More Fun PEI Facts
February 11th, 2007 by PotatoThere are meter-high stakes pounded into the ground all over the Island here. Along the road, down driveways, and it’s not too hard to figure that they’re there to mark where the road is when the snow comes down too high too fast to really know for sure. What I find really amazing though is that everybody takes those stakes out of the ground in the Spring, because there’s virtually no sign of them during tourist season.
Also, in our nearly hour-long drive in the funeral procession to the gravesite, we saw many instances of cars (coming from the opposite direction) pulling over as the fleet of cars went by. It turns out nearly everyone stops to give room for the procession and give respects to the dead, another strange funeral custom I’ve never seen elsewhere (though there were a few people who didn’t know about it, and you could see them taking advantage of the people in front of them pulling over to whiz past).
Horses, it turns out, are giant scaredy-cats. They’re terrified of deer for some reason, and my cousins leave the lights and a radio on for them in the barn at night.
Nearly everyone out here is at least a little behind the curve when it comes to computers and the like (dial-up access penetrated fairly quickly here in the 90’s, but due to the geography and demographics, high speed is pretty rare and things have stagnated a bit). To print pictures from the funeral right away, my dad picked up a cheap photo printer (just plug the camera directly into it and go!) and I was showing my aunts and uncles how to use it. My uncle Kevin took a particular interest in it, so I started talking about some of the other features, talking down to him a bit as, unfortunately, many of us do with our less-technologically inclined relations. A little later we were talking about laptops because he wanted to get one for my aunt, to make it easier for her to do a bit of writing and what-not. I started talking about how pretty much anything would do for the uses she had in mind, and he said that sure, it starts out that way, but then you get into photo and video editing and you need more power… he just put a 4th hard drive into the server computer he built himself (on a motherboard with 8 RAM slots) and then I felt stupid since he obviously was plenty familiar with computers.
Oh, well.
Most people (out here at least) have more second (and greater degree) cousins than they know what to do with. I met my great aunt and uncle (my grandfather’s brother and sister-in-law of his other deceased brother) and their whole clan for the first time today, a good dozen or so second and third cousins. It was a little strange being in a room full of family yet not really knowing anyone’s name.
February 15th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
The pulling over to give respect to a funeral procession is not unique to PEI, unfortunatly, it has almost entirely dissapeared elsewhere.
I remember occasionally when I was little, that people in Toronto would give respect like that. It makes me sad that the world passes them by without a thought now and occasionally even honks at them to hurry up.