Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Nord Encore, Part Deux


Liturgy, Tomahawk, etc.
Sept. 2
Finally catching up.
We went out Sunday morning for a stroll and then went to hear mass sung in the cathedral.
The mass was in French. I tried to follow along in the order of service sheet, but of course, kept losing my place. When I wasn’t lost, I was days late with the responses. I even made believe that I could pronounce part of the creed. The liturgy included both creeds—the Apostles’ Creed, and the Nicene. If I remember right, the priest said the Nicene Creed by himself. Maybe everyone was supposed to join in (as they do in the Episcopal Eucharist, for instance), but they were tired by that time.
It was fun and very beautiful, but by one o’clock when church let out, I was dizzy and in need of hydration. So we strolled around looking for a place where I could get a beer.
Then other things started to compete with my need for refreshment.
The Hudson’s Bay Company department store, for instance. I didn’t see any beaver hats, but they did have Lady Gaga’s and Madonna’s perfumes for sale next to each other. I don’t know if you’ve seen the ads for Lady Gaga’s entry, but I particularly like the way the Blue Man Group climbs up her armpit.
Still no beaver hats, but one department kept up some of the old traditions. You can buy a canoe and a $200 paddle there. What’s more, there was a glass case with furry Canadian Great White North hat, earflaps and all, plus a tomahawk with a two-foot handle. There were colorful stripes on everything, the tomahawk handle, Swiss army knives. You could buy a blanket with stripes on it and give it to the Indians so they’d leave you alone at Glens Falls.

I wanted to buy the tomahawk and furry hat for Joanna. I told her: You wear the hat and carry the tomahawk, nobody will mess with you. Like me. I wear a hat and nobody messes with me. I don’t even need the tomahawk. A guy in a pony tail and a tie. They can’t tell if you’re a lawyer or a gangster; all they know is that they’d better behave.
But no, for all my attempts at persuasion, Joanna didn’t want tomahawk or fuzzy hat. {Editor’s note: Harry is still working on it to this day, and hopes some day to place a mail order.]
After the department store, we walked into the Quartier des Spectacles. All right. This is where the Montreal Festival of Films of the World is centered. There is an inflatable outdoor screen for showing movies. There is also a Place des Arts (at least, I think that’s what it’s called), which is a complex of venues for performances of various kinds—opera, pop music, ballet, maybe acrobatics and gun fights.
Across from that was the Desjardins mall. Ah, there would be a food court, and perhaps beer. As it turned out, no beer that I could see at the food court. Joanna noticed that there was a franchise of the St. Hubert chicken rotisserie somewhere in the mall. It took a couple of seconds looking at the map in my unrefreshed state to pinpoint where it was, hidden up the leg of a wing, which I guess is appropriate, in a confused sort of way, for a chicken joint.
St. Hubert is the guy who saw the stag with a crucifix between its antlers and became a bishop. A representation of that legend, which has nothing to do with chicken, is represented on the Jagermeister label. But I digress.
All they had was Labatt’s Bleue, spelled that way because it’s French Canada. It was like an upscale Bud, but hey, it was beer and 5 percent. It was a good for breakfast. After all, all I had taken so far was some coffee, with yogurt and fruit from a breakfast chain called Chez Cora.
The mall had a Clarks store, one of Joanna’s favorites, so we stopped there to look at the shoes. One of the displays had fuzzy boots. They would have been perfect with the furry hat and tomahawk from Hudson’s Bay. Yes, let’s get the boots, and then we can go back to the department store. It isn’t far. But I still couldn’t convince Joanna.
In the block next to the mall and the Place des Arts is the stretch with the sex shops and strip clubs. Quarter of Spectacles, indeed. I was told in my youth that this stuff could make you go blind.
Dinner was at a place that by itself may be worth the trek to Montreal. It’s called La Gargote. According to my Pocket Larousse, that means a place with low prices and mediocre food. Neither was the case. We had more snails, and a rabbit leg. Judging by the scale of that leg, it would have been the biggest damned rabbit I ever saw. We also sampled as many wines as we could. We had three cotes: de Ventoux, de Provence, and du Rhone. Also a Beaujolais cru. Larry told me years ago that “cru” is a French government controlled term for a distinguished vineyard.
All the wines were fantastic. We had the Beaujolais with dessert, an upside down apple pie called tarte tatin. I tried to order that in pidgin French, and the waitress said “What?”
We walked back to the hotel and on the way we stepped into a building. I forget why. But the place was closed for private party, which I believe was an Arab Christian wedding. We got there just as the bridal party was being introduced. Flashing strobe lights, drummers in checkered head scarves and white robes. The women’s heads were not covered, and everybody except the drummers were in Western dress. The bride wore white, with her shoulders uncovered.

The drummers did a catchy little dance, although the bride and groom were still waiting for their song to take their first dance as husband and wife. They looked a little dazed by it all. Maybe this was her mom’s idea. Some of the guests got up and danced along while they recorded it all on their cell phones.
The rest of the walk home and the wine put me to sleep just fine.

Olmsted and His Works
Sept. 3
Checked out early, got the car and drove up the hill. The lady who served us at St. Hubert in La Gare Windsor told us that you never get lost in Montreal because you look uphill and seen the Mont Real.
We parked the car as far up as we could drive and climbed the stairs to the entrance of Le Parc du Mont-Royale. Don’t ask me why the spelling changes. I don’t know.
We climbed up the Avenue des Pins and came to Chemin Olmsted and kept climbing. It’s wooded and calm. Joggers and bikers go by, but there’s plenty of room. Rich people’s yards back on the park.
It was hotter than I expected—in the high 70s or low 80s—so I carried my jacket and didn’t wear a vest, but was still soaked before we got to the top. Joanna, as usual, was unfazed.
The park is on top of the volcanic outcropping for which the city is named. The original park superintendent’s house is now a public building with exhibits, which tell you that Indians lived here thousands of years ago, that the stone from which the city is built comes from here, and that, like Central Park in New York, it was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Wow. That’s why there was a Chemin Olmsted. And I had suspected the road was named for a local politician.
There is an artificial lake which was dry and dug up for reconstruction. Many of the lawns were dotted with large stone abstracts. I don’t think they were part of Olmsted’s original design. They may be more recent additions, or else stones the Vikings set up during weekend excursions from Vinland.

On the ride home we saw some turkeys and a few runt deer. I mean very small. So was the corn in the fields. I hope the farmers and the poachers are all right. The apples in the orchards seemed to be plentiful.
We went to Calandra’s in Caldwell for dinner and more wine. Then we were done for this voyage.
Be well, all.
Harry.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

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 19th 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