On every license plate in the province of Quebec, the motto "Je me souviens" appears. It means simply, "I remember." It's not just a motto, but for many Quebeckers, a political statement as well. These days it seems that the separatist movement (led by the ruling Parti Quebecois) has drawn back a bit, after a very narrow defeat in a referendum for sovereignty in 1995. The ins and outs of Quebec versus Canada is practically a hobby for me, and I won't go on at length about it in a travel memoir...but my recent visit to Montreal and Ottawa provided many opportunities to see two different societies with very different outlooks interacting peacefully, if not always with understanding or affection.And Quebec is an alltime favorite destination for me: the nearest really foreign place for me to visit.
As is my custom, I trusted in Amtrak to take me to the Great White North. A giveaway fare, and a theoretical love of train travel hooked me in, although Amtrak can put any railway enthusiast's love of trains to the test. What do you get when you combine the USA's inability to run any public service with a 375 mile trip on a train? A little under 35 miles an hour, and 11 hours of feeling like the mules pulling us were going to give out at any moment.
Two tour groups had also booked on the train, and so all the seats were filled. At least I was in one of Amtrak's newest coaches, with lots of legroom and big (and clean)windows to look out at the passing scene. I sat on the side that would ride along Lake George and Lake Champlain upstate. Since this was October, there would be lots of pretty views of the autumn foliage.
I read, I snacked, I drifted off in a nap or two, and listened to cd's as I enjoyed the lovely scenery. About halfway through the trip, a group of people 8-10 rows back started to get to know one another and began telling each other their life stories. LOUDLY! I could hear a rather shrill woman constantly talking who seemed to be the ringleader, and whenever she said something, whether it was funny or not, a man in the group laughed in the strangest way. This happened almost on cue ever 2-3 minutes. The sound of Polish pop-tunes from my cd would suddenly include the intrusion of this man's laughter, like a spastic magpie. Since there were several L-O-N-G unexplained delays, we arrived in Montreal about an hour late. By then, the group in the back had gone well beyond swapping horror stories about their lives, and were on to the great game of today: telling Monica Lewinsky jokes. This only made the magpie laugh all the more. It seemed as if we were only going about 10 miles an hour at this point, and his constant cawing almost felt like being beaten by a laugh.
As we pulled into Montreal's Gare Centrale, I gathered together all my stuff and turned around to look at this gang. They were a motley crew all right. The magpie looked like a retired gay Vegas hotel clerk,a sort of down at the heel Liberace, and he was with a man who was his mirror image, although extremely quiet(two noisy ones would've been beyond unbearable). They towered over quite a large lady who was impossibly short. She seems to have been the "ringleader". And there was an older couple, who looked like they were far too prim to be telling raucous jokes. Well, they all looked innocuous enough, but they were far too noisy, and I was glad to be leaving them.
I settled into my modest hotel without any trouble. The room was only 8 feet by 8 feet, so I felt right at home (my apartment is 11 by 15 feet...) Sadly, there was no bathtub, so I wouldn't be starting my vacation with a bubble-bath. But I had color TV...and I soon discovered it had TWO colors: dark green and dark brown. I was only staying the night, so I didn't mind too much that everyone looked like they had scurvy.
It was actually fairly late when I arrived at the hotel, so I went out for a quick dinner, and saw that the huge Marche du Livre, a block long store of secondhand French books, was still open. I popped in to take a look. Since my French is beyond rudimentary, I always have to choose carefully what to buy. I can usually get the gist of general books about Quebec, for example. So school textbooks on history, geography etc are easy enough for me to read. Almost everything in the Marche du Livre costs under $2 or $3 Canadian, and I browsed until well after 11:00 pm. When I returned to my hotel,I settled into bed as I watched a musical program from the early 70s, some sort of Quebecoise rock opera. There were some very pretty chansons, and every last singer held the same prop: a burning cigarette. Perhaps it was called "La Cigarette", who knows? I drifted off to sleep with these French songs in the background. A nice way to end my first night in Quebec.
Early the next day, I went over to the bus station to get my ticket in advance for Ottawa, and to have breakfast at a little restaurant inside the station. For just a couple of loonies and toonies (nicknames for Canadian dollar coins.The one dollar coin has a picture of a loon on it, so it's called the "loonie", and just for fun they call the two dollar coin the "toonie"!) Anyway, the best sausage I've had in quite a while came with the eggs, and chopped at least a year off my life expectancy. What are vacations for if not to eat bad food?
