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there and back again
Jan. 5th, 2005 04:48 pmI came home from Montreal late Sunday. Montreal is a beautiful city, with lovely freezing rain. Last year, I took a significant fraction of my vacation time in visiting Montreal, so my colleagues expect me to tell them about my adventures in Quebec tourism. Um, well. I'm not much of a tourist...the grand scale of the world is mostly something that makes it inconvenient for me to visit my friends. I had wonderful conversations with Papersky and Rysmiel, and I met Redbird, whose Usenet posts I had seen for years. I fell asleep to the rattle of hail against a window, when I was warm and safe in a bed that was very nearly under a Christmas tree, a bed in a room full of books. None of this is really very specific to Montreal.
There was a wonderful used book shop in a neighborhood that Papersky condemned as suburban, because the architecture wasn't interesting and there weren't office buildings. There were houses and apartment buildings and little shops, and buses and cars and a handful of pedestrians. (I expect there would have been more people around if it hadn't been late afternoon on December 31.) The neighborhood reminded me of where I live. (The shop reminded me a little of my first used book shop, in Berkeley, MI. I used to ride my bike across miles of real suburban sprawl to get to a place like that, a shop not in any kind of mall, just by itself, selling whatever they wanted to anyone who happened to come by.) I made out like a bandit(*) at this Montreal bookshop. They had a huge stack of Nevil Shute books, quite a few Mary Renault, and all the _Emily of New Moon_ books. I was even rejecting books because they were falling apart. Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
There was also a lovely tea shop, Cha Noir, that serves chocolate truffles with tiny little pots of good tea. (They don't serve sugar with the tea, unless you order a variety they think is supposed to have sugar added. If you're such a barbarian as to ask for sugar anyhow, as Redbird did and Hiranu surely would, they assume you're *generally* a barbarian and ask you not to put the sugar directly into the teapot.) They have a Scrabble set there, presumably to encourage people to hang out and order more tea and chocolate. It's scored for French, so "walk" becomes a really extravagent high scoring word.
My trip home involved more freezing rain than the (generally admirable) Greyhound bus could deal with. I took some slight comfort in the knowledge that we arrived only 4 hours late, and that an airplane or small car probably would not have been able to make the trip at all. Unfortunately, an extended and nerve-wracking trip did not leave me in great shape for getting to work Monday morning, to greet my colleagues who all seemed appallingly eager to get right to work. I'm still very glad I went.
There was a wonderful used book shop in a neighborhood that Papersky condemned as suburban, because the architecture wasn't interesting and there weren't office buildings. There were houses and apartment buildings and little shops, and buses and cars and a handful of pedestrians. (I expect there would have been more people around if it hadn't been late afternoon on December 31.) The neighborhood reminded me of where I live. (The shop reminded me a little of my first used book shop, in Berkeley, MI. I used to ride my bike across miles of real suburban sprawl to get to a place like that, a shop not in any kind of mall, just by itself, selling whatever they wanted to anyone who happened to come by.) I made out like a bandit(*) at this Montreal bookshop. They had a huge stack of Nevil Shute books, quite a few Mary Renault, and all the _Emily of New Moon_ books. I was even rejecting books because they were falling apart. Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
There was also a lovely tea shop, Cha Noir, that serves chocolate truffles with tiny little pots of good tea. (They don't serve sugar with the tea, unless you order a variety they think is supposed to have sugar added. If you're such a barbarian as to ask for sugar anyhow, as Redbird did and Hiranu surely would, they assume you're *generally* a barbarian and ask you not to put the sugar directly into the teapot.) They have a Scrabble set there, presumably to encourage people to hang out and order more tea and chocolate. It's scored for French, so "walk" becomes a really extravagent high scoring word.
My trip home involved more freezing rain than the (generally admirable) Greyhound bus could deal with. I took some slight comfort in the knowledge that we arrived only 4 hours late, and that an airplane or small car probably would not have been able to make the trip at all. Unfortunately, an extended and nerve-wracking trip did not leave me in great shape for getting to work Monday morning, to greet my colleagues who all seemed appallingly eager to get right to work. I'm still very glad I went.
