The end.

I arrived home early this morning, and pretty much on time. That last night on the train was about the worst of the lot. I woke up every few minutes and looked at my watch, it seemed. It was bitterly cold. And in the middle of the night I had a dream that I was on a dark and crowded bus with a friend. A man had been teaching him how to smoke a hookah, but I was having trouble with it. Then I kept feeling things moving and nipping in the darkness around my ankles, and I began to get anxious. The bus stopped and strange and threatening men got on, and started to swarm over the backs of the seats towards us, clawing at us and at our things. I was trying to cry out or scream, but I couldn't make any proper noise, just a kind of whimpering groaning noise. Then the girl in the seat next to me touched me on the arm and said, "Are you all right? You were having a nightmare." I started laughing instead, partly from relief at being rescued from it, and partly at the strangeness of having a nightmare in public. The girl told me this morning that once on the train she'd woken herself up screaming.

Below is the account of the last parts of the trip that I wrote yesterday evening.

Sunday 30th December, 6:30 p.m. Between Ottumwa and Osceola, Iowa
(a lot of vowels around here).

I’m on the last leg of my journey home. I’ll arrive, if we’re on time (which remarkably we seem to be so far), at 7:15 tomorrow morning.

From Montreal I took the train back to Schenectady. Boarding at the Gare Centrale in Montreal was straightforward and organized in a way it wasn’t anywhere else on the trip. You arrive at the station and find an enormous but orderly line of people already formed – I was nearly at the end, even though I was there an hour or so before the train went. Once on the platform, as with everywhere else they asked where we were going and directed us onto carriages accordingly, so that even though I was so far back in the line and could see when I got to the train that the early carriages were packed (those going to New York), my own carriage was quiet and I could get a window seat without trouble. For the first few stations the conductor kept telling us that the train was fully booked and that every seat was going to be filled further down the line, but as usual it wasn’t true.

Though many of the Amtrak staff have been pleasant and cheerful, there seems to be an undue number of officious types working for the company. The conductor on that train kept directing snide remarks at some group of people behind me who were presumably shuffling over in their seats so that they could talk to each other – she’d tell them that they had to make up their minds where they were sitting because people would be getting on and they had to know which seats were free (when they collect your ticket they put a slip of card with your destination marked on it in the overhead rail, by your seat number and its window/aisle description). Apart from the fact that we were at this point far from the coming stations, at which no-one much got on anyway, her manner was unduly patronizing and antagonistic. In the waiting room at Schenectady there was a woman who had evidently suffered even worse treatment at the hands of Amtrak staff – she’d been separated from her husband at some earlier stop along her journey. As far as I understood it (she was complaining to the station official about it) he’d got off and when he’d tried to get back on the conductor had seen him but closed the doors anyway. A woman with her corroborated the story. It seems not at all unlikely.

On the train to Schenectady I sat near the woman who’d been in the empty carriage with me on the last part of the journey to Montreal. We’d worked out at the time that we’d be traveling back on the same train, and changing onto the same onward train at Schenectady. She was from somewhere near Seattle, and had been on her way to Quebec (the city, that is) for a break arranged through an organization the name of which I remembered as senior hostel, but looking online think it must have been Elderhostel. It sounded like she had a great time. The advantages of such an arranged group trip over my own are obvious – that you have company, and that you don’t walk around missing meals. I might try it sometime (though not through Elderhostel yet, of course), especially if I’m going to make a habit of going away over Christmas.

My companion had previously been on trains before all round the country and also across Canada, and to my surprise said that in her experience the Canadian company VIA isn’t really any better than Amtrak. On the way out she’d been in the sleeper cars for her overnight trips, and after our Coach experience that night she said that she would be making sure she got sleepers for all stages next time. Me too – if I ever do this again, I have to have a bed. The coach seats are comfortable for sitting, but not for sleeping, and the cars seem to vacillate continually between stiflingly hot and freezing cold (just like my apartment, in fact – you’d think it would make me feel at home). From what she told me, it seems that if you buy your tickets early enough (I thought getting mine in October was early, but she told me she got hers in April), the sleepers aren’t too extortionate. There are two kinds, bedroom and roomette. Just now at Ottumwa where we had a fifteen minute “smoking stop” I walked up to the sleeper cars and peered in the window of an empty compartment, which I think was one of the roomettes she described to me. It is basically a tiny room just big enough for two seats facing each other, which (if I understood correctly) fold down into one bed, with another bed that can be folded out above if you’re sharing.

We arrived in Schenectady about an hour late, but I still had time to go to the Moon and River and have dinner – Moroccan soy chicken and flatbread. His dishes are quite simple, but very tasty – in this case soy and mixed vegetables with a hot oil and cumin dressing. I picked up a sandwich for my companion, who had decided it was too slippery outside to leave the station, and the owner also slipped in an extra portion of the fantastic flatbread for me, which was very nice of him. There was no-one else there when I arrived, but before I left a band that was going to be playing that night arrived along with their entourage. They filled the place on their own. I’d have liked to have stayed and spent the evening, but I had a train to catch…

The Schenectady-Chicago trip was uneventful. We arrived in Chicago in the morning a mere twenty minutes late. These journeys when you arrive in the morning are so much better than the evening arrivals of the ones on the way out. In both cases you have a nasty restless night, but in the former case you at least know you don’t have to keep sitting there for the rest of the day.

(Chicago - Union Station)

In Chicago my friend met me and drove me up to the place where we were staying (the apartment of a friend who was away). It was snowing wetly, and the route we took made Chicago look like Glasgow at its worst – an abandoned industrial wasteland. It’s lucky I was there for a couple of nights, because actually it’s much nicer and more interesting than that.

We went out again and had lunch in a neighbourhood with a lot of Middle Eastern restaurants and stores – I had a good big plate of falafel and baba ghanoush, hummus, and bread. In a shop next door we bought baklava and I stocked up on Turkish coffee. There are such stores in Denver too, but they tend to be far from the centre, stranded along Colorado Boulevard and similar busy soulless roads. Chicago seems to be built of such specific areas – including an unusually vibrant Chinatown, which we visited yesterday.

