The Inaccurate Tourist

39. Foreigner

Well, Happy New Years! Out with dusty old palindromic two-thou-two and welcome to kinky two-naughty-naught-three. A new year and a new Doomsday to remember (Friday, if you haven't already calculated it). I'm now a year-old Parisian, bright and fresh and ready to face the baguettes. But for a special treat, I'm not going to talk about France, the French or Paris for my first travel log this year.

Today, it's all about Canada. I went home for the first time this holiday season to refresh those important links with family and friends. And, importantly, I wanted to see how Canada looked and felt after being away (and pining for the Caribou) for a year.

Actually, that's misleading. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a caribou. Moose and deer, of course. But one day, I will find and view the mysterious and majestic caribou.

I left CDG airport outside of Paris Saturday morning, and waited for a bit in Toronto. Something immediately stood out -- the stairs in the airport were ridiculously steep. It's true. In Canada, all the stairs are steeper than in France. Even the stairs in my parents' house (the stairs I grew up with) seemed oddly high now. I have a theory that the French still associate long, shallow staircases with luxury, while most of the buildings in Canada where built after the invention of the elevator.

I also saw single presumably-Canadian travellers buying ridiculously underpriced fast food 'to go' in the airport secure area, in order to carry the bag over to their gate and eat alone. This is wrong on so many levels. The airport in Toronto also has a bouncy moving sidewalk.

My parents and sister met me in Calgary to drive me to Medicine Hat. Calgary is a beautiful, spacious city -- wide roads and plenty of parking. And unlike Paris, there weren't any cars parked on the huge sidewalks, in the middle of the road, or on the crosswalks. We drove home in a complete lack of snow, although it was sufficiently cold to freeze the fog, which flurried across the road.

When fog freezes just right, you get hoar frost. It covers every twig on a tree and every blade of grass, and makes the entire world white even without a centimetre of snow. It can stick around for a couple of days if the weather stays below zero.

The prairies are flat. The features (if any) are cut down into the flatness instead of rising out. It used to always surprise me, coming back from Vancouver, where the mountains nibble away at the visible sky; it's twice the effect coming from six-story Paris. The sky is bluer in the prairies.

I spent the first few days at my sister's house. I had been seriously busy at work the weeks before leaving, and I hadn't organized my Christmas shopping before leaving so it was mall time, four days before Christmas. It's so easy to shop in Canada -- big aisles, large informative signs and SALES SALES SALES. And everything was so inexpensive, especially home electronics.

Thanks to high clothing prices in Paris, I took this opportunity to blow my entire 2002 clothing budget in Canada. All the clothes I brought back were destined for charity and I would return to France with new Canadian clothes. So much for the fashion capital of the world, where Levi's and T-Shirts command designer prices...

My favourite brand of T-Shirt? Wayne Gretzy(tm), purchased at The Bay. How much more Canadian can you get?

Other than shopping for Christmas gifts, I took it pretty easy. The jet lag hit me pretty hard in the 'winding hours back' direction. I tried to stay awake until a decent bedtime every night and to stay in bed until everyone else was awake and it took about a week to adjust. The biggest effect was meals -- I would be all geared up for a home-style Canadian cooking meal, but my body wouldn't be hungry. Even after my sleep patterns had adjusted to the new time zone, my appetite was never in sync with meals.

I took a picture of the processed cheese aisle, so I could print it out and scare French children with it. But honestly, there is a decent selection of cheese available in Canada, even if much of it has been imported. And as of time of writing, and unlike the United States, unpasteurized cheese is still permitted.

We ate breakfast out a couple of times. While I adore a pain au chocolat and cafe au lait breakfast, the Canadian bacon and eggs, hashbrowns and sausage breakfast is certainly worthwhile! That's a real breakfast. And of course, we had many of the family specialties that make holidays worthwhile: ham, nitfla (a traditional German dish that my gramma makes), homemade chinese food, real Albertan beef sausage and of course, the big beautiful turkey dinner for Christmas.

