Back on the Road

This is a quick hello from Ottawa! The last couple of days in Montreal were spent shopping, eating fabulous steak in the old town area and an evening with my friends JB and Jeremy in Chez Serge, a brilliant bar that gave us free popcorn with our bucket-of-cocktail, had a huge moose head covered with bras on the wall and a bucking bronco bull that of course, we all had several turns on. Jeremy was by far the best, managing a grand total of 98 seconds! Time has never passed as slowly as when you're trying not to slide off a rotating, bucking plastic bull.

So today we picked up our hire car and drove to Ottawa. We managed to see some of the city, mainly a walk by the river and some of the funky bar/restaurant area, and the many government buildings (it being the country's capital and all, and I have to say, they were very aesthetically pleasing). We retreated fairly early back to the hotel given because we were cold and it is VERY wet here - although apparently not as wet as Cumbria :-s

Tomorrow we're getting back into the car and heading on down to Toronto. If we have time, we'll try and get to a hockey match in the afternoon, but if not, we'll try and catch a game on Sunday instead after going down to Niagara Falls. So still lots to do before the girls fly home on the 25th. My return date isn't quite sorted yet. Could be a week on Monday, could be a few days after. We'll see. But, in any case, the impending return is quickly coming up to meet me - but not quite as unwelcome as it was a few weeks ago. Constant travelling and "being on holiday" can be quite tiring, and sad to say, sometimes I just want to stay in the hotel - my equivalent of home right now - and read/internet/chill, do whatever really! But that option wouldn't go down to well with les filles so it's onwards we go.

The still-to-do list is now largely food-based: poutine, Tim Hortons, and pancakes. As well as the falls, possibly the CN tower and maybe Hockey Hall of Fame.

Not long now...

Three little girls went to Montreal...

...but didn't go running all the way home, no no no. It is indeed good to be back in the Great White North, and it feels very much like coming home again. After one last wet day, and a final night out in West Village, Alana and I said goodbye to New York. We said hello to my old friend the Greyhound, and drove up through New York state enjoying views of the Adirondacks for seven beautiful hours.

Monday passed fairly quietly and before we knew it we were heading off to meet Hannah at the airport. Now, I couldn't remember how exactly I'd gotten to Trudeau last time, but figured STM Montreal website would have the answer. It had AN answer, but, it became quickly apparent, not the correct one. One detour later, taking in an industrial estate, Air Canada's headquarters, the side of a freeway and a dilapidated gas station, we called a cab and surrendered. We were there within five minutes (through all of this we'd been able to see the planes landing - so near yet so far).

Lovely to have Han with us. Today was the Old Town, the fantastic Museum of History and Archeology, explaining the history and founding of Montreal. The best multimedia and interactive displays and presentations I've seen for a long time. Then another bit of a wander before out for cocktails this evening. Lots of catching up, gossip and general laughter being had by all :-) as well as snatching as much of an NHL game as Fi could via the bar TVs (Montreal vs Carolina, M win in shoot-out!)

Tomorrow we're making the most of the promised weather and heading to the park before meeting Montreal friends of mine, JB and Jeremy for cocktails and "mechanical bull riding"!! Awesome :-)

Two English Girls in New York

On Sunday I left Chicago and the boyfriend behind and settled in to a 20-hour train journey to New York city to hang out with Alana, a good friend from home. It was long, but I had good company with an Alaskan hippy and we chatted and played cards until we drew into Penn station, where, with a crunching headache, I summoned a cab and headed over to the hotel for dinner and a long-over due catch up with my friend.

So far this week, we’ve walked a very, very long way, managed to not get run over by crazy traffic and successfully navigated the grimy, grungy, ever-so-slightly confusing subway network. Here’s some of the other things we’ve done and seen…

The Met: Fantastic art museum, with a never-ending warren of galleries and rooms. The full-sized stone Egyptian sarcophagus was particularly cool.

Veteran’s Day Parade: We lined up on 5th to watch this parade go past. Took a shameful amount of time to connect the parade title with the day’s date (Nov 11th – it made a bit more sense once we’d added all that up). The parade was much more entertaining than the stuffy Westminster ceremony in London. First we had a procession of Harley Davidsons, then regiments from different areas of the military past and present, marching bands, floats and finally a stream of classic cars. Fun and engaging, but still managing to keep the deeper meaning of what it was all about.

Cool corners to eat: So far we’ve been to Serendipity, a beautiful, kitsch fairyland of a café, where we indulged in extreme ice-cream based food. Alana selected the chocolate cake sundae, and I chose a strawberry cheesecake one. Final result: sundaes 2 girls 0. Today, we went to the Clinton Street Bakery for brunch. It’s a delightful café in a lower east side neighbourhood that doesn’t look much, but this gem of a place was worth the trek and the wait. The best pancakes I’ve ever had. Period. Tomorrow we’re heading to the Alice in Wonderland café for some more fantastical food.

