Pictures paint a thousand words and all that. Links below to the Flickr sets of my Canadian adventure, which definitely proved to be full of surprises and interesting things to snap, wished there’d been more but I was too busy either eating or drunking or being careful not to take my camera everywhere in case I lost it, again.

I’d been wanting to go to Canada for a long time and it was definitely worth the wait. I’m about ready to do it again once the whole financial crisis thing what’s happening cools off and we can all go back to being money hungry capitalist pigs. word.

Vancouver - Flickr set

Montreal - Flickr set

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written by Laurent \\ tags: buildings, Canada, food, Montreal, people, pictures, Quebec, travelling, Vancouver

As I got on the plane and left Vancouver for Montreal in late July, I was wondering what to expect. Five days later as I left Montreal for New York, I had come to realise that, much as had happened with my visit to Hong Kong, Montreal was a whole lot more than I had planned for and imagined.

In a way I had expected Vancouver to be more interesting and entertaining than Montreal, and if I’m honest that’s definitely partly to do with my French upbringing, where the Quebecois are often a source of ridicule, complaints and jokes. And it’s also to do with my family’s comments that Montreal wasn’t all that and I probably wouldn’t enjoy it that much. My dad had said the same thing about Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong, telling me that KL would be the more interesting of the two, yet it turned out HK was the much more entertaining and appealing city. As for Montreal, it was so good that I can honestly say it’s the only place of all those I visited in this entire trip that I would seriously consider moving to. On the other hand, I already had a feeling before leaving Vancouver that Montreal would probably be more interesting than I originally thought, as quite a lot of the people I met and hung out with in Vancouver told me that Montreal was amazing and had, in a way, a lot more to offer than Vancouver (aside from the nature that is).

I was lucky enough to have a friend (big up Lewis!) living in town who not only offered to put me up but also showed me the good spots. As luck would have it, there was another friend of his (big up Ben!) staying at the same time as me, so for the first time in nearly two months I actually had someone to hang around with everyday rather than doing the solo traveller tip. I arrived late on a tuesday, and after making it to the central bus station in downtown Montreal, I waited outside for Lewis and Ben to show up while taking in the surroundings - the city was pretty quiet, given it was nearly 2am, but one thing that struck me straight away, even though I couldn’t see too well, was the architecture and how diverse it was from other North American cities I’d been in so far. And the next thing to hit me was hearing people speak French, as a bunch of African cab drivers were standing outside the station chewing the fat, and speaking in a very strange, but fascinating and attractive, mix of Quebecois French and, from what I could gather, African patois. Within five minutes of being in town I could already feel that this was going to be a lot more interesting than what I’d thought, and I wasn’t wrong.

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written by Laurent \\ tags: architecture, bagels, buildings, Canada, culture, food, France, graffiti, history, Montreal, Quebec, society, summer, travelling

update: I was really tired when I first put this up yesterday and it was full of mistakes and I’d also forgot to thank everyone who hooked it up. All rectified now and also added something important about the idea of the city lacking history.

My short trip across the border from Seattle to Vancouver only served to reinforce my feeling about the omnipresence of nature I got when I arrived in Washington state. The landscape and sights as the bus rolled down the highway were hypnotic at times, and mundane at others, and with the sun setting it only made those hypnotic moments feel all the more relaxing. The US-Canada land border proved to be the first real testing bordercross since my return to the west. We all had to exit the bus, get our bags scanned and queue (or should that be line?) for border control. And that’s when I got my first taste of totally straight-faced, unbending border officers who seem to lack any sense of humour, or at least common sense. Border control is serious business get me, especially in these terrorist times. Not only was I asked absolutely ridiculous questions about where I was staying, how long and why (I still don’t get how explaining that you’re travelling the world on holiday can cause such concerns) but I was then made to go and get a stamp only to be met with more straight faced non sense, forms and general pissing about. So much for visa waivers. The irony of the whole thing being that everyone had told me to expect this and worse from the American customs, and they turned out to be pretty painless on the way in. Though I got an indirect taste of it on the way out of Canada, but we’ll get to that later.

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written by Laurent \\ tags: British Columbia, Canada, city, drinking, green, history, nature, travelling, Vancouver, writing