On one of my last nights in Canada, I took my family out for a meal. The restaurant was 'Western Cookhouse Grill' themed, which means that it prominently featured barbecued meat -- one of the flavours that the French don't seem to get quite right. The waiter scribbled his name on our paper table cloth (we had crayons for our own drawings -- I drew the Eiffel tower) and they served drinks in wide mouth jars (they could carry nine at a time without using a tray!). It was pretty relaxed compared to a French restaurant, and certainly much more spacious and comfortable. I have no idea why there aren't any booths in Parisian restaurants -- they take long enough to eat that they should have more space to enjoy it.

I enjoyed my meal -- I had the half roasted barbecue chicken with a side of garlic mashed potatoes and baked beans, and a peach/blueberry skillet biscuit with ice cream. And the kicker? The meal for FIVE people cost the same as a single person would pay in Paris -- given that we didn't have appetizers or wine, that not everybody had dessert and that Keri had brought a $10 off coupon. And of course, the tip isn't included in the bill in Canada.

A lot of my visiting was coffee-oriented. Canadian coffee is light, large and hot, which suited me and my general fatigue very well. In fact, if you order your coffee in a restaurant (where you are even permitted to drink it with the meal!), you generally get free refills. A hovering server descends when your coffee is getting low with a fresh pot and tops up your cup. Heavenly. Of course, refills aren't free in a real cafe -- Medicine Hat doesn't have a Starbucks but it does have Café Marseilles, a downtown hang-out-terie where you can lounge on a chesterfield and have your Mocha, Latte, Espresso or other Canadian-style European-style coffees.

I took advantage of my time in Canada to fly out to Vancouver to visit my old friends and colleagues. Moving to a foreign country automatically upgrades all your friends from home into 'old friends' -- it's the nostalgia. But they deserve the title anyway.

We hung out and drank coffee and took in the old Vancouver jaunts. The focus, of course, was the upcoming non-palindromic kinky New Year, but even on the fateful last day of 2002, nobody had made any plans. We were saved from the streets by Peter, who offered his wonderful Kitsilano apartment. Peter and his wife are new 'old friends'. So we watched the hockey game, and I drank cranberry vodka and tonics, and we ordered pizza.

As usual, I ended up talking with everybody in the kitchen (where the real party always goes on). As people entered and left, I took down their New Years resolutions and predictions on my Palm PDA (just like I have for the last two years). All of the gang was there, and I met some new members and other unknowns (including a neurophysiology student who insisted that studies prove you only need 4.5 hours of sleep a night. I need more information.)

At midnight, we climbed to the rooftop deck and stood in the rain. Nobody had an accurate watch so we started our own countdown. 5-4-3-2-1 Hooray, drink your champagne, kiss a fine lady and cross off the first of my resolutions.

We had the traditional First Breakfast at our typical breakfast cafe, which I'm not going to reveal here -- they don't need the business and I don't need a longer waiting line. I had the Peameal Benedict, which is an eggs benedict (english muffin, ham, poached egg and hollandaise sauce) but with higher quality Canadian bacon. Yum.

This was the best Christmas ever, but it always is. I didn't do much except hang out, eat and drink, and relax.

I took the airplane home from Medicine Hat -- a city with two gates and a cat in the airport. They don't have an x-ray machine at the departure gate, so they look through all your stuff by hand and do the wand. I was clean... this time.

I met a Canadian colleague in Toronto also flying back to Paris (he's the one I went to the south of France with). Since my day was only going to be sixteen hours long, I tried to sleep the entire trip and skip the in-flight movies. The flight was two hours late arriving in Paris, and we waited nearly two and a half hours to get our luggage (they eventually lost his). I was supposed to go into work on the Monday, but since I was already four and a half hours late, I decided to take an extra vacation day and sleep.

Sorry to all my peeps in Vancouver -- you're all pre-digital camera days. I'll get you next year...

Posted by The Inaccurate Tourist at January 10, 2003 12:00 PM