Pointing out the obivious

Tornwordo's post today reminded me of the immensely unenjoyable time I spent in Winnipeg as a teenager.

The year was 1992 and I was 16. Canada was celebrating 125 years of being a whiny, yet progressive country, and as a special treat they were offering an exchange program free of charge. Anyone 16 and over who wanted to see another part of the country could sign up, though you couldn't choose where to go. It turned out that our school got paired with Winnipeg. Yay.

We had to host first, so at some point in the spring a group of students came over to stay for a week. The people in charge of the program at school organized lots of group outings and trips to keep everyone occupied. It was ok. Though I'm just realizing now that I have no idea what the person's name was who stayed with me, or even what he looked like.

A few weeks later it was our turn to go. Upon arriving we discovered, to our dismay, that we wouldn't be staying with the people who came to visit us - or even seeing them. In fact none of us were to be staying in Winnipeg at all. We ended up being dispersed across the countryside in different backwoods towns. I think I was somewhere outside of Rosenort.

Rosenort.

I ended up staying with a Mennonite family. They were very nice, very hospitable and very innocent. The daughter was all excited because she was going to Bible college the next year. The son, who was my age, was kind of geeky. He didn't have much in the way of social skills, his face was all pimply and looked like it had been run over by a tractor - more than once. But being a hard working farm boy (as opposed to the get-me-the-hell-out-of-here kind of farm boy that I was) he had a killer bod. I thought about putting a potato sack over his head and taking him out back behind the barn once or twice, but figured that might not go over so well.

They had barely scheduled any group activities and we had to complain a lot so that someone would make arrangements so we could see each other. The isolation was awful. We did end up going to a "social" at the local church hall one night. It was their version of a school dance except you could drink - and drink I did. The legal age out there is 18, and somehow I looked it and consequently got the drinking wristband. We also went on some river cruise. I drank a lot there too. We all did.

However I did have a point to this story. We had a few chaperone's accompany us on the trip, one of whom was the female gym teacher - a classic, stereotypical lesbian. I ended up getting into a car with her and a couple of other students when leaving the airport. Ms. Gym Teacher was sitting in the front passenger seat and our driver was telling us about Winnipeg and all the flooding problems they have and all the ways they try to combat it. She was pointing out some landmarks and things and nonchalantly motioned to the right and said "and there's the dyke."
I swear my tongue was bleeding and I almost peed my pants.

And that was my most memorable moment in the utterly forgettable city of Winnipeg.