Empire State Building: High. Windy. Cold. Better done at dusk.

WTC site: A big building site. Come back in about five years.

Broadway: We saw Mary Poppins last night and it was awesome! We’re still singing the songs and the dance routines and sets were a visual/audio feast. We left feeling as sparkly as the lights around us.

Shopping: But of course! We’ve covered Macy’s, Century 21 and Saks, lots of 5th and much more. I indulged in another pair of jeans. Having found my “perfect fit” brand in Vancouver, it was only sensible that I should get another pair as I’ve never seen them in England. It’s exhausting though, and there is no chaos greater than women rifling through handbag sale boxes. Time to head back to the hotel…

I’m really enjoying girl time and re-visiting New York. Under the surface, though, I’m churning over my impending return to the UK. Bed time seems to be the time when Fi’s brain goes into obsession mode on the subject. Cocktails, I was reminded last night, are an excellent way of over-riding brain to fall straight asleep. Plans to repeat process tonight are afoot.

Au Revoir Vancouver, welcome to Chicago, y'all!

It finally happened - we left Vancouver. After much time anticipating the departure, yet not feeling like it was actually real, the final week at 938 W14th passed in a flurry of packing, sorting, a LOT of cleaning and farewell shenanigans - a delicious meal with Jeff and Happy at a seafood restaurant, watching a final hockey match with Canadians, drinks with Annie, Sarah and Meika, and a last night of Magic playing for Q. Suddenly it was our final night. Packed and ready for our 4.30am start, we had a last meal at Earls with the housemates & Jeff but minus Loic, and headed over to a friend's place to carve some pumpkins. Then back to ours for a last game of Settlers before goodbyes and two hours sleep.

Our trip to Chicago was a long one with lots of waiting and long journeys (which included some necessary baggage reshuffling and emergency jettisoning of spare books to get suitcases to an acceptable weight!). We were pretty beat by the time we were met by a hilariously disguised Kurt and Jen at O'Hare. A hot shower, good dinner, a few drinks and great company kept us going til we sunk very gratefully into bed.

The rest of our time in Chicago has been excellent. A mix of chilled-out reading time (The Wheel of Time and the latest Dan Brown) with exploring down-town Chicago and walking the dogs. Kurt, Q and I also took part in a very US and Chicago-biased pub quiz night! I think we were the only team to answer any non-US question correctly. Or even attempt one. However, since 95% of questions involved either Chicago streets/taverns/bakeries/baseball, we didn't fare so well overall...although Q and I managed to get 5/7 of the most populous US cities ending in an "s". That's right. I'd challenge any of our competitors to do the same for the UK!

And of course, there was Halloween: US-style! This was a first for me, and I very much enjoyed seeing how they do it: max-fun, max-dressing up (none of the 3 options of ghost/witch/vampire you get in the UK) and max-pumpkinage. As well as carving said veggies, we fed hideous amounts of candy to small children and scoured the thrift stores in order to find something to complete our costumes. I had a pair of fabulous/hideous knee-high patent stiletto purple boots, two green net curtains, some purple satin long gloves and a lot of green make up. Q had a velvet smoking jacket, cigar and purple satin trousers. Introducing....Poison Ivy and Hugh Hefner! Photos forthcoming. Accompanied by Vampire Jen and Brokeback Kurt, we hit possibly the poshest bar I've been to in a long time: Roof - unsurprisingly on a rooftop of a high-rise downtown. After a few drinks, scoping out the other costumes (Tetris and Earl from My Name Is Earl being my favourites, whilst Q checked on as many of his bunnies as he could find) and scooping a free plate of fries, we headed off to a decidedly cheaper bar and met up with a girl in a bathtub - Jen's friend Kelly. A few drinks and conversations with the Tenenbaums, Snow White and Ghostbusters later, we headed home, sated.

More Chicago fun to follow - and a trip to Wisconsin this weekend! I'm muchly excited about this as I've really only been to major spots in the US and Wisconsin sounds distincly off-radar. Maybe there will be bears...!

Gossip, brunch and sleeplessness in Seattle

Last Friday, myself, Q, my colleague and fab friend Annie, and her best friend Sarah, hired a car and drove the short three-hour trip from one sodden city to another, to see Gossip play in Seattle. It rained the whole way there - the forecasters' prediction of 100% rain looked likely.

Getting across into the Land Of The Free was, as ever, exasperating. As first-timers to the States, Annie and Sarah didn't have I-94 forms so we all had to line up and get them. Clearly two Brits and two Aussies travelling in a Canadian car was suspicious so we were subjected to extensive questioning as to how we all knew each other, what we were doing in a) Canada and b) the US of A and c) how again, exactly, did we know each other? It was all very serious and prolongued but we eventually were let through after Annie assured the customs official that it was okay that she still looked like her passport photo.