That afternoon we went for a drive around so that I could see the centre of Chicago and some of its more scenic views. It does have a lot of interesting buildings, though it’s certainly not the most beautiful of cities overall – in this way it is rather like Glasgow, though on a much grander scale. In Glasgow I always think that the buildings are too tall and set too close to the road, so that if you’re walking you’re unable to see much of them and feel penned in and overshadowed. It’s much worse in Chicago’s financial district – enormously tall buildings in this case so that the light is almost shut out (it doesn’t help that many of those buildings are of dark stone), glowering giants waiting to squash with their clubs any tiny people foolish enough to stray between their feet. The downtown area with the big hotels and shops is much nicer, though, and throughout the rest of Chicago there seems to be a very interesting mix of styles: some buildings look like London, some Glasgow, some Doncaster, some a variety of other European influences, some distinctly Midwest, some just generic concrete monstrosity (or is that Birmingham, with which Chicago is twinned?). After driving, we went to a Belgian beer pub and drank Duchesse de Bourgogne and ate onion rings and macaroni and stilton. The pub was very smoky, which was a surprise – it hadn’t occurred to me that it was legal to smoke in bars or restaurants anywhere in the U.S. any more, but it is of course a state by state thing. In Illinois a ban will come into effect next year.

(Oriental Institute)

Yesterday we went to the University of Chicago – a very beautiful campus, something like Trinity College Dublin, but better – to visit the Oriental Institute and the Smart Museum. The former has a museum of Near and Middle Eastern archeology/antiquities – all those Assyrian and Mesopotamian and Babylonian things you find in the British Museum, but on a smaller scale and thus a lot more accessible. The latter apparently has a large East Asian collection, but a lot of the space just now is given over to some of their modern European artworks (surrealist painting, art nouveau furniture, and other things) and a large and rather dull exhibition of Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery (presumably it wouldn’t be dull if you were a student of art history or cared passionately about the paintings of these particular masters). There was also an exhibition called Looking and Listening in 19th Century France, which included a number of Daumier prints. That was more interesting.

(University of Chicago)

Afterwards we visited the co-op bookshop in the Seminary, which is a beautiful building with a lot of carved stone and stained glass windows. The bookshop is in a catacomb-like basement and has everything – shelves of literary criticism, language books, a big East Asian studies section, the whole range of Oxford A Very Short Introduction books. I’d forgotten that there were such bookshops. The Tattered Cover seems like a very poor substitute.

We went off for dinner in Chinatown, and had very disappointing food in a groundlessly popular pan-Asian restaurant called Joy Yee's Noodles. Afterwards we bought mooncakes and custard tarts, left Chinatown and went off for a couple of drinks in a video bar (they play music videos on multiple screens on the walls), and then took a trip to Sam’s Liquor before heading home. I was told that Sam’s had everything, and it turned out to be true. I’ve been looking out for a while for a violet liqueur, and now at last I have a bottle (unless it is smashed to smithereens in my suitcase, which is possible. I forgot to mention that from certain stations and for certain trains you can check in your luggage as if you’re going on a plane. If they are as careful in their treatment of luggage as they are in treatment of people, I may never get to taste that liqueur. It would be nice to go around with all of my clothes smelling of violets, though).

This morning we went for brunch at Ann Sather, a very popular Swedish breakfast place. In this case the popularity is well-deserved. I had a breakfast wrap with eggs, avocado, tomato and peppers. It was a fatly stuffed wrap with hot filling, done in a nice fresh tortilla baked or toasted until lightly browned on top. It was more like having a pie than a wrap, if wrap brings to your mind those dry pre-packaged sandwiches that so often come under that name. It had with it a tasty green salsa, nice and spicy, and two sides of your choice. I had a fresh fruit plate, and wonderful thyme-flavoured (or was it sage? I never am sure which is which, since we always had both sage-and-onion and parsley-and-thyme stuffing at Christmas) hash browns, which were again less like ordinary hash browns than a kind of hot potato salad.

It’s taken me to Omaha, Nebraska, to write this – we’re pulling in now. I’m going to have to stop because I’m almost out of battery power. On the Lakeshore Limited and the Adirondack they have power strips running along the sides of the coaches with two sockets for each pair of seats, so that you can use laptops or other electrical items. The California Zephyr supposedly has outlets in the sleeper cars, but we common people don’t get such a luxury. I’ve located only two sockets, one in the observation car and one downstairs in the snackbar – but they both have people attached to them.

In any case, I am done. We drove around Chicago a little more, and then I went to get the train. As usual the waiting room situation was chaotic, and as usual the Amtrak worker managed to make it sound as if it was our fault, when it seems to me obvious that specified seat reservations would make everyone’s lives less stressful. I had a brief period between Ottumwa and Somewhere, Iowa where there was no-one sitting next to me, but it didn’t last. Perhaps because I’m on my way home as well as because this is my sixth train since I left I feel more edgy and less tolerant of being penned in by a stranger, so I have been spending more time in the observation car. I’d like to have longer away (forever, for instance), but if I can’t have that, I want to be home now and in my own space.

If I could be allowed to live today over again, but with the benefit of hindsight, I'd probably spend it more profitably; but then, if I just lived here, I wouldn't need to be repeating days because there would still be tomorrow waiting to be used. As it is, I have to get on a train out of here at 9:30 tomorrow morning.

I went to the Musée de Château Ramezay in Old Montreal in the morning, one of the few places that was going to be open today (I was happy to find that Canadians too have Boxing Day. There's no such thing in the United States). It was a little disappointing - some historical objects and a lot of pictures, but the labelling wasn't so great, and as someone who knows almost nothing about Quebecois or Canadian history I was really struggling to put the information there was into a comprehensible framework. It's interesting to find that having a bilingual country doesn't guarantee that translations will be of a good standard - the information in this case was evidently written in French and translated into English, as you'd expect in Quebec, but the English was full of oddities. I particularly liked the suit of clothing labelled in French "Costume d'homme" and translated into English as "Man suit."


Afterwards I walked around for a bit and then had lunch at a Taiwanese vegetarian restaurant, Yuan. Their hot & sour soup was great, and the spring roll was good, but the main part of the lunch set (crunchy fillet of fake fish, vegetables, and black rice) was just passable. It was OK, it just didn't have much flavour.