After breakfast, there was about an hour or two to kill, so I walked around the Rue St. Denis area, an extremely nice neighborhood and the center of French-Canadian life in Montreal. It's a combination of cafes, bistros, boutiques, and a big university campus, as well as lots of lowrise (and a few highrise)apartment buildings. Just what a neighborhood should be like, if you ask me: lively and lived in, and there are three metro lines underneath it all connecting to the other interesting parts of the city. This was a short visit to Montreal, and I felt a little regret I couldn't stay longer as I walked around this wonderful city. Then I did what is a lot of fun on vacation: I changed my plans entirely. Instead of spending nearly all my time in Ottawa as I'd planned, I decided to give an extra day to Montreal at the end of the week. So I trotted over to a hotel right next to the bus station and reserved a room for Saturday. The hotel looked a lot more comfortable than where I'd just spent the night, and it wasn't at all expensive. So with that settled, I got my bags and went back to the bus station to go to Ottawa.
Buses leave on time in Canada, and middle-class people still ride them. A brand-new and super-comfortable bus sat at our gate waiting for passengers, and I got a nice seat, right behind two thirty-something well-dressed women. They were "anglos" it turned out, as English-speakers are known in Quebec. The anglos make up about a quarter of Montreal's population, although a good portion of them are bilingual(some quite reluctantly). English speakers make up just 10% of the entire province's population, which provides some perspective when people wonder why English isn't absolutely dominant in this part of North America. Quebec City is 95% populated by French speakers, and other provincial towns are entirely French. Quebec is not a bilingual society and never has been (although many French speakers know English in varying degrees of fluency). That in mind, I wondered who these women were...they certainly looked high-powered, in Hermes scarves and expensive haircuts. Their American versions wouldn't be caught dead on a public bus! As the bus left behind the suburbs of Montreal and passed through a hilly and beautiful countryside, I could piece together who they were from their non-stop conversation. It seemed they were some kind of high-level publicity flaks from a federal ministry in Ottawa. They knew every bit of gossip about Canadian politics and traded it with each other as they fussed with their $300 scarves and their $200 haircuts. Actually I sort of liked them, even if they were establishment flunkies. They were on the Canadian version of the "shuttle" that flies from New York to DC every hour, and they seemed breezily classy, and bilingual--one of them had a copy not only of the Montreal Gazette, but of Le Devoir (the Quebec version of Le Monde, and completely separatist.)They traded these back and forth gleaning gossip, and giggled at inside jokes like teenage girls.And I could tell they loved Montreal by the way they talked about the shopping and cultural activities there, although scads of anglos have moved to Toronto in the last twenty years or so. Not everyone has been able to adjust to the growing French dominance, and a lot of English speakers have been quite bitter about the changes. Combined with the separatism of many French speakers, there's a certain tension in everyday life in Quebec.The French speakers feel threatened by the overwhelming English speaking culture all around them, and the Quebec anglos feel threatened by the dominant French culture all around them. All these oppressed minorities in what has to be just about the nicest country in the world! It's good Canadians are not a violent people by nature, (just as true in Quebec among both English and French speakers),but it's not without reason that the groups are known as the "two solitudes."
As a tourist, I could gleefully jump from culture to culture, and enjoy the mix that's resulted in Montreal. I actually don't know the anglo side of Montreal very well. There are whole neighborhoods on the West Side of the city and in western suburbs that are as British as Cambridge or as Americanized as Peoria. But those areas are practically terra incognita for me. I like Montreal because it's so "European" in many ways, (and many Europeans like it because it's so "americanized" but still quite familiar to them.)
The gossips in front of me kept me occupied the whole two hours, and before I knew it, we were in the suburbs of Ottawa. We turned right off the freeway onto a special road that could only be used by buses.As I would soon learn, Ottawa has a state-of-the-art bus system, almost the equivalent of a rapid transit network.
After meandering along the busway for a bit and making several intermediate stops, we ended up at the main bus station. It's not exactly in the center of town, and I had to take a taxi a good distance to my hotel, in the area just to the east of the city center called Bytown. My hotel was actually more a motel, and nothing to write home about. It must've been built in the early sixties, and was very plain. But it was located in the center of things, and my room was enormous, with the regulation bathtub and color tv. Also, it was cheap, so all my standards were met.
