[gr8dragon]

I have been a volunteer in FIRST for a couple of years now, and I must say that there is nothing quite like the Festival de Robotique FRC a Montreal Regional. First of all they run both FLL and FRC at the same time, which as one can imagine would take a large volunteer force to pull off, and they do pull it off. The volunteers themselves are fantastic over here with their passion for the game, friendliness towards other volunteers, and their willingness to try and converse in English with those of us who speak little to no French. It was remarkable to see that even when the regional was running close to an hour behind at the start, the volunteers were contemplating waiting for teams to show up to the field just to have everyone play as many matches as possible. What was even more remarkable was the fact that in a matter of hours not only was the time made up for, but we started running ahead of time. The day turned from lets try to make up lost time into, lets just party on the field so we are not too far ahead, and all 6 robots were already on the field.

Everyone else already touched on the lights, and the music and the emcee at the event but no amount of praise is enough for them as anyone watching the webcast can see. I am very thankful to have had the opportunity to be a part of this spectacular event, I enjoyed it so much so that I feel bad for not being able to speak the local language to an extent as to have small conversations. I am sorry to all of the French speaking volunteers who had to bear with me and switch to English to get their jobs done, and am also very grateful. If I return to this event(I have full intentions to) then I do plan on learning some French in the upcoming year. Thanks everyone for the great time.