Nord Encore

Greetings From Natty Bumppo

August 31

I am sitting I believe somewhere in the Adirondacks, but I’m not sure, at Glens Falls, New York. This is a way station on our route to Montreal.

The most significant  thing about Glens Falls is that it is mentioned in “Last of the Mohicans.”

Yes, no one actually reads "Last of the Mohicans,” but there are interesting movies based on it.

I enjoyed the Michael Mann film version so much that I plowed through the novel. Yes, I did. I admit it. As I said, nobody reads it, so I just plowed through.

Natty Bumppo tries to hide his party under the “falls of Glen.” I don’t remember what happens next. Maybe the Indians captured them. People were always  being captured and escaping in the book. Over and over and over again.

Anyhow, I have had to fight a few Indians,  but have so far not been captured.

More later

Harry

Aug. 31

I read it in college, and liked it too.

Alan

Sept. 1

An awesome flick, that was. Magua blew me away ... and then I met him in Smith's Grocery in Santa Fe. Well, the actor, Wes Studi anyway. Who is as unlike Magua as anyone could be. It was quite a moment.

Jack T.

Au Canada

September 1

Joanna says I had six glasses of wine with dinner last night. The steak was all right, the fries mediocre, the wine very tasty: a pinot noir, a cabernet sauvignon, and a merlot with a fantastic dessert, a kind of cannoli turned inside out. The filling was in a bowl surrounded by chips of cannoli shells. Merlot was perfect with it.

We walked back home, and I was fine to send that e-mail. It was perfect, even the requisite number of typos.

I counted three glasses--no, four. Joanna was likely right. First off, she wasn’t drinking last night. Her stomach was still giving her trouble from eating curry Wednesday night. Another thing, after four glasses of wine, you tend to lose count, especially when you’re having a good time.

So I slept in this morning with a hangover. I had coffee, some yogurt, a little pastry, and that made me feel better.

Now this is why drunkards pity the people who don’t drink. When a tee-totaler wakes up in the morning that is the best he’s going to feel all day long.

By the time I had my shower this morning, all that pain and stomach ache had just washed away, and I was so happy to feel normal again I would have started singing, but I forgot the words.

We crossed the Canadian border shortly after one this afternoon without incident. Nobody asked me about fingerprints; nobody searched my car. But then, it’s usually U.S. Customs that does the search.

Montreal is a beautiful city. The hotel is in the financial district so much of the neighborhood was closed. The restaurants open late for dinner, but we found a place to have lunch a few blocks from the hotel, in the railroad station, La Gare Windsor.

We got there by accident because of Macdonald and then a wedding. The statue is in a park between the hotel and the Cathedral of Mary Queen of the World (Basilique-Cathedrale Marie Reine du Monde) on Boulevard Rene Levesque. I’m just writing in all this foreign-language detail because the French helped us win the Revolution.

Anyway, we took pictures, like this one, in which Joanna meets Macdonald. 

I had no idea who he was—a politician maybe? For all I could tell, he could be the Canadian who invented the hamburger. I have since asked Google and my first guess was right. He was the first prime minister of Canada.

Then the bells started to ring. I had never heard a danceable rhythm come out of a belfry before. It was really catchy. I don’t know that I quite caught it on the short video I made, but I tried. It was celebrating a wedding, and the party was coming out of the church, St. George’s Anglican.

La Gare Windsor is across the street from St. George's. It houses a restaurant called St. Hubert, which seems to specialize in chicken, and was the first open place that we saw. They had Alexander Keith’s on tap. I had tried that in Ontario in May and liked it. It’s a lager, and I generally prefer ales, but the red and the blond are both tasty. The hops give them a touch of fruit flavor.

So after two beers, I was ready for church. The cathedral, it turns out, is modeled on St. Peter’s in Rome. It has the same kind of chuppah over the altar and Latin verses running on a frieze at the top of the walls. 

I’ve only seen St. Peter’s on television, so I don’t know what other features the two churches have in common.

There was a wedding in progress when we entered, but the place is so big that the 50 or 2,000 guests filled some front pews and didn’t notice the tourists photographing each other in the back.

We lit candles, of course, because it is always right and a joyful thing to set fire to something—candle, incense, or heretic—in a place of worship. We also said hello to St. Anne and the Virgin.

From there, we strolled downhill to Vieux Montreal. Narrow streets, hip boutiques and eateries, why, it felt a little like SoHo with a French accent.

We found an interesting spot. It’s the site were Canada’s first saint, Mere d’Youville founded an order of sisters, who tended the sick, and cared for orphans and the elderly. We had seen a painting of her in the cathedral singing the Te Deum as her hospital burns. Nothing she could do to put out the fire, so she might as well sing.

According to sign outside the site of the old church, the chapel burned too, but everything was rebuilt. The chapel was demolished sometime late in the 19^th century to make way for a street named for St. Peter. There is a line on the sidewalk and crossing the street that shows the outline of the original church walls.

Most of the other buildings are still there and in use. The order is the Grey Sisters and may still headquartered in the surviving buildings.

We wandered through the streets and sat for a while in a plaza across from the Basilica of Notre Dame in the old town.

That was only a few blocks from Chinatown, the heart of which is Rue de la Gauchetiere, which is closed to vehicles.

In Chinatown we passed a shop that claimed to showcase art from Bali. In the window, along with images of Buddha and other religious objects was a pile of wooden phalluses. I immediately had flashbacks to Bangkok and the penis shrine outside the Swissotel.

When we got inside, we found that these things were bottle openers. How great is that? You could be in downtown Bangkok, pop the top off a beer Chang, and make an offering all at the same time.

We walked up and down the street to compare menus. The Cantonese restaurant advertising five-ingredient snake soup won hands down. They also had a traditional dish of snails in black bean sauce.

The soup looked like sweet and sour, but tasted very savory with a good hit of ginger. The snake gave a good meaty flavor and the texture was perfect. If I ever catch a snake, I’m going to make soup.

The snails were tasty enough, but they are much smaller than escargot and served in the shell. It’s messy picking them up and trying to hold onto them. You have to wheedle the meat out with a toothpick. I couldn’t do it. Half the time I could swear there was no snail inside, because my toothpick was going around the bend of the shell, but picking up nothing.

Joanna says that usually the shell is cut or broken at the back so you can suck the snail out. You couldn’t do that with these because the shells were whole.

It was too much work and very frustrating, although they were tasty enough and went well with the rice. Joanna, as she often does, had to help me out.

We stopped for dessert at a bakery and had two warm egg custard tarts. Then we went back to the hotel. I was out of cash. Get this: here I am in the financial district, a bank on every corner, and then in the tourist part of town, and I didn’t see one ATM the entire time. The only one I knew of in Montreal is off the lobby of our hotel, the Europa, so I went back to use that.

I was going to go out for another beer or two, but I’m getting tired. I’m going to send this e-mail and sack out.

Good night, all. Pleasant dreams of snakes and snails. They are good food.

Harry