I then made the mistake of venturing underground. It was nasty down there. You should never shop on Boxing Day - it's worth paying full price just to avoid it. I needed some clothes, a bag, and some things to take to people - but I failed to get anything except a basic sweater before the frenzy and my inability to navigate underground drove me back to the surface.

This evening I took the metro up to Petite Italie to discover that the pizza restaurant I wanted to eat in was closed. I started walking back down Blvd. St. Denis as a last wild trek before leaving, but then I came across the entrance to a metro station and decided to call it a day.

Christmas Day

I went to the cinema to see Sweeney Todd tonight. Ooo, it was dark. I think the version we put on when I was in Primary 7 (I was Mrs Lovett) must have been Sweeney Todd Lite. Of course, we didn't have Tim Burton directing us. The film is beautifully done, but with quite a lot of throat-slitting, spurting blood, and nasty spasmodic death throes.

Earlier I went out on a very very long walk - somewhat longer than intended. First I went through McGill and up to the Mount Royal chateau again to look out at the view. It was sunny today, and there were lots of people out for Christmas Day walks. Not that walking was easy - with all that snow, then the pouring rain two days ago, and then the bitter cold since, all of the paths in the park are now paved with thick, hard ice.

I've often wondered since getting to America about the haste to clear snow from the sidewalks. In Colorado, at least, you're legally obliged to do it if you're a home or business owner. But with the kind of weather we have, if we have a heavy snowfall we can have days on end of the piled-up snow thawing in the daytime, leaking across the pavement, and freezing again at night, so that the apparently clear pavements become perilously slippy in unexpected places, and if you can find a place to walk where the snow was never cleared it's a relief. You know where you are when you're walking on snow, whereas on ice you often find that your legs aren't where you thought you'd left them.


I went on up past the Lac aux Castors (which turns out to be Beaver Lake, and nothing to do with it being on wheels), and into the Cimetiere de Notre-Dame-Des-Neiges. This is very large, and stretches out over a great expanse of the hill, with lots of little roads going here and there. I wandered lost in a forest of dead people for quite some time, before coming out on the other side of the hill somewhere near the Oratoire, in other words at the furthest possible corner from my B&B. So, I walked round the top side to see what was there, and then back down the edge. It was interesting to go from the very ugly Université de Montréal (the ugliness made more remarkable because of the prettiness of McGill on the other side of the park) and the ugly terraced blocks facing it, to the very upmarked neighbourhood of Outremont, and then to huge ugly apartment blocks again, all on one long road.

Joyeux Noel!

Well, I'm glad I dragged myself back out for that. The service was more traditional (I suppose) and harder to follow (not only no musical notation, but no words, even), and all of the people around me seemed to know just what they were doing; but the music beforehand was great - both choir and organ. The inside of the church (basilica? cathedral? what is the difference between all of these? are they interchangeable?) was certainly decorative, though in a rather ugly Wedgewood and wedding cake kind of a way.

Does everyone else know "Minuit chrétiens" already? The choir two days ago sang it, and I heard it again tonight. What lovely music.

Merry Christmas, all of you.

Footsore but festive.

When people ask me if I don't mind travelling alone, I always tell them that it has great advantages - you can do what you like when you like, and in particular you can eat whenever and whatever without having to consult with someone else. In reality, though, I find this usually means that I spend days walking enormous distances and failing to stop and eat much at all. Today I missed lunch, and finally fell into a Thai restaurant at 8 p.m. on the way back to my lodgings. It was the only place open on a very long stretch of Blvd. St. Laurent from the metro station, so at least I didn't have to make any difficult decisions. Now I am fed, and if my ill-used and by now very sore foot feels better in 40 minutes or so, I'll be going back out to a Christmas concert followed by midnight mass at the Cathédrale Marie-Reine-Du-Monde.

I have been to Christmas mass already this evening at the Oratoire Saint-Joseph. If I make it to the later one tonight, that'll be three church services in under ten days - and that's perhaps one more than I've been to in my entire life. I'd never been to a catholic mass before this evening, anyway. The Oratoire is enormous, and a big tourist destination (and site of pilgrimage too, apparently), so it was a quite dramatic introduction to the whole thing. I sang hymns in French. The woman leading us in the singing was very impressive. What a wonderful way to handle it, with her singing us the first verse before conducting us to join in. And they had printed the music on the pamphlet they gave us. I've always wondered why churches don't usually do that - so that if you're not in the choir you either work from memory, or you guess where the music is going (usually wrongly, if like me you're not hymn-literate).


The outside of St. Joseph's is quite spectacular, sitting on the other side of Mount Royal so that you see it first from below, standing out with its large domed roof. It was dark already when I got out there, and it was floodlit. The inside is full of escalators to get you up to the Oratory itself - that's how much of a tourist destination it is - and from inside the building there is a fantastic view over the (to me entirely unfamiliar) northern part of Montreal. The inside of the Oratory was surprisingly plain, including the inside of that dome which wasn't decorated at all. Before I went up the Oratory I visited their exhibition of Nativity scenes, brought from various places around the world. Not really my thing... though there were some interesting ones, and it was worth looking to see how the conventions had been kept or discarded. When I was small I always wondered why they depicted two white kings and one black - which is to say that I always wondered where the black king came from. At some point I saw an older bible with a map of the holy lands in it, and it confused me because I didn't think of any of those stories of Bethlehem and mangers and the like as having any kind of geographical setting - at least none that we'd be able to locate today. The maps weren't connected to anything recognizable, of course, so it still didn't help to situate it for me in any way that would have made a black king make sense. Adults forget to explain such things - and in this case I mean school teachers, who (unlikely though it seems now - surely they don't do this any more?) were the ones who taught us bible stories and made us sing that bloody awful wailing Away in a Manger (I was just thinking about this last week, as we sang it at the Denver service. It wasn't so bad as I remembered, but it is inextricably tied to my memories of having to sing it when I was in early primary school, and to the fact that no-one explained what "till morning is nigh" meant. And I also realised that my feeling about it is similar to how I feel about performing poodles. That's what you get if you make small children sing cute songs about small children).

