Happy Holidays! Keeping It Réal

After an interminable customs-stop at the Canadian border, we finally rolled into Montréal station - clean, airy, businesslike. A friendly, uniformed porter was helping people with their bags, and was greeting every passenger with a cheery "bienvenue!". It was great to be back in Canada again!

Montréal is the capital of the province of Québec - where French is the official first language - so we both had a strange period of adjustment while we got used to the seemingly-implausible Franco-American mixture:

	The French Like	Americans Like
Housing	City-centre apartments	Large suburban houses
Cars	Small, efficient hatchbacks	Gas-guzzling SUVs and large sedans
Clothes	Elegant, tailored minimalism	Elasticated-waist trousers, logos, bling
Food	Fresh ingredients, rich flavours	Hot dogs, orange cheese

Our first morning in Montréal was spent in a picture-perfect clone of a 1950's American diner - all chrome, posters and booths - but we ordered our pancakes and coffees in French. Mostly. It's quite amazing (and amusing) how quickly everyone can switch from rapidfire, properly-accented French to full American English drawl.

The weather was, frankly, nasty, so we did as the locals do and headed for the souterrain - the network of underground passageways and shopping malls that keeps central Montréal running during the long winter months. It was quite fun seeing how far we could go without setting foot outside, but eventually we had to brave the cold in order to explore the Old Town and Port areas.


As you can see in the picture above, the streets were perilously icy, and on more than one occasion we had to save each other from a painful and embarrassing tumble. Montréalers, on the other hand, are very adept at dealing with icy surfaces, as demonstrated by this multi-tasking mother:


A visit to Montréal is (apparently) not complete without sampling The Smoked Meat at a deli - the most famous of which is (apparently) Reuben's. We didn't really know what we were getting ourselves into when we ordered a couple of classic deli sandwiches - and we're still reeling. The key idea seems to be to cram as much meat between two slices of bread as possible (more than can conceivably fit into any normal mouth), adding mustard and other substances as throat lubricant. Quite a challenge to eat!


Our final mission was to climb the city's namesake - Mount Royal - which rises up behind the city to a dizzying 233 metres (!) What should have been a gentle stroll became quite an adventure however, as the entire park was covered in deep snow and treacherous ice. Most of the staircases resembled frozen waterslides, but we managed to reach the top with no significant damage.


Let's not mention the trip back down the hill...

Happy Holidays! Riding The Rails

Finally it was time to leave both Brandy and the Big Apple and head back up into Canada again. We'd decided to mix it up a bit and take the train to get there. Johnny had been looking forward to this train journey since Andy had first made him aware of The Adirondack; New York to Montréal in ten hours, undoubtedly passing through stunning forested scenes, frosted with snow. Andy's Amtrak catalogue reinforced the picture of scenic, 1950's golden-era elegance, with glossy pictures of Vista-Dome observation cars, uniformed porters and small pockets of well-heeled retirees enjoying their SKI* funds.

The reality, of course, was very different. Despite its noble history as a unifier of a vast nation, American train travel has unfortunately been relegated to, at-best, a third-class mode of travel behind the automobile and the aeroplane.

The dismal experience began at Penn Station, a subterranean maze of dingy, claustrophobic corridors populated by shambling hordes of drunks, the homeless, and the insane. And the occasional horrified European, accustomed to the airy, clean, businesslike style of modern terminals like St. Pancras or the Gare de l'Est. We had arrived with plenty of time to spare - our train hadn't yet been allocated a platform - so we spent a couple of minutes obtaining bagel and coffee supplies. Unfortunately, during that time, the platform was announced, and a truly epic queue had formed at the escalator leading down to the platform.

After a shambolic documentation-check (America still struggles with international formalities, despite sharing the world's longest peaceful border with Canada) we boarded the train, and quickly forgot any notions we'd had about Vista-Dome, Electro-Glide style. The train was clearly insufficiently long for the number of passengers, and the carriage's internal styling was a mixture of the forced intimacy of a Greyhound bus and the porthole windows of an aircraft, reminding all passengers of their exact position in the American travel pecking-order.

Seats on board were in short supply and none could be reserved in advance, resulting in jockeying for position which as unassertive non-Americans, we had no chance of competing with. So the two of us ended up sitting in line-astern, hoping that one of our neighbours would get off at the next stop - they never did.

As an aside which illustrates the blackness of Johnny's mood, here's an excerpt from his original set of blog notes written during the journey:

Hypothetical time: You have a gun with one bullet; which fellow traveller do you shoot, the snoring old lady next door or the eye-wateringly smelly guy in the seat in front?
I'd take the snoring old bat - it'd shut her up, and if the stinky guy was dead he'd only start getting smellier. Hypothetically of course...

The train clattered on through some pretty nice scenery, it must be admitted, but none of our photos really turned out because the windows of the train were so dirty. Pretty symbolic of the whole experience really. America's railways could be, and should be, great. Instead they have been allowed to rot away - what a horrendous waste.

*Spending Kids' Inheritance