10.31.04
The Few Things I Won't Miss About Montreal
Late last August, tears falling into my farewell hamburger from Frite Alors!, I inched my way out of Montreal and into the murky borderlands of Québec. My summer in Canada was over.
I made up this list to cheer myself on the ride home:
Dorval
Dorval (YUL) is Montreal's main airport, a distant, weaselly warren of tunnels and construction areas that violates the cardinal rule of airport construction: do not put a large mountain between yourself and the city that you serve.
No one at Dorval has made the connection between the giant aluminum winged things that float in hourly from the sky and the enormous crowds of people packing the arrivals hall.
The people at Immigration Canada behave as if they are genuinely shocked and bewildered to see so many people yet again materializing out of thin air, for the 589th consecutive day. Where do they all come from?
They do their best to check documents and be firendly - they've even installed a helpful clock (a tribute to retarded bilingualism: "estimated waiting time: 55 minutes/55 minutes"), and they have a friendly officer manfully bearing the complaints of all the passengers at the head of the line. But they seem overwhelmed by all the mysterious strangers filling their airport.
Follow the winged metal cylinders, I want to tell them. The secret is in the winged metal cylinders!
I can only imagine the morning routine at Dorval.
- Eh, Giles, ca commence! Y'a des tas de gens!
- Merde! Qu'est-ce qin va faeire?
- Tsi bouing de la faroule, non?
On my last arrival at Dorval, the wait was up to seventy five minutes, and to get to the passport counters you had to zigzag along a nylon rope maze with about forty switchbacks, an experience akin to passing through a bureaucratic intestinal tract. Immediately to our right, past the nylon rope, was the baggage area with a beautiful view of all our suitcases, neatly lined up next to the conveyor belts. A large caged dog who had made the transatlantic trip in the cargo hold had been unloaded along with the baggage, and he spent the entire seventy five minutes barking and howling disconsolately as his cursing owner snaked back and forth with us through the line, trying to comfort the animal whenever he got near enough to the cage, which only intensified the barking.
Pepperoni
Montreal pepperoni is wide, pale and flaccid in a way completely unbefitting the traditions of this noble sausage. It's like finding a piece of salami in your pizza, but instead of manfully putting the stuff on top where it can be evaluated and condemned by a just world, the pizza makers of Montreal sneak it in under the surface, so you have to tease it out with your teeth like a Guinea worm.
Reliable Canadian sources tell me that I am full of it, and that Montreal is home to some of the finest small-diameter, wine-dark pepperoni anywhere, but I was both lazy and fixated on chatting up pizza girls at the local we-employ-only-Russians pizza joint, so the sample size was limited.
Parking
"Big deal", you are going to say, "parking is a hassle in any city". But Montreal has the twin weapons of bilingualism and snow days, leading to the most inscrutable parking signs known to modern science. For example, you might see:
NO PARKING 8:30 - 9:30 Monday Friday* SAUF AVEC PERMIS 2 hour maximum 18:30 - 22:00 December / April DELIVERIES ONLY * (aprè�s 18h jours ferié�s)I list this typical set of rules together for convenience, but in the wild you are likely to find them distributed over a deep inheritance hierarchy, scattered up and down the length of an entire street. They are arranged to maximize potential ambiguity, with some very subtle touches. For example, signs demanding sticker parking theoretically have an arrow pointing from the signpost in the direction that they apply:
RESIDENT PARKING ONLY HERE TO CORNER. MUST DISPLAY STICKER >>-------->But these signs are always mounted at an 89.99 degree� angle to the sidewalk, so that they are essentially orthogonal to the street, whose denizens live in fear.
Default-Deny Culture
In the United States, you are free to turn any way you damned well please at an intersection, unless there is an explicit road sign prohibiting it. In Canada, you must look for the turn sign with green arrows showing which turns are allowed. You heard that right. The government has to *specifically allow* you to make a turn before you can contemplate making it.
All you needed to know about the two countries.
