Canada Trip Epilogue 3- Silly pictures signifying nothing

Well, blog's done for now guys. Enjoy some silly, out of context pictures I took all across this great nation.

Winnipeg bear is not pleased

I like to imagine he already had that ribbon before he was made into a fur. Like, just an award-winning raccoon or something.

Hostels.jpg

A giant fencing studio in Vancouver

Right across the street from the fencing studio- Scientology Center. I think a wars a-brewin

Oh yeah that's nice hey wait a minute

Oh no not that

overdoing it a little on the bilingual here i think

nice slogan

please don't call dr. hook on me

I declare this entrance to the USA to be uninspired and pedestrian

dramatic shift in tone there

yeah.. science..

like the rock says, til' we meet again travelblog fans. may you always travel vaguely. thanks for following along

Canada Trip Epilogue 2- Three mini-essays and 2 lists on Canada in general

On Canadian Identity

There are cards from some Candian version of trivial pursuit here on the table of this bar that I'm in. Out of 6 questions on the card, 2 of them have 'Canada' as he answer. A brief perusal of the other cards indicates a lot of this kind of thing. I seems to me that there's something to all this- a quest for national identity and pride. Usually this is just represented by talking a lot about the Canadian identity of various famous people and things. As if to say "perhaps you will reconsider your position on Canada now that you see that the zipper was invented here?" I'm sure with enough time I would truly be able to make a claim of some sort of national neurosis. An inferiority/superiority complex. I mean, what else is to happen when you are right next to (geographically as well as in other ways) the best and worst country in the world?

On Canadians

Everyone I’ve met here is just overall more pleasant. But it’s not by a particular Canadian characteristic, but rather, a lack of something American. People here seem less existentially anxious, perhaps. There’s a certain seething undercurrent of anger and confusion I see In Americans that seems to be lacking here. You could call it a simplicity, but I think that would miss the point. Whatever it is, it’s a refreshing change. There’s also a kind of national relaxation here that is absent in the US. People in Canada speak about their country in warm, familiar terms, and can easily rattle off statistics and factoids about their home-province. However, this pride has none of the jingoist or aggressive edge that it might in America. Canadians don’t feel the need to be number 1. Maybe once the US has stopped teetering and finally definitively toppled we can relax a little bit too.

On the Canadian Currency

Because they have coins in denominations of both 1 and 2 dollars, as well as all the usuals, it seems like no matter how I try, I end up with an ever increasing quantity of change. My bags are weighed down with these things and I’m too embarrassed to just buckle down and pay for a meal entirely in dimes and nickels. And god forbid you buy something inexpensive with one of your precious few bills- you’ll be rewarded with an avalanche of coins of varying and arcane values. Credit cards are hopeless as well. Canada has apparently surpassed the US technologically to the point where presenting a card you have to actually swipe will get you the same kind of incredulous eyeballing that you would get if you had flopped a dead fish onto the counter as a means of payment. They have to dust off some ancient machine and fiddle with its buttons while the queue behind you grows ever longer with increasingly patient Canadians. It is best to avoid spending money at all, if possible.

I would imagine you are not aware of these surprising Canada facts

• The baseball glove was invented by a Canadian, as was the zipper
• A Saskatoon is a blueberry like fruit
• Britain had a prime minister who was born in Canada. Infinitely more interesting, his name was Andrew Boner Law
• Huckleberry Finn had trouble getting published in the US, and in fact was only picked up after it was published in Canada
• The man who is widely considered to be the inspiration for James bond was a Canadian
• Maple Syrup was discovered in Canada. Ok, maybe this one does not surprise you, but the way it was discovered was that a young native man observed a squirrel break off the branch of a tree and drinking the sap and got the idea to do the same thing. Take home point- Squirrels eat maple syrup?!
• Canada was visited by Chinese explorers in 326 BC on a mission to find some kind of legendary fungus. No word on whether or not they found it.
• The red fox is an anxious and stressed out animal. Scientists have found that about half of them have ulcers, some of them severe (ulcers!)

It’s the little things (observations on the foreignness of Canada)