All this only for Quentin, literally ten minutes into the country, to realise that he'd left our tickets at home. Convinced that I'd seen him put them in the bag, I made him hunt through about five times, until he remembered that they were in his wallet the whole time. Turns out, when we finally arrived in Seattle, they weren't even the correct tickets (being only the receipt stubs) and we had to do a lot of schmoozing to let us in with our proof of purchase, ID and Q's talent for talking himself into, or out of, any given situation.**

The gig itself was fantastic. The support acts were a hip-hop group called Champagne Champagne and a very bizarre outfit called Men..? It took a good few songs to establish the gender of the lead singer, but we eventually located an Adam's apple, so unanimously voted male, and carried on enjoying the set - which was a bit of a surprise given the middling review it got from A and S (who had seen Gossip play the night before in Vancouver). When Gossip finally came one, it was an awesome start, a simple, driving beat from the drummer building up parts of the band to Beth Ditto's entrance. Fab voice, great stage presence, sparky, charming, smaller in real life, and, contrary to what London Lite would have you believe, didn't strip to her underwear at any given moment (although she did the night before, the Annie/Sarah info source informed us). The vibe in the venue was awesome- a small place meant people were right up close to the stage - we were about 3 lines of people from the front and the beat you could feel from the floor was electric, catchy, hypnotic almost. We tried to continue to do the evening justice, but trying to get into bars armed with only a driver's license in the state of Washington proved tricky. It was passports only, and seeing as we were all tired and had an early start the next day, we called in quits and headed back to Annie's friend's place to hang out and crash.

Saturday 8am saw us all up and about to drop Q off at the Space Needle to play a Magic tournament. Us girls then headed in search of brunch in a funky place. And did we find it. Bedlam is one of the funkiest, coolest cafes I've been to in a long while. Great service, drinks and the best doorstop toast all in a vintagey, chilled, eclectic setting, complete with comfy sofas and newspapers. It's a wonder we even saw any of Seattle. But we tore ourselves away and headed for the public markets and the Mecca spot for all modern-day, professional North Americans. I'm talking of course, of Pike Place Starbucks, the original Starbucks, the seemingly innocent location that spawned the branding and coffee behemoth it currently is today. Too lazy to queue for the same drink I could get a block from work, I stole a paper napkin and we left. Next stop, trying to find the underground original city that stood before natural disasters destroyed it and new Seattle was built on top. What exactly caused the original city to disappear, we didn't find out as we were ever so politely (and promptly!) chucked off the tour we sneakily tagged on to. So we settled for exploration on our own, shopping and generally admiring the cool architecture around. Seattle had lots of brickworks, hence why many of their buildings are brick, as opposed to here were they have lots of wood - so everything is clapboard and wood.

Meanwhile, Quentin was having fun destroying all his opponents in the tournament. Great for him, but it meant that we had to stay a lot later than planned before driving home. We left, at last, with Annie and Sarah under sleeping bags on the back seat, trying to fall asleep and myself tanking up with several cups of coffee. The drive back was easy - no rain, no traffic, no Americans at the border: where have you been/where do you live/how are you doing today is the customary line of questioning to get back into Canada.... ah Canada :-)

**Currently packing up our lives ready to go to Chicago on Friday, what did Q find on the floor by the bin? The actual Gossip tickets. Of course.

Places full of thanks

The clock is ticking down on my time in beautiful British Colombia, but there has still been time for some proper Canadian fun. That's right people, I'm talking NHL hockey and Thanksgiving! A good friend and avid Canucks (that's Vancouver's NHL team) fan, Jeff, kindly organised tickets to a home game versus the Dallas Stars this weekend, which was also Thanksgiving weekend.

First off, a bit of hockey background for y'all. The NHL has 30 teams, six of which are Canadian. These are: Vancouver Canucks, Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers, Ottawa Senators, Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens. Out of these, the Canucks were generally rated the best, or at least they were up until the season proper started on Oct 1 - Calgary are admittedly looking pretty strong...but seeing as there are 82 games in the season, there's plenty of time for them to get their act back together. Anywho!

Some key Canucks players. First and foremost, Roberto Luongo. The captain and goalie is widely regarded as one of the best keepers in the league and enjoys almost god-like status in this country. Then we have Ryan Kesler, the Sedin twins, Henrik and Daniel, the latter is currently injured for around 4-6 weeks with a broken foot, Alexandre Burrows, Willie Mitchell, Steve Bernier and Darcy Hordichuk amongst others.

So back to the action. We got into the hockey mood with tickets to an open practice session on Saturday morning. Rink-side seats meant that we could see all the action up close. And subsequently got smothered by excited, autograph-hunting children when all the players left through the nearby tunnel. Penless, and feeling that it would be churlish to sweep aside eight-year-olds, we battled the opposite way through the throng and chants of "Roberto, Roberto!"

