Niagara Falls

Check it out, I'm at Niagara Falls!

So, as I've said, I spent about 3 days in Niagara Falls for the National Johnson-O'Malley Conference. Johnson-O'Malley is a federal program that provides supplemental programming that addresses the unique cultural needs of American Indian public school students. It was great getting to meet so many people from across the country who work with Native students.

After the conference was over I took a representative from the American Indian Graduate Center to several New York state high schools that have high Native enrollments so he could present the scholarship opportunities available through AIGC, as well as to several higher education offices of the Six Nations of the Haudenesaunee (Iroquois).

The day after the conference we spent the morning visiting Niagara Falls, Canada. It was neat to see the falls, but I don't know if it was worth the cost. It cost us $3 to cross the bridge into Canada and then parking was $10 (and that was the cheap parking). We literally spent all of about 15 minutes looking at the falls. I mean, once you've seen them there really isn't much to do but watch more and more water fall over them. Nothing changes, just more and more water.

Well, the Canada side of the falls is a friggin' theme park! The whole time we were there, we kept talking about how ghetto Niagara Falls, NY was and we just thought it was partly due to it being the off-season, but after having seen the Canada side we knew why the New York side has become so run down. New York just can't compete with the variety of things to do on the Canada side and how family friendly the Canada side was. There was tons of stuff to keep a young family occupied for days.

It was a really great trip and I had a fabulous time. Here are some pictures from our day visiting Niagara Falls, Canada.Check out the dude climbing a rope on the Guinness sign! It was a real guy climbing the sign, not some sort of special effect. I have no clue what he was doing?