nearlyhere

Our run of good weather in Seattle continued after a dry, but very cold weekend visit the city to see the Pixies. I’m so glad we made the trip – they were unbelieveable, and the magnificent Paramount Theatre was an appropriate venue for these unassuming rock gods to grind out the greatest indie album of all time, Doolittle.

We also checked out the Bodies exhibition – Plasticised Humans, stripped of their skin posed sportingly on plinths, organs in clear display cases and, downstairs in a darkened room off to the side with worried warnings at the door, embryos and fetuses in back-lit bottles. Other highlights were the Seattle Art Museum with an impressive permanent Aboriginal Art exhibition and the small cinema at East Broadway, The Harvard Exit Theatre, where we rested our legs and took in the Cohen Brothers’ latest black comedy. The weekend was rounded off with the best authentic italian pizza we’ve ever had at Via Tribunali in Belltown.

Seattle has it’s rough patches, but it’s way less edgier than Vancouver and an altogether more grown-up and relaxed city – we look forward to returning there soon.

Check out our Flickr Photostream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bradnlala/sets/72157622812534314/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bradnlala/collections/72157622474806133/

Toronto

A few good friends here had recommended Toronto for it’s culture and diversity, and some others had described it as a sprawling, smoggy, North American city from which you have to drive two hours to breathe clean air. I hadn’t really formed any strong ideas about the place, and was looking forward to seeing it for myself – first impressions from the plane as we circled, staring down on freeways and empty, illuminated car parks were of the sprawling, potentially smoggy variety, but closer inspection over our four day visit indicated that Toronto had a lot more to offer than well-engineered overpasses and generous turning areas into drive-through banks. We stayed with Miriam in her apartment on the 3oth floor of a new tower downtown, which apparently provides great views of the afternoon thunder storms that roll across the lake. She was a super host; plying us with wine immediately upon our arrival, and she had wheeled a bulky borrowed inflatable bed some distance across town to sleep us on. It deflated on the first night and Laura woke up with her face pressed into my armpit. The next night we tried separate nests, playing rock, paper, scissors for the couch.

Jo, our other buddy in Toronto, joined us for a couple of long strolls about the place, which took us to the beach, where lifeguards appeared to be patrolling waters you couldn’t swim in. We headed to West Queen where we discovered lots of cafes, bars and interesting stores along the trendy but still fairly woolly thoroughfare. The eateries and pubs were abuzz with wasps hovering around the sweets as the population of yellow jackets had exploded after recurring garbage collection strikes a few weeks before. The Annex is pretty well known as a fun part of town for youngsters (and midsters) and we met up with another couple of Kiwis who’d carved out a bit of a nook in “Tronno”, dining and drinking local brews at the Victory Cafe in the Annex. If you’re not concerned with cris-crossing town, the street cars and subway will take care of your commuting needs up and along the grid. We didn’t travel outside of the 15 block radius from Miriam’s apartment, but we got a fair sense of the parts of the city we’d be interested in if we decided to live there. Toronto seemed pretty do-able – we’d get the urban fix we miss here in Victoria and probably be able to find interesting work, but despite the big city bustle, it felt rather familiar compared it’s enigmatic Quebecois cousin.

Montreal

We traveled by VIA Rail from Toronto to Montreal and connected with the Metro to get to the station at Laurier, in the Mile End neighbourhood, where Ian lives. He walked to meet us half way and we continued on to his apartment in a three-storeyed row housing block, a style of residence common to much of the densely populated plateau area. He was a brilliant host, guide and translator and after a brief orientation we set out for a nearby brew pub, Dieu du ciel! where he facilitated the ordering of pints and some sandwiches, and we caught up.

Our visit to the city could hardly be described as an adventurous one. Basically, all we were really interested in could be found within a 15 minute walk from Ian’s, which roughy amounted to the strip between Avenue du Parc and Saint Denis, south of Rue Bernard and north of Rue Rachel, a significant chunk of the area known as the Plateau – so that’s where we spent most of our  few days there. This involved mostly waking, eating a bagel with coffee and chatting with Ian, and then setting out for a day of walking between cafes, parks, boulangeries and boutiques, until we met up with Ian again for an evening meal. We took the metro to travel into Old Montreal, a wedge of the inner city next to the river filled with large stone buildings. We dropped by Tam Tams, a popular African drumming and mock-medieval battle get-together at the foot of Mont Royal every sunny Sunday. There we lounged on the lawn, in haze of cigarette smoke with Patrick and Falon, a couple of friends from Victoria who were bound for Halifax on their trans-Canadian road trip.

