Poly-HABS

Friggatriskaidekaphobia
- fear of Friday the 13th.

Hockey is insanely huge in Canada, especially in Québec, and even more especially in Montréal!

The hockey team of Montréal is called the Montréal Canadiens and the entire city becomes alive of red/white colors on game nights. Their nickname is HABS which is probably the stupidiest nickname French-speaking people could have chosen. Firstly, I'm not even sure it's a real word and I have no idea how Montréal Canadiens is abbreviated to Habs and furthermore they chant GO HABS, GO! constantly. No problem there except when you have French-speaking yelling it out... you do know that the H is silent in French? so it all comes down to GO ABS, GO!

For you not too high on your English - Abs is the word given to a person's abdominal area. So basically, during hockey-nights at Polytechnique (organized by the student organization Poly-HABS), you have hundreds of students yelling, "GO ABS, GO!" and I'm sitting there thinking that we may as well be watching an Arnold Schwarznegger excercise video...

But the Poly-HABS nights are beyong amazing. Fantastic ambience, cheap beer and pizza! It's all I want out of life. During the period intermissions they run various competitions and lotteries and one thing they do is go around taking pictures of groups of people and during the next Poly-HABS event, the students get to vote for their faviroute picture and the winning group gets a free pitcher of beer. So since the students decide (based on a yell-factor - the more you yell for a picture the higher the vote), you basically have to go nuts on the picture. Now our group did win this week but hadn't it been for the French it would have been a really boring pic - solely the Swedes look normal on the wining photo!

From top-left: Victor, Godefroy's censured rear, Raoul, Elin, Thierry, Isabel

 

Have a great weekend and I'll get back to you at the beginning of next week - I'm going to New York tonight and I'll be there until Monday so I'll be sure to have something fun to report about!