Elmira Maple Syrup Festival

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Wow, it was such an amazing day today (Saturday)! We went to the biggest maple syrup festival in the world, in the small town of Elmira. First we were brought to Elmira with the usual yellow school bus. They use those busses for a lot of trips and this was already the third time I went on one. There isn’t a lot of room for your legs but that would be expected from a little children’s bus. When we arrived at Elmira we had to walk down a street to get to the main festival street. In that street were a yard sale and a horse and carriage coming down the street. The houses all had a front porch and big trees in front of them. Oh and of course most of them had the Canadian flag waving in front. The feeling of entering a movie came once more and I was excited to see what was next.

We got on the main street and there were a lot of people. In the middle were all sorts of stands where you could get any type of food you wanted. I expected mostly maple related food, but they had everything. You could also buy random things like scarfs, hats, jewelry, etc. We strolled through the sea of people and already lost half of the group after a few minutes. As the festival was mostly on one long street it was easy to find each other again. I saw a lot of interesting things along the way. There was a lady in a funny costume making balloon animals with a man and a banjo playing next to her. For the first time I saw Mennonites walking around with their white caps on and wearing their skirts. Also, there were a lot of diverse types of food available. They had perogies, polish sausage on a bun, huge chicken legs, a pig roasting on a barbeque (with head and everything!), loads of English things I had never heard of like pulled pork and beavertails, and even stir fry Asain types of food. Of course they also had pancakes with maple syrup but the lines for those stands were way too long. Also there were several stands were you could buy maple syrup, maple butter, maple candy, maple cookies, etc. There was even a stand were you could buy popcorn in a cone with maple syrup on it. It was a good illustration of the love for unhealthy fatty food North Americans have. It is then also obvious that I saw a lot of really fat people that day.

We found the stand where we could buy sugar bush tour tickets and started waiting in the line for the school bus that would take us to the sugar bush farm. At first I didn’t know what a sugar bush was but they told me we were going on a tour to see how maple syrup is made. A school bus brought us to a road a little bit further out of the centre and there we were picked up by tractors. The tractors had big cages behind it with hay in it to sit on. It was a proper farm excursion basically. We loved it. When we drove towards the farm we first came across a part of the maple trees with blue strings hanging in them. Some other trees had buckets hanging from them. I didn’t know how it worked and I thought they had blue strings around them to mark which trees were used to get the syrup from.

We arrived at the farm and a lot of steam coming out of the top. We climbed out of the cage and saw the sign that stated: Please feel free to walk through the bush – (and ask questions). Most of the gang went to walk through the maple bush but I was too curious to see what was inside of the shack and how they make the syrup. There were three farmers inside that you could talk to and ask questions. Here is what I learned about maple syrup. The season starts at the beginning of spring. The season is only 4 to 6 weeks, depending on how fast it gets warmer. Once buds start appearing on the branches, the season is over. They make holes in the stem of the maple trees and put a plug in it so the sap can leak out of the tree. Some trees had buckets for the sap to drip into, but most of them were connected to the shack by the long blue tubes we saw earlier. The sap mostly contains water so they boil the sap in multiple stages to get the syrup from them. They don’t add anything so the syrup is basically straight from the tree. After my chat with the farmers it was off to try my first spoon of maple syrup. It seriously was amazingly delicious! I immediately bought some syrup from them and then went for a walk through the bush. Oh, they also had maple syrup toffee in a cone for 50 cents. I bought one to take along through the bush. At that point I was thinking to myself that I wouldn’t mind living on the country with all the maple syrup you can eat.

After returning from the sugar bush tour we strolled around the festival some more and decided what we wanted to eat. The Brits went for the pulled pork and I had polish sausage on a bun. We are totally integrated…
Around 2 o’clock we took our school bus back to the university and walked home. I had to return to studying again because I had a midterm on Monday again. Yes I know, the term is almost over but they still call it a midterm. There was a house party that evening and a lot of the internationals went out but I stayed home and read some more. Sunday was pretty quiet, read a lot and didn’t do much else. My test on Monday went pretty well so I am really happy to have a week of rest before the finals begin. I’m going to have to study a lot, but at least this is the last two weeks coming up. It is nice to know that the mountain of schoolwork is almost over and it’s also sad that my exchange is almost over. I had such a great time living here. I’m definitely going to miss this house and my roommates. It really went by fast! Yesterday evening (Monday) we had a pot luck night. Everybody makes a dish and you eat together from everyone’s food. We had so much food, probably enough for two or three days. After the food fest we did a little trivia night. Everyone had made a round of questions and you had to get the right answer together with your team. It was a really fun night and probably one of the last nights with most of us together. Well, tonight we also have an evening like that. We are going to dinner as a goodbye to one of the British girls because she is leaving tomorrow.

I should go and study right now but I’ve just discovered an online version of Settlers of Catan (thanks to my lovely roommate Lucy) so I think I’ll do that first to stay in the trend of procrastination. There is almost no chance of me failing my courses when I calculate all my grades so far so there isn’t a lot of pressure for me to be studying like a madman. It has also just started to get warmer here so I might go outside for a bit. The weather really has been strange the last couple of days. Almost all the snow had melted in the last weeks and just as we thought it wouldn’t snow anymore it started snowing on Sunday evening again. During the day it had been quite warm so no one was expecting that. In the night there was a huge lightning storm with a lot of rain so luckily all the snow was gone my Monday. Don’t get me wrong, I love the snow. It is just that when you start smelling spring in the air, you just want it to get warm and sunny again.

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