While in Quebec we were obligated to ingest smoked meat and to dine on a genuine Montreal serving of Poutine, for both of which the region is well-known. Whenever we passed the fabled Hebrew Deli, Shwartz’s, lines of salivating customers extended out along the sidewalk, so we opted for the Main, over the road on St Laurent, where we avoided the crowds and dined on a large bowl of smoked meat poutine – it was incredible: potato chips deep fried in tallow, swimming in rich gravy and cheese curd, topped with hot, thick, tender slices of spicy pastrami-style beef. This massive meal cost me $10, and probably a week off my life.

Montreal has a lively reputation (search for ‘bar + montreal’ on google maps and the central city is rendered with a rash of pink dots) which breeds and attracts folks possessing certain European values, so the vibe is noticeably less conservative  than in B.C. Laws regarding alcohol are far more relaxed here, permitting BYO restaurants and liquor sales at the local corner store, or Depanneurs – abbreviated to ‘Dep’. A more imaginative interpretation of the road rules in Montreal could spell trouble for a visitor from Victoria accustomed to bringing four lanes of traffic to a halt the second they start thinking about crossing a road. Unlike Vancouver or Victoria, Montreal is a very affordable place; Food, for example, costs what you feel you should pay – a meal in a cafe will set you back around half as much as it might in New Zealand. Rent is famously cheap here, too – a beautiful refurbished 2–bedroom loft apartment in a lively neighbourhood might set you back $700 per month. The significant downside is that most rental agreements are for one year, commencing and concluding on on a single chaotic day of the year – ‘Canada Day’. That the majority of the renting population of Montreal are content to spend the national Holiday lugging their belongings across the city hints at Quebec’s sometimes ambivalent relationship with the rest of the country.

Interestingly, provincial parks in Quebec are considered to be National Parks, because Quebec is really a Nation… well, it feels like it sometimes. What has allowed Montreal to become this unique place started long before the Francophone independence movement which reached a head in the 70’s when Trudeau called the army in and tanks rolled through the main streets. For a day, Montreal was like Belfast. A politician was even murdered, that’s how serious the separatists were. Eventually the stuffy Anglos in their tweed got the message and left, setting the scene for a cultural renaissance which continues today. How they would actually survive economically if they were to separate from Canada and become a republic, we may never know, but often these matters aren’t important when cultural identity is at stake. They’d manage I guess, and if not, they probably wouldn’t worry about it too much.

New York

If any of you are contemplating traipsing through three large cities on foot, we most strongly recommend packing very comfortable footwear. Chuck Taylor’s may suit skinny-legged jeans and might allow one to blend in with the hipster locals (if you dispense with the camera and don’t pause on corners to tussle with an intricately folding map), but there’s nothing like garishly sporty running shoes, with squishy distended soles, to cradle your mangled plates of meat. Strapped into gleaming new silver trainers, I appeared to have stepped into a pair of miniature fairground bumper cars from 2050, but I didn’t mind the stares – I could walk without screaming again and spring freely about New York like an escaped gazelle after a hoof massage. I figure that over the 16 days of holiday (minus four days of traveling which makes 12 days at  about 8km per day)  we ambled roughly 104km. Our appetites were in fine form, but the NY bagels cemented together with half a pound of cream cheese still proved too much of a mouthful.

The area of New York we enjoyed the most was Williamsburgh – over the East river, just north of Brooklyn. This might be because we’d recovered enough energy for a last burst of pavement pounding before flying home, but the wackiness of the place sure did strike a chord with us. There we wandered the streets and marvelled at the wonderful assortment of nutty human animals interacting on the streets. An pair of sweet looking elderly Jewish women sat at an apartment entrance, and reprimanded a pair of skinny hipsters for feebly scratching a horseshoe shape onto the pavement at the foot of the steps with chalk. “You fuckin piece of shit, what the fuck is wrong with you, doing that outside of some body’s house!?” the delightful old crone was heard to say. We ate, shopped for a few records and explored away from the main strip while a balding overweight fellow in an SUV with the stereo wound to the brink of disintegration passed us every few minutes, his hairy arm clamped to the sill, shouting out Neil Diamond as if he were a malfunctioning robotic version of the man himself, in Vegas. To protect our aching sides from further disurbance, we hurried into a dim, sandy-floored surf bar to drink beer before catching the L train back to Manhatten. From there we went onto the Staten Island Ferry for a farewell to the bright lights, unaware we’d be stranded in the cold SI terminal like well-fed western refugees for an hour, before being able to board the boat home.