Sales Tax
I understand the need for taxes. Freedom isn't free, let alone things like the Canadarm 2. I am not bitter about paying a surcharge on everything I buy to fund the Nunavut Festival de la Francophonie, since in the end the sight of Canadian currency is irrevocably linked to 'monopoly money' in my brain, and in a more philosophical sense, we die broke anyway.
But what does rankle me is the completely non-deterministic nature of the Canadian sales tax. You have not tasted anxiety until you arrive at a gas station with a five dollar bill in hand, buy a muffin and small coffee, and stand shuddering at the checkout, waiting to see if the sales tax will be $0.11 or $34. On one memorable night, I paid $0.69 sales tax on an $0.80 pack of gum, and only a spare quarter in a forgotten pocket saved me.
But did somebody say muffins?
Muffins
For all that Canada is an advanced civilization, the country remains sadly behind in muffin technology. The pre-requistes to a good muffin, any American will tell you, are a golden baked outer crust, fluffy middle, and a reasonable attempt at non-greasiness.
The P & A offers something resembling chewed-up brown paper towels, with or without chocolate chips, proudly boasting "only 190 calories". The only other muffin contender was the local gas station, with a promising-looking muffin bin of ten flavors, all of which turned out to be variations on compressed sheet cake.
Tim Horton's offers muffins, but I knew better than to try one and risk having to criticize Tim Horton's on this blog. No one wants a Canadian death squad on their ass.
The Burrito
The failure of Canada to independently develop the burrito is one of the great mysteries in the development of human civilization. All the key elements are in place - Mexicans, tortilla bakeries, a large drunk population, the concept of flat pancake-like thing wrapped around a savory filling (thanks to creperies), the concept of a starchy, vaguely spice-filled Latin American food (thanks to the empanada bakeries), even the concept of 24 hour cheap bulk food (thanks to the $0.99 pizza parlors).
But just as the Chinese were never able to make the leap to the printing press despite inventing ink, paper, movable type, and educating a large literate class, Canada can't seem to make the conceptual or cultural leap to the burrito. Perhaps it is a niche in the Canadian stomach already occupied by poutine? Or is it the invisible hand of Tim Horton's "taking care" of any entrepreneur who dares open a burrito stand?
The world may never know. But the world is certainly not going to consider moving permanently to a place that does not offer giant foil-wrapped cylinders of Mexican food at three in the morning.
Greeks
HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK
11:41 AM10.28.04
Languid
I've set up a little web service for identifying language. If you paste in some text (the more the better), it will tell you what language it's in. Not rocket science, but perhaps useful to somebody.
There's an API for people who like to do things programatically.
Note that I'm logging all the queries, so you don't have to email me and say "I pasted BLAH and it gave me the wrong answer". But any other feedback is welcome.
Check it out at http://languid.cantbedone.org.
For the curious, this is the same algorithm as TextCat, except with Unicode smarts built in.
12:37 PM10.26.04
These Little Town Blues
Vermont is up to its old October tricks again, but I've been hurt before. I'm not falling for the pumpkins this time. No amount of fog-on-pond in the morning, red maple trees, or fresh cider is going to distract me from what the state so desperately wants me to forget: winter is coming - bleak, dark, and populated by middle-aged people in reindeer sweaters.
The saddest Sunday of the year arrives this week, when for the murkiest of reasons we have to move our clocks back, and suddenly four o'clock means sunset. Any day now we will have a rainstorm that will knock down the rest of the pretty leaves, and sometime around Halloween there will be the first snow, which we will pretend didn't happen. And then in late November the frosts will settle in for good.
Already I've woken up to thick floral patterns of ice on the car window. Again - pretty but ominious. There was hoarfrost on the grass along the road to work a full three weeks ago. In the mornings now there is a bite and a chill; the dogs fill the air with steam when they run out to the pond.