It was early afternoon, and I immediately set out for Parliament Hill after check-in. First I had to cross through the very busy and rather congested shopping district, and a little beyond that was the much quieter and very dignified area with the main government buildings and Parliament. I took several snapshots and admired the scene for a moment. I really like Canada, and I'd wanted to see their Houses of Parliament for a very long time. It's always a thrill to actually get to see these places I've only read about or admired in pictures.
I popped into the National Capital Region Information Center and stocked up on some brochures and maps, and saw one of those huge building dioramas I love to come across--the whole city center of Ottawa. Then I walked along Spark Street Mall, a pedestrian only shopping street. I ended up at the Currency Museum, a free display on the history of money, mostly Canadian, but with enough samples from around the world to be interesting, including every paper currency lover's favorites: the beautifully designed and (tragically)soon-to-be-extinct Dutch guilders.
After a really cheap and delicious buffet lunch at one of the nicest Indian restaurants I've been to, I decided to go on a used bookstore "crawl". I had a list of 4 or 5 different stores, and several of them were on Bank Street, one of the main shopping streets of Ottawa. It turned out that I would pass right through the small (but big enough) gay ghetto, with rainbow flags nearly in every window. I took a look in several of the stores, but it was just the same stuff I see in New York's Chelsea,with tons of gay kitsch. Who buys all this stuff I can't imagine...but actually one shop had lots of general postcards with views of Ottawa, so I stocked up there and made my contribution to the Ottawa gay community.
After quite a long walk, I finally got to the first bookstore on my list, and crossed over the street to go in. But just as I was about to enter, I could see a turnstile just inside with a curtain right behind it, which struck me as odd...and then I looked in the display window. This store was listed in the yellow pages with the other secondhand bookstores but was actually a porno shop! Too bad! My juices were flowin' over the prospect of even more old books for my tiny apartment, not tattered back-issues of "Hustler".
Most of the other used bookstores were clustered not far from my hotel, so I figured I'd take a look at them a bit later. Next, I decided to go over to Hull, which is just across the Ottawa River, but located in Quebec. It's a totally French-speaking town, although many of its residents actually work in federal offices, and this is the least separatist part of Quebec province. It was a short busride, and I could see as we crossed over the river that there were some spectacular views of Parliament Hill. But my main goal for visiting Hull was to take a look at La Maison du Citoyen, which is a combined town hall and cultural center. The bus dropped me off at an enormous complex of offices, hotels, a convention center, and shopping mall. After passing through this lively but confusing maze, I ended up in the quiet square in front of the Maison du Citoyen. I like these sorts of complexes immensely, from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the Kulturhuset in Stockholm--they're sort of secular cathedrals to me. Hull's is far more modest compared to some others, but there was a very pleasant indoor space called the Agora, around which were situated a library, an auditorium, an art gallery, and municipal offices. It's well adapted to the harsh climate in these parts since it's all indoors, and it's connected by a bridge to the enormous complex I'd just wandered through.
Next I made a brief visit to the Canadian Museum of Civilization, which opened just a few years ago. It's a very impressive complex of buildings which upstages what used to be Hull's biggest riverside claim to fame: a Scott tissue toilet paper factory. I wanted to see the gallery in the museum with all the totem poles of the Indian tribes of the northwest, particularly the Haida Indians on the Queen Charlotte Islands (the locale briefly for my imaginary country Alphistia at one time). The hall is immense and filled with rows of these enormous totem polls, and was extremely beautiful. There's a whole lot more to see in the museum, but I wasn't going to have time to really explore it. I wanted to get over to the bookstores near my hotel before the end of the shopping day.
I had enough time to walk back to Ottawa though, across the bridge right next to the museum. It wasn't a long walk and the weather was really mild. I got some really nice views of the Parliament from the bridge.
Dalhousie Street, in the heart of Bytown, has a very large used bookstore, and I spent more than an hour gathering books and adding to my Canadiana collection. I got a dozen different titles for a total of 37.00 loonies and toonies. A real bargain and a guaranteed backache for the rest of my trip, because I'd be carting the stuff back through Montreal and then down to New York.