In New York, the accepted rule of thumb when talking on a cellphone is to restrict conversation to topics such as relationship difficulties, infidelity, disagreements with colleagues and friends, and matters of life and death, and I suspect that if the volume of the dialogue falls below a decibel level prescribed in their contract, the call is disconnected. iPhones rule supreme in the city, and if somebody isn’t yelling into it, you’ll see them thumbing the screen, nodding and mouthing mysterious things with signature white ear buds dangling from their antitragial nooks. The proliferation of these smart phones might be attributed in part to the widespread availability of free Wi-Fi in Manhattan, but attention-grabbing devices of all breeds can be commonly seen slung over shoulders, clipped to waistbands and cradled on laps, so it’s probably just because New Yorkers love their gadgets. I’m a bit envious, I guess.

While walking along the waterfront park in Tribeca, I witnessed a fellow haul a fish out of the weak milky tea-coloured Hudson River. Chatting with a passer-by he claimed that he’d only had his line in the water for 6o seconds and that he regularly fished there. He then went on to explain that this species of fish fed purely on shellfish and was thus very tasty. As the fellow spoke assuredly on the subject of piscatology, I wondered… if the word “Bioaccumulation” had been stenciled on the side of his flapping meal-to-be, would he have paused to ask the stranger what it meant?

No colds

Striding our way across the Brooklyn bridge on a hot Sunday afternoon along with hundreds of tourists we passed a clammy young fellow, dabbing his nose gingerly, looking generally clogged-up and miserable, yet drawn out from his tissue-strewn hotel room by the incredible energy of the city, to rejoice at the glory and the splendor of the Manhattan skyline through puffy eyes and swollen mucus membranes.

His presence on the bridge reminded me of how fortunate we were, despite our recent over indulgences, immersions in recycled air, and numerous encounters with doorhandles, balustrades and deli-salad bars, to have dodged the travel lurgy. Apart from some internal rumblings in Montreal, our immune systems held up, and our keen olfactory bulbs remained unobstructed by sinusial goo. In possession of fully operational chemoreceptors, we were blessed with an array of  memorably smelly experiences. We were able to draw in deeply the doughy aroma of baking bagels rising from the Fairmont Bagelry in the Plateau district  in Montreal. In the New York subway our nose hairs sizzled in the heat of stale, oily, electrified air. Breathing the atmosphere within Toronto’s famous Honest Ed’s emporium our brains grew foggy from the subtly toxic emissions seeping from colourful heaps of cheap garments hewn from petroleum-based fabrics. Aviation fuel, cigar smoke, coffee, craft beer, record stores, wet asphalt, pastry (in Cheskies, Montreal!), smog, sewers and spices. The fragrance of cooking seemed richer than anything I’d experienced: American, Jamaican, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Portugese, Polish, Jewish, Irish, Hawaiian, Italian, Ethiopian and, of course, Australian … sometimes suffusing into an international super odor as we traversed a boulevard.

Which one?

If we were to pick our favourite, meaning the city we could see ourselves living in, it would have to be Montreal – New York was the craziest, and Toronto was the most comfortable, and Montreal offers a bit of both, and something extra. But old zild still features in our plans… we’ll see what’s next, next.

A week ago Laura and I were wed by a bear who delivered the ceremony using a sketch pad, and sealed the occassion with rubber bands on our fingers, all for $3.

I concur with Mr Eddie Izzard; “there’s this trickle-down theory. Why do we have to have a trickle-down theory? Why does it trickle? Why can’t it be a flow-down theory? Why can’t it gush down? Trickle implies that someone’s got bazillions, and someone else might get pennies.”

It seems that our bunged-up macro-economic faucet is in need of repairs … or maybe somebody needs to turn it on.

It’s been a while coming, but today it’s happening. Obama’s convincingly shown he can muster more funds and intellect than his septagenarian adversary, and he’s a much better dancer than McCain, and probably every senior U.S. politician in history – which is reason alone to vote for the guy. Historically though, Americans haven’t placed great importance on the snake-like qualities of a presidential candidates hips – number 43 surely proves that – and instead their preferences tend to ocillate wildy between the warmongering and wealth de-distributution of religious zealot hand wavers, and the pale but steady plam of a democratic fix-it guy. There’s certainly nothing zealous or pale about Obamas hands.

Check out the New York Times website for regular updates and one of the map thingies that generally indicate a red swathe of ingnorance through the centre of the nation. That’s unlikely to change, however it’s the swing states where it’s going to be be most interesting, and there could well be some surprises. Let’s hope so.