Earlier in the day I did my laundry in a place in the basement of an apartment building down the road, with a coffee shop attached to it. The girl behind the counter turned out to have studied Japanese literature at McGill, so we had a lot to talk about.

Hares and hats

This morning I located a post office counter (hurray! the internet is a wonderful thing, and works much better than people) inside a drugstore in one of those underground places, and was able to buy stamps even though it's Sunday.

Following that success I went to the museum (Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal). I started with a very charming exhibition of Christmas trees decorated by various community organizations - a slightly darkened hall with them all lined up in rows, all with little white lights on them, so that as you walk in through the atrium (the Hall of Mirrors) you glimpse hundreds of little lights through the glass-panelled doors. Then I went upstairs to the modern Canadian art. Should you find yourself passing by, I recommend that you take a look at Philip Surrey's Night (1942) amongst the paintings there, and also at the Inuit art room which has some fantastic carvings. Then I saw everything else, of which there is a lot, and it's good stuff. Most importantly, I revisited the Barry Flanagan statue in the entrance hall, a very smooth and classical-looking horse with an altogether more wild and animated cougar sitting side-saddle atop it.

Goodness. Look at that. It seems that there is one in the Setagaya Art Museum. I used to live near there, but I don't remember seeing it. Not that I'd heard of Barry Flanagan at the time - in fact, it was the following year that I was so struck by the Nijinsky Hare in the National Museum of Wales. It was on display in the café, and you could drink your coffee while looking at it, which I did at every opportunity I could find. There's a Small Nijinski Hare in the Montreal museum too.


By the time I'd finished in the museum it had started to rain outside, gently as I walked back past my lodgings, and then in buckets once I was further away. As I was walking up Rue Saint-Denis past all of the interesting little shops that line it I thought - wouldn't it be good if one of these upcoming shops turned out to be a hat shop? And lo! There was a hat shop. Now, that would never happen in Denver. There aren't streets full of interesting little shops, for one thing, and there aren't any hat shops (which always seems strange to me - as well as being cold in winter, it's sunny all year round, we're right up there in the sky next to the sun and we all know about the increase in the incidence of skin cancer. So why is it so difficult to buy a decent hat?). I am now the proud owner of two new hats, and can cast off the black fleece one I hate so much but have been wearing for the past couple of years. Even a new hat wasn't enough to keep off the rain, though, and by the time it was running past my ears and soaking in through my knees and through my toes, I decided it was time to call it a day. I bought some bread and cheese and olives and wine and came back to my room.

Now, this B&B is pretty nice, but it has two drawbacks so far. First, the wall between my room and that of the man across the hall is not so thick, and every night he has his television turned up loud until late (I'm cursed! Who did this to me? Who decreed that I should never have another peaceful night until... until what? Tell me, and I'll willingly do what is required. Fetching water from the well at the end of the world? Lining a stable with feathers each from a different bird? Getting the sword of the light from the Giant of the North?); and secondly, though I know we're allowed to put food on the guest-shelf in the fridge (and to cook too, if we're clean and careful), it turns out that the fridge has a big combination lock on it. So we can only access it during office hours, then? What good is that? What good is it to my Roquefort, currently suppurating in my warm bedroom?

Wonders and disenchantments

This morning I went out and headed straight back up the hill, hired skates, and skated round and round for an hour and a half. It was fun!

In the afternoon I went down to Old Montreal to hear a choir singing in the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours.


They were evidently amateur but quite good. They did a mixture of Christmas music, some overly familiar, some less so. Their soloist wore a sleeveless/strapless dress, which seems an odd choice in a cold church in Montreal in the middle of winter. The chapel had model ships hanging from the ceiling, some in an older style each holding a pair of green votive-style lights, but there was also a modern tanker towards the front.

The day before I left Denver I went to a Service of Nine Lessons and Carols in St. John's Episcopal Cathedral. My car is always parked outside there, so for once I thought I would go inside. It's turning out to be a good Christmas for choral music.


I didn't hang around in Old Montreal after the performance finished. It's a very pretty area down by the waterfront, with a lot of old buildings, but it's like the Royal Mile: full of tourists and tourist-oriented shops and restaurants, and little sign of any real life. Instead I came back up into town, and since I had managed to miss lunch along the way I decided to go and eat early at an Italian restaurant I'd been told about near my lodgings. This is where my evening started to go wrong. No! It started to go wrong much earlier in the day when I went off on a doomed quest for stamps. Anyway, the restaurant was closed for the holiday, so I had to trek back in the other direction to go to Le Commensal, Montreal's big and well-known self-service vegetarian restaurant. They have a variety of salads and hot dishes, and you pay by weight. Of course, if you haven't eaten since breakfast, you are attracted by only the heaviest food. I also got a nice bottle of white beer, Cheval Blanc, most of which I managed to spill across the table.

Afterwards I thought I'd go underground again and have a look around the shops. I wandered in circles for a long time, unable to find any of those numerous entrances and beginning to think I'd dreamed the whole thing. Finally I found a way in, only to discover that it had been abandoned. It seems that by 7 p.m. on a Saturday the whole place is dead, all the shops are closed, and many of the passages are shut off. This definitely isn't Osaka.

So I wandered along to Maison Ogilvie, a department store known for its Christmas display window. Well, I remember how exciting Christmas windows were when I was a child - enormous shining wonderlands. This was just a display window with a bunch of toys made to move unconvincingly in a snowy scene with some buildings. Were the ones of my childhood just like that too? Is it just that I'm much bigger now?

Entrances to the Underworld

Happy wedding day, R & H.

Tonight I finally stumbled across one of the secret entrances to the underground city, only to find that everyone else was down there already. I knew it was there, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the extent of it or the spaciousness. I thought it was just a network of underground passages, some with a few shops – but it’s much bigger than I expected, lots and lots of shops, and it keeps opening out onto multi-level centres with food courts and all sorts of things. Most of the population of Montreal seemed to be milling around down there, which makes a lot of sense since the pavements above ground are slushy and slippery, and it’s very cold. I always surfaced as quickly as possible from the underground shopping streets in Osaka, which always seemed to me the vision of a post-apocalyptic dystopia, but here for the first time I see the point.