• The hotel in Winnipeg was a bit confusing to me. Instead of familiar buttons, it had ones with intriguing names like ‘(star)B’, 'MR', and ‘M’, which I eventually figured out was the lobby. I think the M probably stands for ‘manitoba’, which makes sense because when you push the button you do end up in Manitoba. There is also a switch on the elevator which can be turned between OFF and HWENAB. I am convinced there is no explanation for this.
• The only soft drink that is sold out in the pop (they call it pop) vending machine is Canada Dry GingerAle
• Other beverages loved my Winnipeggers- 7-11 slushees. I read in my guide book that Winnipeg consumes more of them per capita than anywhere else in the world. No less than half an hour after reading this fact I overheard a conversation about slushees and how good they are.
• At Tim Horton’s the woman asked me if I wanted cream, chocolate milk (!), or white milk (??) with my coffee. I ordered a small and was surprised to find that it was small.
• Another interesting color-food connection. Toast is not described here are ‘wheat’ or ‘whole-grain’, but rather just as ‘brown’. This seems more honest somehow, like they’re not trying to sell you on the bread, just describing it in the most basic possible way. We’ve got some bread here, how shall we describe it? Well, what color is it?
• Here, when someone says a business is ‘licensed’, it means that they can serve alcohol. This, in itself, is not so unusual, but the problem is it seems to mean nothing else. There’s a whole lot of ‘oh yes, we have a license here, or sadly, we don’t have a license. I would have assumed that they weren’t legally allowed to sell food to me if I didn’t know better. License is actually a very meaningful word, but here it seems to have been reduced entirely to code for ‘has booze’. If I were to tell people that I’m a licensed counselor they would probably assume that I can serve liquor in my sessions. Which I can.
• Winnipeggers love reggae. Being a street musician is a real, licensed profession in the city, and being a ‘busker’, as they’re called, requires an audition to prove that you can actually play an instrument pleasingly. In the summer, at least, the city is filled with music. Mostly reggae music.
• The musk ox is an animal so ridiculous that is impossible to caricature

Canada Trip Epilogue 1- Trains

A word or two about ViaRail and long trips on trains in general

On this trip I spent over 200 hours riding on trains. This experience was not as rewarding as I had fantasized it would be. It was very irritating and uncomfortable. I swear I must have been cursed with terrible train partners. That, or there's just something about people on trains.

On the first leg of my trip a plague of teenage girls descended upon my car and spent the entire first night giggling and cavorting and just generally preventing sleep. Next, on the way to Churchill, someone has brought an honest-to-god baby aboard. It should probably be illegal to bring a baby on a 40 hour train ride, although I guess such a law would seem silly because who would want to do this in the first place? The woman in front of me, that’s who! Well, let’s be fair. It’s not quite a baby, more like a toddler, but is that really an upgrade? I guess if you’re a parent, it must be very rewarding to see your child progress from the writhing and crying stage to the flailing and yelling stage (which they will remain in until age 22).  Anyway, this baby spent the whole night yelling about something (gaabee?) and I’m pretty sure it went through a stage where it was just yelling the word shit over and over. You got that right kid. The mother kept shushing it in these urgent, quiet tones, as if the baby would eventually pick up on the social cues or something and say ‘oh, pardon, I have no idea what I was thinking yelling like that for hours’.  I have to say, although it was the shouting that woke me up, what made me lose the most sleep was the existential crisis it triggered about whether I really do want children. Don’t get me wrong, I love kids. I work with kids. I just don’t really love babies, and if I ever have one, I promise not to bring it on a train.

Aside from the dramatic Candian Rockies on the first day, the ride itself was not very eventful. We kept passing by the remains of telephone poles, which had been disused for years, in various stages of sinking into the muck. Some are held up by other poles, tripod-style. It reminds me of that bit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail about swamp castle. So we built another telephone pole! It fell over, burned down, and then sank into the swamp. It really makes you wonder what exactly people are doing out here, that they’d colonize someplace so nakedly inhospitable to them. Is the need to expand so great that we just do it thoughtlessly, without any regard to whether or not it’s actually a good idea? The railroad, by the way, is also sinking into the swamp. An American company does the rail maintenance for viarail, laying down new track as needed. Evidently, they do not do this job very well. Before I came on this trip, it didn’t really occur to me that a train could experience ‘turbulence’, and now I know both that it can and why. Turns out it’s america’s fault. I like to imagine that when the train’s pace slows inexplicably, that it’s because we’re approaching a particularly faulty section of rail, and we have to, like, creep carefully over it, like an explorer on an old rope bridge.

More than anything else, the train is slow. Aside from the aforementioned swamp, there are plenty of other issues that can cause endless delay. Sometimes it's too hot and the train must creep along at 10 miles per hour to avoid warping the track. Sometimes a freight train breaks down in front of you and you just sit still for hours. Sometimes it just seems as if something is wrong with the train as it sits in the station with no one apparently doing anything to make it leave on time or fix it. Mostly, however, the problem is that the railroads themselves are owned by the freight companies. This ends up meaning that the freight trains have priority and that passenger trains must essentially pull over and wait for them to pass, no matter how long that might take. In some places it means sitting on a side track for 2 hours. Capitalism, everyone!