My feet were really aching by now, so I went back to the hotel to soak in the tub. I listened to the CBC's all-news channel while I lingered in the bubblebath. Some local scandal was trying to mimic the nonsense going on south of the border, with members of parliament calling the leader of the New Democratic Party, "Canada's Linda Tripp." It all seemed like a terrible tempest in a teapot to me. After all, Canada's national motto includes the phrase: "order and good government." I switched to a French channel a bit later to see an installment in what seemed was an endless soap opera about the travails of a spoiled ballet student somewhere in France. She pouted and alienated each of her friends and all her relatives in turn, (without commercial interruption) for well over an hour. The crucial cliffhanging scene promised more pouting and "une crise" next week. This was followed by the Belgian evening news program, which was presented by what looked like a transsexual to me. (Now Belgium is a country with truly corrupt politics. A veritable nation of Linda Tripps!)
I enjoyed all this as I sipped prodigious amounts of cola and munched on a pizza sent over from a place right next door. Since I'd been going since 7:00 am, I turned in far earlier than I do at home.
On Friday morning, I went over to a big restaurant near the hotel for breakfast. It's called Nickels, and was decorated in the theme style of a fifties drive-in restaurant. Not very convincingly, and the service was lousy. I went for a stroll around Bytown after finally flagging down a bobby-soxed middle-aged waitress to pay for my meal (my tip was far less than a loonie...)Bytown has a large market hall and lots of individual stalls selling all kinds of fresh food. It's adjacent to an enormous indoor shopping mall (which Canadians place in all their city centers)called Rideau Centre. It's a convenient way to shop downtown, and all the city's busroutes meet near here and make it very easy to use public transit. That was my next project for the day. I stocked up on bus tickets which I bought at a news kiosk, and studying my OC Transpo bus map, plotted my rides. Several busways funnel long articulated buses through the downtown. These operate as a sort of main line similar to a subway line in a bigger city. At various stations along the busways, other buses would be waiting to take passengers further into neighborhoods. The busways don't have bus stops like most other places, but elaborate stations, some of them underground. Due to the brutal winters Ottawa has, these stations have been very well-planned to keep passengers from being blown away. During the worst weather, the buses are lifelines. They get people to and from work, schools, and shopping centers even in the fiercest snowstorms. And OC Transpo seems to be very popular. The buses were packed and service was very frequent. I traveled from one end of the city to the other along the busways, visiting the modernist Ottawa Railway Station on one side of town, to a vast housing complex on the other side of town. Busway connect the two sides of town right through the center. This included a stretch along the Ottawa river on the west side of the city. It was a lot of fun to be on these well-used buses and see the everyday scene in Ottawa.
My last busride dropped me off at the Rideau Centre, and I shopped for a bit there. Since the exchange rate is so good, I thought I'd look for a light jacket. Canadians have a huge selection of coats in their stores, since they wear them 8 months of the year, and I had no trouble finding a nice jacket at a crazily low price.
I dropped my packages off at the hotel and then headed right back out. It was really warm, and I didn't even need a jacket then. I walked over to the Chapters Bookstore, one of the Canadian supersized book chains. When I left, the sun was beginning to set, so I walked the short distance over to the Parliament buildings. It was quite beautiful to see these buildings with a golden hue at dusk. Now it was beginning to get rather chilly, so I headed back to the hotel. I noticed that the traffic was bumper to bumper, and when I got back to the hotel I learned why when I turned on the news. It was the Friday before Canada's Thanksgiving holiday, celebrated on the second Monday of October up north. Everybody was skedaddling out of town. A local news reporter interviewed people about rising gasoline prices during the holiday. One "man in the street" gave a 90 second commentary about the economics of supply and demand that flabbergasted me, because "man in the street" interviews in the USA have deteriorated into finding the most ignorant and inarticulate people possible to weigh in on topics way over their heads, for perhaps a 10 word max soundbite. God bless Canada...
For dinner I went to the deli of a giant Loblaw's supermarket right next to my hotel. I got takeout while everyone else scrambled to buy turkeys and throwaway cooking trays. I watched more CBC programs back in my room, and noticed right away when a family with small children landed in the room right above me at about 8:00 pm. After hearing for nearly an hour the squeals of these kids and non-stop tumbling right through the floorboards above (obviously there wasn't an ounce of soundproofing in the place), I tore out of my room to go down to the front desk to complain (this is where the Darth Vader theme music is played...)The man at the front desk was quite unsympathetic and refused to change my room, telling me they were "totally full". I didn't believe a word of that, but I felt in my bones he wasn't going to budge on letting me have a different room. I gnashed my teeth and asked if he could at least call the parents up in the room and tell them to give their kids some ritalin. He did call, and within a half-hour the kids konked out. Thank goodness the parents didn't make love...I would've heard the condom wrapper being dropped to the floor plus everything else.
