Jeffrey Vanneste’s Personal Blog

“If only I was younger.” – Rachel

Rach and I went to check out the big foam sword fights that go on in summer in Montreal. Michelle and Sean told us about them when they stayed here over summer (though they called them “Nerd Wars”). The sword fighting is much better than the tam-tams (which happen right beside where the fighting occurs). To get it out of the way, here is the picture of the tam-tams:

You can find many hippies here. I made a short video of the tam-tams to save you the bother of ever having to attend this. You can check it out on youtube and waste 30 seconds of your life. In case you can’t tell, I’m not a big fan of the tam-tams.

So the foam sword fighting. These guys put foam around wood sticks for swords, put foam onto the end of arrows, make big lances, make shields and many other weapons. On a field they stand in 2 lines facing each other and then charge and fight. Everyone seemed to be pretty honest about getting hit. It looked like a good time and as Rachel said “If only I was younger” she would have jumped in there and beat down someone. You can check out the few pictures we took (my camera died so there isn’t many) on flickr as usual. The best guys were the ones with bow and arrows:

Followed by the guys that got completely dressed up for this event:

I also recorded a 1 minute video of one round of fighting. I put up on youtube if you want to check it out.