued for the food. The menu in the restaurant was completly in French and no English translation was available, so we had to puzzle a translation more or less on our own, which was pretty funny but worked well. I took snails as the starter and lamb for the main part. For dessert I had some kind of choclate cake, which was really mighty (I did not even manage to eat half of it). The whole meal was very delicious. That night I went to bed right after dinner, since I still had to fight with my jet lag and was pretty tired.

On the second and last day of the conf we went out for party. After having dinner, Damien and the other organizers lead us to a bar, where they have live music. John told me about that bar before, because he went there last year, too, and was so amazed that he wanted to get there again under any circumstances. There were 2 bands taking turns with playing and both were really amazingly good. The music was mostly rock style, from own compositions, over French/Canadian oldies through local area music to rock classics like "Basketcase" by "Greenday" and "Nothing else matters" by "Metallica". Everybody really enjoyed it and we had party all night until 3:00 in the moring. Really amazing. The party was indeed that good, that those of us who are still here decided to go there tonight again. :) See yourself:

The party night helped me to fix my jet lag completly, which is of course not very good, since I will have problems again when coming back home on Monday. Today we met again at 11:00 (which was a bit early and I did not get that much sleep) to take a "typical Quebec event", as the organizers told us. We went to a location almost 50 km away from Montreal, some kind of mixture between a factory, museum and restaurant for maple products.

Maple is typically for Canada and especially for the Quebec area and I didn't know, what you can do with those maple stuff. It's manufactured in different stages, from maple sirup (which the Canadians put mostly onto every kind of food) over maple butter, maple toffee to maple sugar. First of all we tried some maple toffee, which is extremly delicious, and then continued to the restaurant. It's really funny to see, what you can do with maple sirup, if you are crazy enough. ;)

We first had some bred with maple sirup (of course, this is logical and one can even get that in Germany). Then they served a soup with yellow peas and Canadians put maple sirup into it. Tastes a bit strange, but of course delicious. After that the main meal was served, consisting of omelete, bacon, sausages, beans and some more stuff. Believe it or not, Canadians put maple sirup onto all of these. :) A really strange taste, but I cannot say that it tasted bad. In some way it's been really delicious and of course it was really interessting. For dessert they served some kind of sugar cake (made with maple), pancake (of course with maple sirup) and coffee, which even tastes good with maple sirup. By now I feel a bit like having a sugar shock, but it was really an amazing experience.

Although the weather is really bad today (it's been permanently raining since I woke up) I took some more photos and uploaded the whole bunch of the last days to my gallery. The new pictures start here. Many thanks to Jordi (a speaker from Mexico) who gave me his photos for my gallery!

My special thanks go to Damien and all of the organizers and voluntary helpers from PHP Quebec. It's been a really cool conference and an amazing stay in Canada (in fact it currently is). Thank you for bringing me here!!!