The entrances were a secret only from me, evidently – they’re obvious now that the veil has been pulled away from my eyes. All those signs that I thought were pointing to metro stations (RES plus a metro sign, as I thought) turn out actually to be RÉSO, which a quick trip to Wikipedia tells me is for réseau, “network.” In the sign the final O has a downward pointing arrow inside it, which is why I’d never worked out that it was a letter at all – not that it would have helped me if I’d realized, since that is indeed the symbol for the metro incorporated into the design, so it is kind of signposting the metro as well.

I was on the way back from the Salon des métiers d’art du Québec, a big arts and crafts fair in an exhibition hall at the Place Bonaventure. Lots of nice things, but I wasn’t tempted to buy anything (or at least, not anything that cost less than a few hundred dollars – there was a stall with grotesque and fantastic creatures, including an enormous rod puppet that would have looked at home in The Dark Crystal). I need a warmer hat. There were lots of those, but they made me think that the quickest way to get just what I want may be to make my own. I need some Christmas presents and omiyage, but I’m becoming more reluctant every year to give people things that don’t do anything, unless they really have something special about them.

Earlier in the day I went to the tourist information office to find out what’s on in the next few days, and then I hiked my way up the Parc du Mont-Royal intending to look out at the view from the Chateau (which isn’t a real chateau, but a kind of pavilion with a terrace in front of it). In fact I missed the road and went around a long (and very snowy) way, and got to the Lac des Castors instead, which at the moment is a small skating rink.


I was immediately struck by an overwhelming desire to skate, but thought I’d better go back to the B&B and get another pair of socks and some warmer clothing first, as well as getting rid of my camera and other unnecessary accoutrements. I had lunch in the pavilion there, and then came back here; but by the time I’d walked back I’d had plenty of opportunity to let common sense get the better of me (I hate that common sense!). Apart from wondering whether it was a good idea to risk breaking any part of myself right at the beginning of my visit, I didn’t bother getting travel insurance before I came here. Adding to that the consideration that I’m not a competent skater at the best of times, and that today I was tired and have just had my inner spirit-level shaken around for several days, I thought I’d probably better do something else instead. At the same time, I knew I was going to be faintly dissatisfied with anything else I did, so I had a long inner struggle which outwardly pulled me back as far as the skating lake, but which was resolved once I saw that the numbers of people had substantially increased and that several of them were teenagers speeding around and messing about. So instead I walked to the Chateau and looked out over snowy Montreal. I don’t have a photo of it, of course, because I’d left my camera here. When I got back, I bought some visitor’s medical insurance, partly so that I can skate tomorrow if I want to, but also because all of these slippery sloping roads and pavements seem fraught with possibilities for nasty accidents just now.

After the craft fair, I went for dinner in the Lola Rosa, a vegetarian café on Milton, somewhere between Rue University and Avenue du Parc. It’s just down from my B&B, and I tried to go there last night but they were closing. They told me yesterday that they’d be closed for two weeks from Saturday, so today was the only chance to try it. It’s a shame, because it was good. I had bourek - a spanakopitta thing with spinach and pine nuts in it - which came in two triangles with a big salad between them. The smell of spices rising from it when it arrived was lovely.

Contrary to yesterday's promise of photos soon, it turns out that I won't be adding any until I get back to Denver. I forgot to bring the USB cable with me.

MONTREAL!

I am there.

The train arrived two hours late, blame for which can be only partially apportioned to Amtrak, since the hour or more at the Canadian customs point played a fairly significant part. There were only two of us left in the back two carriages of the train, so we couldn't understand why it took so long (though they certainly questioned me thoroughly, as if they had a chronic problem with British people trying to sneak over the border from the United States) - but apparently there were around one hundred people in the carriages forward from the snackbar (why, again, why? Why would they arrange it so that all of those people were crushed in together, while my carriage-companion (who had got on at Albany) and I were rattling around?).

So, I didn't get in to Montreal until 9 p.m., and then by the time I'd pulled my suitcase up the snowy streets (sledge runners would be more useful than wheels), found my bed and breakfast - the University Bed and Breakfast, on Rue Prince-Arthur Ouest - and got out to look for some dinner it was near ten. I had to eat in a sports-bar style burger/pizza pub. The striking thing is, though, that a pizza in such a place here tastes pretty good - all that goats cheese and olives - in a way it never would in Colorado.

Tomorrow I think I need to hike up and around Mount Royal, after all of these days of sitting on trains.

Below is the account of how I got here, written along the way. I'll add a photo or two later, when I have the energy.

Tuesday 18th December 9 am (CT) (That’s Central Time, for you non-Americans. I live in MT, Mountain Time)

I just got out of the train at Omaha and walked along the platform – so now I can add Nebraska to the states I’ve visited. From all I’ve heard (and seen from the train), a station platform is about as far as you need to go.

(Omaha, Nebraska.... I think)

I got on the train at 9:30 or so last night – it was about an hour late. I didn’t think anyone traveled by train here, but it seems that at this season they do. When I arrived in Union Station I was surprised to find it full of people with suitcases. I overheard one of the Amtrak staff telling people that as of today all of the trains are sold out. For our train, though, it seems that most of us on our own can have two seats to ourselves.

I’m in Reserved Coach, which in spite of the name doesn’t mean that you get assigned to a particular seat. At Union Station we had to line up for a desk in the middle of the hall where we traded in our tickets for boarding passes, which specify carriage number only. Then you hang around and wait to be allowed out to the platform to board, when you take any seat you can get.

The train, the California Zephyr, is one of those strange silver things you see in films. It looks like a cross between a trailer and a burger-stand from the outside, and as you come into it looks like a public toilet – one of those ones at the edges of carparks, grubby and dank smelling with functional metal appliances. It didn’t help that there didn’t seem to be any lights on. It was so dark that I missed the downstairs luggage rack and hefted my suitcase up the narrow little stairs, which were like those you get on a double-decker bus. I got a good seat by the window, though, and behind a wall so that no-one could recline their chair back onto my knees (in fact, though, there’s a lot more space than on a plane or on the standard British train – I can stretch my legs right out to a footrest in front). In the light I can now say that the décor isn’t beautiful – a kind of brown twill on the walls and the low-hanging luggage racks, blue chairs, carpet and curtains, all looking a little worn. I’m grateful that there are any trains left at all, though, so I’m not complaining.