The whole gang left in a flurry very early the next morning, which woke me up of course. I just got up with them and headed out for breakfast. I decided to take an early bus back to Montreal after that.
The bus station was packed with Thanksgiving travelers, but extra buses were waiting at every gate. I was thankful for Canadian transportation planners, because in spite of the volume of people, everyone got on their buses with a minimum of fuss and confusion. I was back in Montreal at noon, and since I was staying at the slightly misnamed Taj Mahal Hotel right next to the bus station, I was in my room right away, which was simple but quite comfortable and quiet.
The wonderful weather from the day before was long gone, and it was rather wet and damp out.I didn't mind a bit, since it would be a chance to wear my brand new Canadian jacket. I went over to Rue St. Denis to look for a place for lunch, and chanced upon a big buffet style natural food restaurant. Inside were two huge steamtable areas of hot and cold dishes. I piled a selection of vegetarian hot dishes on my plate, and couldn't wait to dig in. It all looked so tasty. On the way to the cash register I nearly had a mishap as I reached for a bottled water. My plate went sliding all over my tray, but the woman at the cash register saw what was about to happen and came right over to steady the tray for me. She had the nicest smile that only got bigger when she realized I didn't know French. If there's any hostility toward English speakers it wasn't obvious in this health food restaurant. She wished me a pleasant day after I paid, and then translated it into English when she realized I didn't get that either. Very sweet girl...
I thought it a little odd to find myself sitting in the middle of a smoking section (in a health food restaurant?!),but I didn't really mind. The food really was excellent
After lunch I bought a carnet of tickets for the Metro. I wanted to ride it around town, with no real destination in mind, because it's such an elegant subway system. Here I go again with a religious allusion, but Margaret Atwood (one of Canada's most well-known riders) wrote that the Montreal Metro stations are like churches in this modern, secularized city. Everyone goes to them, and there's plenty of time for reflection waiting for or riding in the trains. Besides, more than one Montreal metro station has large stained-glass panels, and most of them have some type of inspired artworks. The Berri-UQAM station has cavernous waiting areas, one of which has wonderful acoustics. A folk choir was singing before a crowd of several hundred people. It could've been a Mass, if you asked me...
I headed up to the Jean-Talon transfer station on the main line. As the trains pull out of the station, an air-activated design that's part of the rubber-wheeled metro-cars plays a swooshing sort of flute-like melody. I love that sound. It always lets me know I'm really in Montreal again.
After transferring to another line, I took the train to the Universite de Montreal station. This university is an enormous complex, but its main building is what I wanted to see. It's enormous as well, and is an Art Deco masterpiece. An extra treat was taking a moving sidewalk up through a tunnel after leaving the metro station. It had to be at least 800 feet long and rose in a steep incline to take people up to the university campus, built on the northern side of Mount Royal. Once I got outside, the main building didn't disappoint. It really is beautiful.
I took the long way back to Berri-UQAM on the metro, stopping to look at the cathedral-like interior of the Lionel Groulx station, another main transfer point (and Lionel Groulx was a Quebec nationalist priest). As I waited for the next train, I realized that a recent commercial I'd seen on CNN many times back home was filmed on the Montreal Metro. What was really ironic was that the whole ad was fake: it shows a huge number of hard-working business-people boarding a subway train(could they be trying to portray NYC?), then reading the business section of the paper as they ride along, looking like they're thinking about their investments. The voiceover tells us that "in this country in this day and age, you need the "Best of America" financial services to help plan your future..."blah, blah, blah. Now where did they have to go to find a nice subway for their commercial? Not in America...and those actors were probably mostly French speaking Montrealers. It was quite amusing to think that the "Best of America" was really to be found in Quebec.
When I got back to the Rue Saint Denis area, I headed down Rue Saint Catherine. This is the main gay street in Montreal. I wanted to take a look, although there's really not a lot to see that isn't the same in all the other gay strips around the world. But this stroll was actually a bit annoying, because the street was packed with groups of men dressed in black, and nearly all of them were speaking English. This wasn't the usual scene in the Village Gai, but I'd read that the biggest gay party in Montreal was being held that night, so of course tons of men from New York, Boston, Toronto, and beyond were in town and were out and about. They were like conventioneers taking over a town for the duration. I headed back to the hotel after I paused in front of a cosy little cafe for a moment. I almost went in to hear a singer performing, when I looked up and saw the name of the place: Cafe Chretien (Christian Cafe...). It was a born-again mission to save French-speaking lost souls!
