Trip to ABR - Day 4

May 2, 2008 | Updates

Monday morning, April 21st, was our ABR evaluation. A trainer looked Samuel over and showed us how deformed (for lack of a better word) his body has become since his accident. There are many things I knew had occurred, but many of them, I had not noticed. About half of it I had realized on my own. The other half, surprised me. But, these are all things that ABR will fix. And, they said that ABR will help with his arching, but that the inventor himself would have to address that when we saw him on Wednesday. We then had 2 ½ hours of training on how to apply ABR and practiced on each other. Samuel was kind enough to sleep through that training for us :)!

That evening, we decided to go into the heart of town to look around and eat dinner. It was rather late – about 8 pm – when we went. We found a place to park and started walking around. It was odd because we could hear people cheering and it seemed to be all around us. We thought there must be a stadium nearby and a game of some sort going on. We had seen flags on everyone’s cars and in everyone’s windows and finally determined they were for the Montreal Canadian’s hockey team. We figured a game must be going on.

As we walked farther, we noticed there were people everywhere in pubs and bars and restaurants and standing outside of them, watching any TV they could. And they were watching hockey. But everytime someone would score, EVERYONE would cheer. It was the oddest thing because it sounded like the entire town was the stadium! And it made it more intense that most of the restaurants had these huge windows that they had pulled completely back so there was nothing between the people inside and the street outside. We also noticed that there were police on every corner. And we finally figured out where the stadium was and it was several miles away. We didn’t really understand what the big deal was. (You can see in the picture below how the windows on the restaurants open clear up leaving nothing between the people inside and the streets outside.)

We found a Hard Rock Café to eat in. When we went inside, the place was packed with people. And there were TV’s everywhere all tuned into the hockey game. But it was like you were in the stadium again with people singing and stomping their feet and cheering. We found a table and ordered and sitting there in that restaurant, it became clear how big of a deal this was for these people. Everytime there was a score, the cheering and singing and stomping was so loud! It was incredible. We kept commenting on how excited these people all were about this game.

When the game ended, everyone got up to leave. I said to Tom that we were going to be in for a TON of traffic. So, we paid our bill and went to find our car. But there wasn’t that much traffic. Apparently, most people don’t own cars and had just walked to where they were. So, instead of cars everywhere, there were people everywhere. And I mean everywhere - not just on the sidewalks, but congesting the streets! It took us quite some time to reach our car and I can tell you that I didn’t see one other child that whole entire night. I was getting a little concerned that everyone there seemed to know this was not a night to have your child on the street with you. That and the 100’s of cops we saw made it a little disconcerting. And this was where I learned my first French words very rapidly. They consisted of “Excusez-moi” (excuse me) and “Attention!!” (watch out) as I tried to keep everyone from stepping on Samuel.

We finally reached our car and drove home. I later found out this was the last of a 7 game series between Boston and Canada. Boston had won 3 games and the Canadians had won 3 games. This was the winner takes all final game and the Canadians won 5 to 0. We got home about midnight. It was soon after that – just a few block from where we had been – that riots broke out in the streets and at least 5 police cars were trashed and then set on fire. Shops were broken into and fights broke out. Montreal sent out their riot police and it took about 3 hours to clear out the streets. Man, oh, man, I’m glad we got the heck out of there and I’m glad they won the game! What would’ve happened if they had lost!

Until tomorrow…

Love,
The Jewkes

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