(California Zephyr)

It wasn’t the most comfy night, but still better than plane travel. I have with me one of those neck pillows (more useful for lower back than neck, if you ask me), and a big scarf I use as a shawl when cold at work, and which turned last night into my new best friend wrapped around my shoulders, head and face both for warmth, a feeling of enclosure, and to replace the pervasive stale foot smell in my half of this carriage with its reassuring scorched cake-crust and burnt coffee smell (I sat there and thought: in the Christian tradition clothing is perceived from the outside as a covering-up, something you put on to hide your nakedness and shame – but you can think of it from the inside too, from where it can seem as much a comforting protection from the world as the walls of your house. Tortoises aren’t the only ones who carry their homes around with them). For anyone thinking of doing this kind of trip I’d also suggest that when you look at the fleece blanket on your bed and wonder if you should take it with you, the answer is that you should. In the middle of the night it was freezing, and I had to sleep under my coat.

I woke up this morning as we were pulling out of Lincoln, Nebraska. I went along to the snack bar and got coffee – which was hot and coffee-coloured, but completely without flavour – and sat in the observation lounge. Every train should have one of those – and plane too, for that matter – a carriage with big windows all along, and seats facing outwards. I got to watch the sun rise over Nebraska – a pretty white wasteland which looks nice enough if you know you’re never going to have to live there.

(Sunrise over Nebraska)

I just saw something that looked very like a group of three wild turkeys sitting amongst some trees. At least, they were very large dark birds, and I have no idea what else they could have been. The snowy countryside, growing more hilly now as we come nearer (or into?) Iowa, is nice – but the most beautiful thing so far has been the ice on the rivers and ponds, not usually a solid expanse but instead formed into numerous little raised-edge islands to look like frozen lily-pads.

(I was wrong about the hills – must have been a quirk of topography. Thank goodness for the snow, because I don’t think expanses of brown stubble would be quite so pleasant.)

11 a.m. Passing through Creston, Iowa

I presume that it was the ice storm I heard about last week that so beautifully decorated all of these trees with this fine glasswork now illuminated by the sun.

We passed a graveyard a while back that was just like all of the fields surrounding it but with a fine crop of stone tablets. I didn’t see any town, or even any building, nearby.

In the Rockies, every town seems to have a letter on a hillside standing for their college. In Iowa, you get water towers with the town name on them instead.

(Crossing the Mississippi into Illinois)

Wednesday 19th December, 8:30 p.m. (ET) Econolodge, Schenectady

The Econolodge has all the charm its name suggests – but it will be good to sleep in a horizontal position after these last two nights, and the hot shower earlier was long anticipated. It’s nice that the room isn’t moving, too, though it appears as if I still am.

Outside it is snowing. When I woke up this morning, somewhere on the edge of Indiana or coming into Pennsylvania, I found that the bright sunshine had been replaced by gloomy grey cloud. Since I complain about the sunshine continually, it’s a matter of pride that I say that this weather suits me better. In truth, though, it’s a bit of a shock to the system once you’ve been living in Colorado for a while.

From a sampling of two Amtrak journeys so far, I’d say that though there is a nominal schedule, the actuality is that the trains wander across the country and arrive sometime. At one point yesterday we were running three hours late, though I think that by the time we arrived in Chicago we’d caught up half an hour or so. Although they announced an estimated arrival time when we left Denver, they never mentioned the fact that we were late again until around 50 minutes before we arrived in Chicago. The announcements they do make are often quite strange and cryptic – like the one telling us that there would be an abbreviated lunch service “because of our arrival into Chicago” (this six or seven hours before that arrival). The train crept unbelievably slowly for most of the journey.

In Chicago I had dinner with friends, and then back to the station to get on the Lakeshore Limited. A different system for boarding was in place at this Union Station, mostly consisting of an officious woman getting annoyed at us when we didn’t sit down in the waiting room in the right place when told to do so, or if we dared to ask questions. Finally we were allowed on to the train – beginning with people travelling to New York and Syracuse (why?), then the rest of us, pointed on to carriages depending on where we said we were going. Most of the seats in the carriage I was sent into were labeled with little hand-written notes to tell us we weren’t allowed to sit there, or to say that they were for parties of two. Finally the man next to me suggested that we made a party of two, and we sat down. He was a good travelling companion, in fact – we talked for a couple of hours yesterday night, and then for much of today. He was interested in music, food, puppets, making things generally, sustainable living, and in talking about religion, politics, and all sorts of things. He was a Unitarian Universalist, and if they’re all like him I’d be happy to meet more. He was heading over from Iowa to meet his son and drive back for Christmas.

The Lakeshore Limited made me remember the California Zephyr almost with affection. It was a single level train, and the décor was distinctly less brown, but it was in poor repair and the restrooms were just HORRIBLE, if they were working at all. No observation lounge, either. To make me feel at home, though, the announcements were equally cryptic.

Sitting ahead of us was a group of three, an old couple (presumably) and a middle aged woman who seemed to be the daughter of the older woman, but perhaps not of the man. They were very interesting. I’d say New Yorkers by their accents and way of speaking, but what would I know? The two women in particular seemed only ever to complain about things and ask the others why it was so (why is it so cold? why couldn’t we get out and smoke at the last stop? why aren’t we moving?), and all three seemed to communicate almost entirely by carping and caviling at each other: “Turn that light off, won’t you? - You can reach it, can’t you? - I can’t even see it.” “Why don’t you lie down on the two seats? - How can I lie down, there isn’t room to lie down. – Why don’t you like down like I’m doing. - What the hell do you think I’m doing?” “You have the pills. – I don’t have the pills, you didn’t give me them. – I gave you the pills.” The old woman went off to the toilets, and the man and younger woman talked across the aisle, but most of it was her telling him every two minutes to look back and see where her mother was, and see if she was all right. I kept wanting to tell her to look herself (she was the one who demanded that the light be turned off, too…) and leave him be for a few minutes. There was also a group of Mennonites on the train, with their unlikely period costumes and haircuts. Negotiating the train toilets in the women’s costume would be quite a task.

