Celebrating Canadia

I never would have imagined Canada Day in any other country could compare with our own celebrations, but boy was I wrong!  Every year England hosts a massive Canada Day party in Trafalgar Square, London, and luckily for us it fell on a weekend this year.
After a very fun day at work (filled with "Happy Canadia Day, miss" wishes from loads of students) we took the train to London, drinking and decorating ourselves with Canada tattoos on the way. 

I was already a little tipsy by the time we got to Trafalgar Square where Laura, Brit, Mark and I met the rest of our friends.  We stood around the square, dancing and singing, surrounded by about 20,000 people all there enjoying the fantastic weather, decked out in their red and white, celebrating the birth of our great nation. It was so much fun I really can't put it into words.  
The only disappointing thing about the evening was that, before we got there, Sarah, Kari, Cara, and Simon met and had their picture taken with none other than Wayne Gretzky!  I was so upset we hadn't arrived a couple hours earlier. 

Then, as if that wasn't bad enough, Sarah and Simon bumped into Mike Myers - I swear, Sarah is like a magnet for famous people (she met Matthew Fox about a month ago too)!  Oh well though, snooze you lose I guess.
We spent the evening drinking, tattooing and drawing on each other with red and white crayons (which are very difficult to wash off, by the way), dancing along to Blue Rodeo, and just generally being our crazy, fun selves.

There were, of course, a lot of angry faces made throughout the night - not because of anger though; it was more of a nostalgic thing.  Like, HEY!  GIMME MY FRIENDS ON CANADA DAY!  :)

To finish off the night Blue Rodeo played the national anthem, and we all sang along with thousands of fellow Canadians to "Oh Canada" - it sounds cheesy but it was a pretty magical moment; Britny even had tears!  Here they are:

I am really happy I had the opportunity to celebrate "Canadia" Day abroad; it's definitely a night I will always remember.