The coach class, which I am of course a part of, is forbidden from interacting with our betters during non-dining hours. We are not even allowed to use the showers, which sit in the nearly-deserted upper class cars largely unused.  And the website explicitly lied about the train’s wifi capacity (it has none).  There is a weird, enforced class divide where the coach passengers actually end up poorly fed and smelly by the time they reach their destination. Didn’t want to pay the extra? This is what you deserve, you Poor. For every dollar they invest on, like, train improvements, and such, ViaRail can expect to make 70 cents back. I learned this from a fellow traveler, but he seemed well informed, so I kind of just believe it. Plus it would explain why it feels like as little effort has been put into this train as possible. Capitalism, everyone! Oh wait, that's the punchline I used last paragraph. Guess it's still true.

Above all else the train is about enduring. You have not truly experienced what it means to be delayed until you arrive at a destination 10 hours late. I don't think I will ever be impatient on an airline flight again.

Chapter 8- Nova Scotia and The End

 Hello blogfriends. This is the last update in my series about spending a month traveling across Canada by train. By the time I got here I had spent 200something hours on trains and was covered in bug bites, cuts, and bruises. I was also pretty sick. Truth be told, I pretty much limped across that finish line. Nova Scotia was a welcome respite. I spent about a week with my parents at their cabin on Church Lake, kinda just recovering. A lot of the striking images here are of the lake.

 Nova Scotia is a maritime province, its motto something like 'shaped by the sea'. Between the lakes, rivers, and frequent fog, even when you're not looking at the ocean it has a generally watery feel to it

 I also has an adorably old-fashioned rustic feel to it. It is low key, small scale, intimate. I actually think that talking a lot about Nova Scotia would be incorrect. It's not that things couldn't be said, but rather that quietness could say more. Does that make any sense? Who knows. Anyway, I think the pictures speak well about the place.

So now I'm back from Canada. While the trip might not have given me everything that I wanted, it certainly gave me what I needed. Expect one more entry where I talk a little bit about trains and post some funny pictures.

Chapter 7- International Metropolis of Confusion, Montreal

or how I failed to learn to stop worrying and love the french

Let's just get it out of the way- Montreal gave me a headache. By the end of my first day I was thoroughly overwhelmed and exhausted. I do not blame Montreal, I blame myself. See, thing is, I don't speak french. Like none at all, with no exaggeration. This is in stark contrast to the other languages that I don't speak like spanish, german, and italian, in which I am pretty sure I could competently recognize at least some percentage of important words and phrases. The only french I know basically comes from Pepe LePew cartoons. We're talking 'I don't know how to say I don't speak french in french' bad.

Montreal's big central-park type park, Mont Royal Parc. There were a lot of steps..

featuring views like this

and the famous la croix (no points for guessing what this means)

 I figured that Montreal would be bi-lingual, like most of the places I had been in in Canada so far. Nope, all french, all the time. I guess it makes sense, I mean, this is why the Canadians train themselves in at-least-incidental french from an early age. When you visit montreal you want to know that the truck in front of you makes frequent arrets and you need to know not to wander into le machine qui écrase la tête. It is an intimidating place for someone unprepared. Thing is, it actually is bilingual. Like, virtually everyone can speak english, they just tend not to. Still, I felt a little bit of internal tugging between my desire to at least attempt to speak to these people in their native language and the realization that I really really had no capacity to do so.

It was silly to feel this way, I realize, but Montreal is no stranger to linguistic confusion and conflict. It is split about evenly between 'francophones' and 'anglophones', on contrast to the rest of Quebec, which is much more 'francophonic'. To give you an idea of how extant these issues are, these are real words that are used regularly there. I've digressed on this either too long or not long enough, so let's move on.

Although I had trouble at first (and indeed throughout), I left with a very pleasant impression on Montreal. It has that european/metropolitan mix of new and old and is organized in a way that makes for an engaged and active population. I don't have much else to say about Montreal, other than that it managed to be challenging to me in a way that drew me in, rather than repelled me, which is no mean feat. I look forward to going back. And now, some pictures of my self-guided bike tour around Montreal (an amazing way to see the city, highly recommend).

 This is one of Montreal's greatest architectural wonders, La Basilique Notre-Dame de Montreal

 It was built in the 1820's and boasts a spectacularly 11 ton bell and two towers named Perseverance and Temperance. You can bet that if I ever come into possession of towers, I will be naming them in a similar way.

 In addition to traditional stained-glass, it also features depictions of important events in montreal's history.

 Like all good churches, it is literally awe-inspiring.

 Celine Dion was married here, in case you care to know such a thing.

 I just love church organs

 Some of Montreal's oldest sky-scrapers. Once again I am impressed by how legitimate the history is here.

 Biking along the waterfront I came upon some of the coolest looking apartments I've ever seen.

 Central station, a site of much confusion for me, but a beautiful building.

Next blog post will probably be the last one in this series and will cover Nova Scotia and some general observations. See you soon