Today we were just under two hours late by the time we got to Schenectady, not helped along by two lengthy delays for checks by Border Patrol. Were we crossing a border? No. But unexpectedly at Erie, Pennsylvania, and then again at Syracuse (or possibly Buffalo), New York, Border Patrol policemen came down through the carriages asking everyone “Are you a citizen?” and if we answered in the negative, demanding our I.D. We were told later that it was because we were within a hundred miles of the border. But there was never any information from Amtrak that such a thing might happen. In Chicago, at least, we’d had to show our I.D. before we got on the train anyway. Today both times there was someone in our carriage who ran into trouble – the first time an Asian man who didn’t seem to understand what they wanted, and was taken away and I don’t think ever came back, and the second time a black woman whose name they took but who was left where she was after some lengthy and condescending questioning. The whole thing was unpleasant and threatening – especially because they weren’t checking everyone’s I.D., and seemed to be expecting everyone white to say yes, and accepting it. The first time they came by I said I wasn’t a citizen, and they took a cursory look at my passport. The second time the man next to me said “Yes, I am,” and they didn’t hesitate for long enough for me to say that I wasn’t.

As for Schenectady – it doesn’t seem as bad as I was led to expect. Or perhaps it is just that, like Doncaster, it looked much better once I got some dinner inside me. I went back past the station to the old area, The Stockade, which was settled by the Dutch originally in 16-something and has a lot of nice buildings still. I found a café called The Moon and River, which I’d read about online somewhere – initially I’d found it recommended by some visitors as a better choice than the well-known vegetarian option. I actually walked past it twice because there was no-one inside except the owner who looked as if he was asleep on a chair at the back, and it seemed like a bad sign. However, the only other two places in the immediate area were a bar that sold very meaty sounding sandwiches, or a highly expensive restaurant – so I did go in, and it was the right thing to do. The owner was friendly, the place was nicely decorated, the food was tasty, and a couple of evident regulars wandered in a little later. And, contrary to the information I got online, it will open again at 9 tomorrow morning, so I will be able to go back for a good cup of coffee and something to eat before my last leg to Montreal. I had breakfast (Mexican eggs) tonight for dinner, so I said I would call in for dinner at breakfast time.

Thursday 20th December, 4 p.m.

I’m somewhere between Westport and Plattsburgh, NY. The train is running about an hour and a half late, but it is warm and comfortable and modern and very sparsely populated (so much so that I’ve just been advised to move up a carriage at the next stop since everyone left in this one is getting off at Plattsburgh), and outside is beautiful, and I’m quite content.

(Adirondack)

I’ve seen plenty of wild turkeys – and we’ve just now passed two perched in a tree. There have been a couple of deer, lots of raptors (bald eagles and others), We’ve been travelling up the side of Lake Champlain for some time now. The river we followed earlier and then the first parts of the lake were frozen across, though now it looks like the sea, and there are trees and hills and snow and dramatic rocky outcrops. And I do indeed like this grey weather better. It has atmosphere. It’s what winter looks like in my ideal image, a little magical, inviting and forbidding at once, something a little beyond control.

Unseasonal temperatures

It's two o'clock in the morning. All summer and fall as I was woken by my neighbours in the middle of the night I would console myself with the thought that once we got to winter everyone would go indoors and shut their windows and it would all be much quieter. It is, largely - at least no-one hangs out talking loudly in the courtyard any more - but there are new and unimagined problems instead.

Somewhere between two and four each night my radiators - even the ones I have shut off, which is now pretty much all of them except for the one in my tiny bathroom that is stuck very firmly at full blast - begin to rattle and bubble more hysterically as if there is a bad witch hidden somewhere in the building who starts to feed her fattened children into the furnace at around that time. I wake up to find that the heat in the place has intensified to the point that even though I'm sleeping with my windows open I have to get up and throw them wide just to be able to breathe again. I go round and feel each of my radiators to see if I've somehow mistakenly turned them back on without noticing, and can then only conclude that the heat is seeping in through the floorboards and walls as the witch cackles down below over her plan to suffocate us all in our sleep.

I'm looking forward to leaving on Monday for a while.

Margot at the Wedding

It's been snowing lightly but persistently all day, so that we now have quite a covering outside. It's just about the coldest it's been so far this season, too, so naturally the radiators in the building (which on warmer days keep the place so hot I can hardly breathe) have all switched themselves off. Those of us who have hanten get to carry their own toasty little climate around with them, though.

Today I finally made it out to the cinema. I went to the Esquire to see Margot at the Wedding, directed by Noah Baumbach (who did The Squid and the Whale). Before I went I looked on Rotten Tomatoes to see what the critics thought, and since they seemed divided down the middle I thought it might not be bad. I liked it. As with The Squid and the Whale it didn't leave me stunned - but it was worth a Saturday afternoon.

The film begins with Margot and her pre-pubescent son going back to the family home, now owned by her sister, for the sister's wedding. A fight has stopped them talking for some time past, and when they talk now it's a continual tightrope-walk between camaraderie and indirect attack. The sister is marrying an unemployed and unsuccessful musician, and among other things Margot sets out to undermine the union (he's "not good enough"), while it becomes apparent that she herself is in the middle of leaving her husband, and is having an affair with a writer and collaborator who lives near the sister. Meanwhile a battle is developing with the more overtly dysfunctional redneck neighbours across the fence.

More than one of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes remarked that all of the characters in this film were unlikeable, but it isn't entirely true. All of them are flawed, certainly, but of the central characters only Margot is almost entirely without a sympathetic side - and yet her unpleasantness to everyone around her seems so compulsive and self-destructive that to me she came across as someone perhaps more in need of sympathy than anyone else in the film.

It's a somewhat rambling film that doesn't tie much up at the end. About three quarters of the way through I was suddenly bored, unable to see that there was anywhere else worth going with it - it didn't last, though, and I liked the inconclusive ending very much, along with an earlier coda when the son sees the mother and son of the dysfunctional neighbours on the same ferry, evidently leaving home, the mother physically comforting that son who has earlier been encountered only as violent aggressor.