It occurs to me that I am living somebody's bucolic rural fantasy. I wake up in the morning to slanting yellow sunlight, many times with cello music filtering up from the room below (I live with a concert cellist). The sound is soft but fills the entire house, now that the birds have flown and the frogs are sleeping somewhere in the muck. I wear wool sweaters, pick apples off the tree for my breakfast, throw sticks for the dogs to chase. At any moment I could go out back and chop wood, if the mood struck me.
It doesn't strike me.
Whoever this bucolic fantasy belongs to (and I suspect it's some burnt out middle-aged city dweller who wants to drink cocoa and wear reindeer sweaters), they are welcome to it. I want to be near pizza, movie theaters, and bars that do not have a television set. I want the noise and I would also welcome the funk. I have had four years of contemplative rural winters and there is not a thought left in my spiritually bankrupt head. I want to be near four-story bookstores, real sushi and the kind of attractive, lonesome women with low expectations who will eat that sushi with me.
So I've accepted a wonderful job offer in New York City. Starting in December, I'm going to be an Associate Program Officer at the Andrew Mellon Foundation, helping oversee a number of their open source software projects. I'm excited, eager to be near friends in New York, and looking forward to a Thanksgiving spent apartment hunting. I will do my level best here to not be annoying and wide-eyed about it.
9:16 PM10.24.04
The Black Rider
Every time I open a can of шпротный паштет fish paste, I get to missing my cat. шпротный паштет ('shprotnyi pashtet', Russian for 'sardine pâté') is a gray slurry with the texture and appearance, but not the odor, of freshly mixed concrete. It is made of industrially mashed and homogenized sardines from the former Eastern bloc. As best I can determine, it comes from Latvia and is sold in an attractive, ageless yellow metal can with a faded black label. There is no expiration date.
шпротный паштет may look like wet concrete, but it tastes like seafood heaven. It is particularly good spread on a toasted bagel and served with thick tomato slices on top, but if you are a cat, you are likely to prefer it straight from the can. If you are a cat, you can also probably detect a can of the stuff being opened in the kitchen two stories below despite being sound asleep on your back in an armchair, four paws in the air, dead to the world. Because not only does шпротный паштет come in a thick-walled can that makes a loud 'thunk - fsssss!' when pierced, but it also has what one might call a distinctive odor.
Which is a bit like saying that capsaicin has a distinctive flavor. You love it, or you don't.
To the uncultured palate, there is nothing that шпротный паштет calls to mind as much as really, really cheap cat food; and the cat's behavior on detecting the presence of a can only reinforces the impression. The substance is like crack cocaine for felis catus.
Very early in our cohabitation, my ex issued a fatwa against шпротный паштет and forced the cat and me to go underground to safeguard a supply. My own mother became a dealer, making once-a-season supply runs to some back room Russian deli in Boston to load up on the tasty disks. She and I would rendezvous in New Hampshire, and I would trade a mortgage check in return for a tall stack of cans, along with some other Slavic unobtainables, which I hid under a false floor in the trunk.
The cat's job was to destroy all evidence of шпротный паштет at home, and her performance was outstanding. On the (mercifully frequent) mornings when I was up and ready for work while the ex was still asleep, I would open a can and prepare myself a royal breakfast, working quickly by an opened window. The cat would hurl herself down the stairs like a load of bricks falling down a chute, and then sit on her tall stool and bore holes into me with her eyes until I relinquished the can. This she would lick clean, stripping the metal lining out of the bottom with her raspy pink tongue, purring like a chainsaw.
One nice thing about being single is that it has lifted so many food restrictions for me - no need to negotiate for rights to the avocado, no consequences if I finish the salsa, nothing standing between me and шпротный паштет, 24/7, whenever I want it. But a not-so-nice thing about being single is that I have had to relinquish the cat. And without my partner in crime, the fish paste has lost all its savor. She is somewhere in Maine now, being well cared for by a near stranger, while I wait to find a steady place to live and can bring her back. And I have a whole stack of yellow cans saved up for that happy day.
