YOW, YUL and environs
Zambia/Malawi and Svalbard were both way outside my frame of previous reference, but Canada is well within it. This is not because I've been here too often -- I later determined that it's been precisely 26 years since my last visit -- but because, well, it's a carbon copy of the United States. Urban planning is equated with strip malls and suburban sprawl, Wal-Marts and Costcos litter the landscape, soccer moms drive around in SUVs, traffic signage is identical and everything is oversized, including many inhabitants. I kept getting flashbacks to my previous existence in a leafy suburb of New York... And regardless of Michael Moore's assertions to the contrary, in Canada too the post-9/11 continental mood of omnipresent paranoia was downright unsettling after Europe, with automatically locking car doors, key cards needed to access parking garage elevators and signs proclaiming electronic surveillance, angry dogs and guard patrols everywhere, including
inside the booths of highway restrooms.
Before a mob of angry Canucks assaults me with hockey sticks, I'll concede that there are enough non-American details to cause a little cognitive dissonance. The obvious one in bilingual Ontario is that all official signs are also written in French, and careful examination also reveals that the seemingly all-American mileposts use kilometers and the apparently all-American juice boxes are in liters. Instead of McDonalds at every corner there's a Tim Hortons (if usually with a McD's across the street), and PetroCanada gas stations did seem a little thin on the ground in the lower 48. And, of course, instead of wrapping up in the Stars and Stripes and holding an unquestioning belief that America is number 1, there are maple leaves everywhere and an equally firm conviction that Canada is number 1 (with the United States most certainly relegated to #2 or below). Sigh.
Ottawa is usually not on the top of a Canadian tourist's agenda, and the main reason I was there was to visit family. The town has a pretty bad rep as a soulless artificial creation in the middle of nowhere, filled with bureaucrats and snowdrifts of income tax forms. When founded, an American newspaper famously commented that the new capital was impregnable, as any "invader would get lost in the woods trying to find it", and most Canadians prefer to cast the blame of Queen Victoria for coming up with the harebrained scheme. With all this bad karma piled on it, I was actually somewhat surprised to find Ottawa rather pleasant-looking on a sunny late summer day, with stately buildings, grassy lawns, lakes and canals, oodles of museums, a bustling market, and most Brutalist government buildings from the 1960s sent to hide in well-deserved exile on the outskirts of town. The Parliament buildings are pretty enough and would fit in well in London, the capital of an empire spanning the globe at the time, but what megalomaniac designed them in
1859, when Canada was even more of a howling wilderness than now? The capital's most notable tourist draw, however, is the Canadian Museum of Civilization across the river in Gatineau, which packs in the world's largest collection of totem poles, some moderately interesting exhibits on whatever they're calling Canada's poor aborigines these days, and a surprisingly well-done and, yes, interesting exhibition of Canada's own history, complete with full-size recreations of villages, towns and cities through the years.
Excursion number two was to
Montreal, which was more of the same, only now unilingually in French. Montreal's
vieux ville has somewhat hyperbolically been called Paris without the jet lag, and for a select few streets you could maintain this illusion, at least if your Paris consists only of snooty restaurants and souvenir shops (not an entirely inaccurate description of its more central
arrondissements, mind you). Having wasted nine years of my life studying French, I'm tolerably conversant in this maddeningly ugly and illogical language (hark, is that a crowd of Quebecois armed with baguettes joining the lynch mob?), but the zealously enforced language laws combined with the influence from south of the border combine to make travel in Quebec an endless series of Tarantino-esque "Royale with Cheese" moments. What's in the vending machine? Why, a bag of Cheetos(tm)-brand
Fromage Etoufflés. What does LCBO's
Le Party Zone retail? Big boxes of
Herb's Cooler de Vodka, of course. But my finely honed absurd-o-meter was only pegged by the PFK outlet: that's right, in Quebec even Colonel Sanders goes francophone and hawks
Poulet Frit Kentucky instead.
Thus inspired, I dedicated one day to sampling the best of Canadian cuisine. First up was
poutine, french fries slathered with gravy and cheese, which tastes exactly how it looks and sounds. Montreal smoked meat was next on the agenda, although the only visible difference to a pastrami sandwich in New York was that the local bagel is smaller. For dessert, I couldn't help but sample a Beaver Tail, which is a flat piece of deep-fried dough slathered in sugar and cinnamon and, wait for it, tastes just like it to too. Unexpected bright spots on the culinary landscape, however, were the wide availability of rather excellent Middle-Eastern fare (no, not more kebab, but eg. decent pita, hummus and olives) and some pretty good lobsters too. As in the US, supermarkets are huge and bursting at the seams, and it's easy and fairly cheap to eat excellently in Canada... it's just a bit of shame none of it is actually uniquely Canadian as such.
Last and least, a half-day sampler of rural Canada in the shape of drive down the Rideau Canal to the metropolis of
Merrickville (pop. 1,025), which has wisely opted to jettison smelly farm animals and all that tiresome rooting about in soil, substituting the cultivation of tourists instead. Firmly at the other end of the Franco-Anglo spectrum, Merrickville is a decent facsimile of an English countryside town, all stone buildings, expensive antique shops, disused mills and pre-electric factories (there's an "Industrial Heritage Complex" devoted to all the things you can do with a dam and good old-fashioned water power), and a slew of pubs with names like Goose and Gridiron or Monkey and Sprocket, offering bangers and mash, fish and chips, and seventeen gazillion varieties of beer on tap. Even the crowd of Harley-riding bikers in town seemed to mellow out, straighten their doilies and serve each other cups of tea when confronted with this, although admittedly the Ottawa Northern Stars weren't quite a match for the Hell's Angels in appearance or reputation.