Back at home, I quickly decided to make some potato pancakes for lunch. It took quite a while to make them. Since I was in a hurry because I wanted to leave in order to watch the ceremony for the royal visit, I ended up burning most of the potato pancakes. Consequently, there was a lot of smoke in the house as I hadn't opened the windows. That smoke actually set off the fire alarm upstairs. Katrina quickly disabled it and we opened the windows to let the smoke get out.
By now, I had convinced Katrina to join me and so we took the car Downtown. Katrina parked a few blocks from the Parliament building and we walked the rest of the way. It was very crowded when we arrived. However, after we passed through the first big group of people on the field in front of the parliament building, there was actually a lot of free space. We were confused and wondered why the people didn't use up all of that space. It was their loss anyway since this way, we could get a lot closer to where the ceremony would take place.
The Royal family was a little late and everyone was anxious for it to start. Before they arrived we could see Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and his wife as well as several other people leaving the Parliament building in order to receive the Royal Heighnesses. As soon as they arrived, there were a lot of handshakes and a military orchestra playing in the background. Some First Nation's people also performed a traditional dance to welcome the Royal couple. Unfortunately, I couldn't really see any of that from where I was standing.
There were 21(?) shots fired from cannons as a tribute, which seemed pretty impressive to me as I had never actually heard a cannon being fired.
After the distinguished guests arrived and took their seats in front of the Parliament building, I could finally catch a few glimpses of them. There were welcoming speeches by Justin Trudeau, Christy Clark, the Premier of British Columbia, and Judith Guichon, the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia. The speeches were partly in English and partly in French, which was interesting since they seemed to be talking about different things in each language instead of just translating everything. Lastly, there was a speech by Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge. He tried to say a few words in French as well but his French was more than a little rusty so that this part of his speech was actually rather funny.
There was also a children's choir singing a few songs (mostly in French). Accompanied by this children's choir, the whole audience sang along to the national anthem 'Oh Canada'.
At the end of the whole ceremony I had lost sight of Katrina and it took a while for us to meet up again.
I had asked Katrina to drop me off at Save-on-foods on the way home. While we were driving close to the Government house, we were suddenly stopped by some policemen. A few moments later, the cars with the Royal Highnesses inside were turning into a street right in front of where we were standing, which was kind of cool.
I walked home after returning a lot of empty bottles and buying several groceries at Save-on-foods. When I arrived, Margo, Tuulia and Katrina were in the kitchen eating some macarones, which Margo had brought home. I tried most of them, too.
Katrina and I decided to watch 'The Conjuring' and even though they didn't really want to see it at first, we could persuade Margo and Tuulia to watch it with us. As we had started watching after 9 PM, it was petty late when we were done with the movie. As it had been kind of scary, Katrina started telling us about a few scary dreams she had had, which almost made me reconsider sleeping in my bedroom.
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