I passed the bus station to pop into Marche du Livres again and saw a "lost soul" myself standing on the corner, with a small bag at his feet. He couldn't have been more than 20, and was obviously available for the evening from the look he shot at me. After leaving the bookstore a bit later, he was still there, and practically greeted me like we were old friends, with a hearty "Bonjour". This of course stunned me, since living in New York kills the "greeting of strangers" reflex. I muttered a stifled hello back, and he smiled "meaningfully". He was a good businessman, but I was far more interested in the books I'd just bought. I doubted he'd be alone for much longer.
I ordered in from the hotel restaurant and settled in front of the television to watch a Quebec salute to Jacques Brel. It was wonderful. It sure would be nice to have access to this variety of programming back home, but downloading tv programs from all over the world through a computer is still a ways off. Until then, I still have an incentive to travel...
I was up early the next morning and had breakfast in the hotel restaurant. It looked like it was a family operation with the husband as chef and the wife doing everything else. In the middle of taking orders, serving the food, clearing tables, and washing dishes, the wife also served her 10 or 12 year old son breakfast at the bar. He was a tubby little kid in pajamas and a housecoat,who looked like his mother doted on him. She handed him a huge platter of sausages and eggs and the remote to the TV. As he shoveled in the food, he channel-surfed. During a lull in the kitchen, papa came out to smoke an extra, extra long cigarette which made him look quite effeminate. But like a typical burly male, he grabbed the remote from the kid who cried "Non!" when his father went directly to RDS, the Quebec all-sports network. The kid waddled off to the kitchen to complain, and get some extra breakfast. It was quite a comic scene I was watching.
I went for a last walk in Montreal after breakfast. My train to New York would leave at 1:00 pm. I went up Rue Saint Hubert through block after block of cosy rowhouses, with the characteristic outdoor stairways and cast-iron balconies on the facades of most of them. I walked down Rue Saint Denis to go to Square Saint Louis and witnessed a messy carcrash. Quebeckers have Gallic driving habits(that means they go too fast). No one was hurt, but one car was now ready for the junkheap. Square Saint Louis is a quiet, beautiful spot, and I sat on a bench for a bit. The streets nearby have more long rows of beautiful townhouses, and I walked along Avenue Laval and Rue Drolet, where a pen-pal I'd unfortunately lost contact with many years ago lived.
A roadworks detour made getting to the train station an ordeal. There was a massive line already waiting for my train when I got there. I ran off to get some snacks for the trip, and with only a slight delay, we boarded. A loud-mouthed Amtrak conductor was ordering all the New York bound passengers into the last car, an old-fashioned cramped coach. It was bedlam in there, with people scrambling for seats. I went back to the platform and told the conductor it was full. He just barked at me that there were still plenty of seats in there and to move toward the rear of the coach. Why I obeyed his orders, I don't know. There was another coach right in front of the one he told me to go to that was practically empty. But I was a "good boy" and went back into the cramped one, and two rows in,I saw an empty seat. I asked the woman in the place next to it if it was free and she told me no one was sitting there. I took it, and then moments later saw the conductor motioning people into the forward car. Drat and double drat!
It wasn't long before the woman next to me struck up a conversation. Practically the first thing she said to me was, "Weren't you on the train up to Montreal on Wednesday?" With a certain amount of suspicion, I answered "yes". She then told me we were in the same coach, and that she was seated way in the back and got to know all the people sitting around her on the 10 hour trip up. It was then I realized that I'd plopped myself next to the "ringleader" of that bunch partying non-stop, which included the "spastic magpie". What had I gotten myself into?
I soon learned that I was next to a chatterbox. She wasn't a bore, but she certainly never shut up. When I pulled out my CD player and headphones, I thought I was sending the international recognized signal that I wanted to be "alone", but that didn't deter her at all. Several times I heard her talking during a song, and wondered who on earth she was chatting with. When I looked over at her, I realized she was saying something to me! Good grief!