Sunday was the real deal. Bedecked in newly purchased (discounted! cos that makes it better...) shirts, we headed not quite up to the rafters to find our seats. The good thing about a hockey stadium, and GM place in particular, is that there are no bad seats, so we had a clear, birds-eye view of all the action.

After the slow, scrappy start from Vancouver it turned into a more exciting game. Goals were alternated for both teams, but the Canucks managed to keep the lead. Until the third period when the Stars equalised. Twice. Extra time. A tense Jeff reminded us that although this was not the way it was meant to comfortably go, we were seeing more hockey than usual. A goalless five minutes took us to a shoot-out. I was confident, given our aforementioned weapon in the shape of Luongo but Jeff was pessimistic about our goal-scoring capabilities. He needn't have worried. Both Kesler and...hmm...someone else sent the puck home whilst at the other end, Luongo did his duty and kept the goal empty. Result! A tense one, but the desired winners in the end and we got to see all elements of a match.

From one Canadian celebration to another. The next day, Monday, was Thanksgiving Day, which, unlike our southerly neighbours, is celebrated here on the second Monday of October (unless you're in PEI, Newfoundland & Labrador or Nova Scotai where it's not marked as a stat holiday).

Whilst many north American tribes held feasts and celebrations to mark the end of harvest, Canadian Thanksgiving stems from the explorer James Frobischer, who held a service of thanksgiving to mark his safe return from a search for the Northwest Passage. The French settlers also held a feast of thanks in 1604 to celebrate their safe landing in Canada. Over the years, the occasion has served to give thanks for many things, harvests and special occasions but there was no regular fixed day. In 1879, an official Thanksgiving Day was observed although it continues to change from year to year.

A few weeks ago, Annie, Sarah and I decided to do dinner but nothing much was done to organise it further until a few days before when we got to inviting other stray people who didn't have families to go to. What started as dinner for five or six turned into a potluck feast for nine. We didn't manage a turkey, but chicken, roast potatoes, veggies, vegetarian chilli stew, meatloaf, bread, onion soup, corn chowder, caramel tart and pumpkin pie and plenty of wine was more than enough to satisfy. Throughout preparations in our bustling, smoke-filled kitchen (dilapidated oven, people, not burnt food) and then eating and talking it was clear that we all had much to be thankful for and celebrate.

And so I am inspired to enjoy every last minute of life in Vancouver, whether it's out with friends, cycling, playing Settlers with housemates, hiking, or squeezing in one last trip to the ocean. Clearly I will miss a country where I can write for several paragraphs on the national sport (sorry, Premier League, you just don't stand a chance). But, as a friend from work said on Sunday, it's not about missing the country you've come from, but seeing the opportunities in the place you've arrived. So, a belated thanksgiving toast: to experiences, wherever they lead, and to looking for them in all places, even those where you might not necessarily want to be just yet :-)

Loopy Landlord, in the kitchen, with the dagger.

Nope not a new version of the famous board game, but a (not so) normal Thursday morning at home. Let me set the scene:

Our water system blocked so for a few days we, and the couple who share our duplex upstairs, could not use any water. No washing up, no flushing the loo, no washing machine. We were resorting to Tim Hortons and other restaurants and cafes just to use their facilities. The landlords came round after a couple of days of this. Well, the landlord and his loopy girlfriend Charlotte with whom we deal, and whose schizophrenic tendencies have probably been detailed somewhere earlier on this blog. Whilst showing them the problem areas and flooding, she sent evil stares and threats of our footing the bill my way, until he started telling her to stop talking. That's when the shouting started, and they proceeded to argue and shout and swear at each other. Upstairs in the kitchen, the domestic continued. Then, after one insult too many, the landlord grabbed a kitchen knife and made for Charlotte, who scampered into my room. Q and I calmed them down, although this was only a momentary relief as five minutes later, the knife was in his hands again and heading for her.

After that we decided that they were better off sorting whatever trivial matter it was outside and we ushered them out, to sit down and stare bemusedly at each other. Until I remembered that I had laundry to do, at which point I left for the local laundromat. And, of course, the obligatory cafe....

So, a happy conclusion to the story. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you see it) no one was really hurt, our water system is now working and we no longer have to use the cold community centre showers. Life can go on as normal until the end of October when our house is sadly parting ways...and I head to Chicago with Q, and then over to NYC and back up to Canada with some friends from home.

Which brings us into the last few weeks of Vancouver life. I have notified work that I'll be leaving and now am weighing up whether to use my discounts to stock up on gear now instead of crying over prices in Snow & Rock when I get back to London, or keep the money for travel. Travel money would be good, but my ski jacket is tearing and the downside of working at an outdoor store means I'm less inclined than ever to check out M&S's ski section...