From the above account it might not sound it, but it's also very funny.

Culture shock.

I've been in this country for three years and four months now, but I think I'm feeling more out of place and out of step with those around me now than at any time since I arrived. There are various causes, though I admit that their effects on me might be intensified by us being out of term time, so that I'm no longer surrounded daily by a department-full of fellow foreigners.

Let me tell you about my problems...

First, transport and city design (or lack of it).

Yesterday and on Sunday I took my car and drove up to the northern parts of Denver for a couple of things I needed in shops in that area, and for an appointment I had. I'm lucky enough to live in the middle of the city so that I can walk to many places, and to be able to take the Light Rail to work; but you only have to drive a little north to have it rammed home that this is indeed land of the car, and that it's a very ugly land: stretches of bleak highway, streets and streets of scattered businesses with no sense of spatial community, the horrible clone housing developments of Thornton.

On the way home on Sunday I came down Washington Street, a road which in the middle of town is a pleasant residential street, but which in the north turns out to be a godforsaken wasteland scattered with a number of seedy-looking bars that you could only get to by car. And there is another of my ongoing cultural difficulties: my discomfort with the general tolerance of drinking and driving here. You see a few signs along the roads urging you not to do it, and I know that the police do stop people and charge them now and then - but it is still socially acceptable in a way I don't think it is in Britain any longer. As a pedestrian I have enough trouble not getting run over by people talking on mobile phones as they drive, without having to worry about how much they've drunk as well. Actually, I did almost get hit by a car last week, but that was due (as often) to the rule which allows drivers to turn on a red light, something they usually do while craning their necks around to look at the oncoming traffic instead of at the road in front of them - but that is a rant for another day, if I live long enough to write it.

The waste of petrol in this driving culture is something I have difficulties with too, but I'm more often struck by the unquestioning waste of other resources. It's December now, and many people have their houses decorated on the outside and lit up like... well, like Christmas trees, except on an entirely different scale. It doesn't seem to concern anyone. The waste of electricity is rivalled only by the waste of water for the rest of the year. Here we are in a semi-arid climate, and all around are stretches of green lawn. To be fair, there are rules about water waste, but these are to prevent people using excess water while still keeping their lawns green - no one seems to think that having green lawns in such a climate might in itself be wasteful. The rules say that you shouldn't have water seeping over the sidewalk, too, but all summer you have to paddle through muddy puddles and dodge sprinklers if you're on foot. I might have mentioned before that they have sprinklers in the courtyard of my apartment block which go off morning and evening - for what reason I know not, since they are only watering woodchips and a strand or two of ivy.

Well, I could go on to the news, and to my disgust at the religious side of politics here coming out so clearly in the race for the presidential candidacy (see Justin Webb's BBC blog), my alarm at George Bush apparently trying to edge us towards WWIII (does that photo look to anyone else startlingly like a throw back to the Cold War, by the way?), or my accustomed feelings of anger at the news of yet another suicidal maniac who has been imbued with so little empathy in this self-righteously "Christian" nation that he thinks it is reasonable to take a group of random strangers with him when he goes (this one claiming that he will now be famous - is this the reason for Bush's policies too, I sometimes wonder?). But I won't. I'll go instead into a more personal experience in the last week which has left me feeling more alien than usual.

I went out on three dates (and dating - there's a weird American experience in itself) with someone I got on well with, in spite of major differences in our backgrounds. The third time we went out earlier this week I asked him about his faith, since I knew he called himself a Christian. He said he used to be a regular church goer, now wasn't, but was "spiritual" - everyone here calls themselves "spiritual," which always brings to my mind a mixture of slave songs and ouija boards, though I don't think that's what they mean by it. All of this is OK by me, though he seemed less comfortable with my concept of life after death as getting eaten by worms. In fact, though, I'd asked only because I needed to know that I wasn't dealing with someone who subscribed to Creationism or Intelligent Design. And it turned out that I was. Not wholehearted Creationism, but the idea that everything was too complex to have happened on its own, and that there had to have been "a helping hand." I asked him if that meant that he didn't believe we'd evolved from single cell organisms, and he said that he didn't. Somewhere along the way I mentioned the small matter of evidence, and he remarked that there was evidence for the other view too - at which point I should probably have asked calmly what evidence there was, but I fear that I instead ranted for a little while about the drawbacks of faith-based "science" which looks for evidence only to try to back up what it want to be true. We parted soon after.

I have told three friends about this - two non-Americans who reacted with a mixture of horror and sympathy, and one American who, though sympathetic, told me that it was a question that should be avoided in this country. But while I can and do avoid such questions with students, colleagues, and even with many of my friends, is it really a good idea to avoid such a question with someone you're dating? Isn't it better to find out sooner rather than later that your worldviews are incompatible? For me this isn't some side issue - it's a fundamental question about how we relate to the world and how we fit into it. In my case not very well, evidently, if the world is Colorado. To make me feel even more out of place here, he told me later in an email that he'd never met anyone before who didn't believe in a "higher intelligence." Are we so thin on the ground, or is everyone else just avoiding such questions?

I've been comforting myself a lot over the last couple of days by avidly reading the Pharyngula blog and various other articles on evolution, atheism, and so on, in part just to reassure myself that there are other ways of thought in this country, even if they are under constant attack. I particularly liked this article on the anthropocentric conceit - precisely my problem with Christianity and its foundations, from the moment near the beginning of Genesis when God gives man "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" (and then there's chapter 4 - God respecting Abel's offering of a lamb, and not Cain's one of "the fruit of the ground." As a vegetarian, I find that especially hard to stomach). It explains why Christians are particularly resistant to any science which threatens that sense of God-given superiority.

It's turned me back to thinking about my own work too, both research and teaching. I wonder sometimes as I read my student papers on literature if it is doing any good to any of us, but then I look at these debates over what should be taught in schools and universities, and I realise that just by making students support their statements with evidence from the texts I'm moving them just a nudge in the right direction. As for research, whatever small corner we are working in it is still a blow for inquiry and evidence over faith and fabrication.

And if I stress the importance of evidence here and now, it is not without an eye to the cavalier treatment of it by the current American president.