To make matters worse, a goofball from the forward car was using the boarding hall in our car as a place to smoke both pot and cigarettes. Halfway through this endless journey to hell, I marched up to the lounge car (it's where the conductors "lounge" the whole trip) and denounced the smoker to the proper authorities like someone out of the Stalinist period. I told her I wouldn't point out the offending passenger, but that he went for a smoke every 10 minutes and was easy to catch. Obviously this conductor liked a challenge, and went up and down the coaches looking for the offender, walking past him 5 times without catching him. Meanwhile everytime she went back to the lounge he went right back to our car for a smoke. This was totally ridiculous, but finally someone else complained and the offending passenger was told to knock it off or be thrown off the train at Fort Ticonderoga.
Well before the train reached Albany, the cafe car ran out of food and soft drinks. The rather rude cafe attendant said he'd get plenty more food in Albany. Meanwhile the impossibly short ringleader was getting rather hungry and a bit grumpy. She suggested moving stratigically to the cafe car during the 20 minute layover in Albany to get first crack at the offerings loaded on the train. Obviously this was a woman who never missed a meal. I conspired to go out on the platform during the 20 minute stop to get some air, but also to be near a guy who was luxuriating in the comfy car ahead of me, and who every time I'd passed him, shot me a curious and not unfriendly look. Being the world's worst at chatting up strangers, I didn't really expect anything to happen. But there he was on the platform, desperately smoking a cigarette (almost always an automatic disqualification for me), and he glanced benignly at me. But right behind me was the "ringleader", who from then on came to be known to me as Mrs. Millstone. I wouldn't say she "ruined my chances", but I'll never know now, will I?.
A lot of other hungry people got into line in the cafe car too once we left Albany, but we were all soon to be disappointed. Mrs. Millstone managed to get a pastrami sandwich and I got a bag of peanuts for a buck (no loonies please!), but most people got nothing at all, and it was another 3 hours to NY! The cafe attendant testily explained that 3 other trains ahead of us got all the food. I knew I was back home in America, the land of horrible public transportation. You'd think the people running Amtrak would realize how many people might be riding on a particular train, and to provide enough food for them along the way...but that's far to great a challenge apparently.At least I could order Chinese once I got home.
Mrs. Millstone had quieted down a bit, after telling me practically every detail of her life. What was left to tell me? I heard all about her marital troubles, her grandchildren (she looked no older than her mid-forties to me, but OK...)her plans to emigrate to Quebec with her Pakistani husband. I heard it all, and I tried to be sympathetic, without reciprocating with my own woes. (I figure if she's web savvy she can learn all about me, if she knows where to look...)Still, I couldn't help but feel sorry for this very lonely lady. She was as much a lost soul as that rentboy in Montreal, but obviously there was nothing I could do for her but lend a sympathetic ear.
Finally, finally we reached Penn Station an hour late, at about 11:30. Mrs. Millstone hated Manhattan and didn't even know where to hail a taxi when we arrived, so as a final favor, I escorted her to the taxi ranks, which had an impossibly enormous line. We waited over 10 minutes and not one cab came to pick up the first of at least 60 waiting people. I realized that an event in Madison Square Garden had just let out, and that all those thousands of people were "stealing" our taxis over on Seventh Ave. I broke the news to Mrs. Millstone, who seemed like she was going to break into tears at any moment. I suggested we head over to Seventh Avenue and try our luck there. We made quite a sight with Mrs. Millstone dragging herself and an enormous suitcase down one of those dark sidestreets by Penn Station. Fortunately, I saw a cab coming by and got it to stop. I let Mrs. Millstone have it, because it finally promised me the freedom of being alone again, and because she was at her wit's end in this unfamiliar and threatening place.I wished her well, and heaved a sigh of relief that she hadn't asked me for my phone number.
I managed to hail a cab myself soon after, and got my late night Chinese food delivered to my door well after midnight. "They" say it's not the destination but the journey that counts...but I'd have to say that this time around my destinations were far more fun than the unpleasantness coming and going. Perhaps Amtrak's motto should be: "Next time,we fly." (I've heard that uttered more than once on Amtrak trains...) I don't really care for flying, but for a trip to Montreal, it'd be only an hour or so in the air, with a free bag of peanuts...
Still, Montreal is worth even a bad Amtrak experience, and I had a great time up north. It's one of those special places for me.Throwing in Ottawa was a nice idea too this time. "Je me souviens" is a wonderful way to bring people back, and I know I'll be in Quebec again one day soon.