I've been back at work for two days after my fantastic vacation in BC and Québec. I posted all my photos in my album for you to see. Mostly I just relaxed and did a lot of reading in Kelowna, which was great. I got all caught up in my Walrus issues and read a few books. I loved "My Life with Tolstoy" in the Walrus summer reading issue. It really did make me want to read War and Peace. I love reading while on vacation. The author of this piece (David Gilmour) puts it perfectly:
There's a way you read when you travel; it is, in itself, a kind of transport, the purity with which you pay attention. You never read like that at home.
The first thing I picked up was Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, mostly because I saw Evan Solomon's review of it on Hot Type and it sounded like a good vacation novel. There's nothing like a mojito in the sun to wash down a bit of light dystopian fare, right? It was entertaining and it was definitely a light read. Don't expect it to be much more than that. I didn't. Oink! The pigoons are loose! I'm working on Guy Vanderhague's The Last Crossing now, but I didn't finish it before I got home so it might have to sit for a while.
Montréal was fantastic. I freaking love that city. It has all the best of big Canadian cities (mixing of many different cultures, languages, great variety of food) but the francophone influence mixed in with all that makes it such a unique, diverse city. Of course, pretty much everyone speaks at least two languages (french and english), and in the immigrant communities most people are multilingual. It's a humbling environment for us unilinguals. R and I talked about how pathetic it is that as a bilingual (and multicultural) country, bilingualism is virtually non-existant outside of Québec, Ottawa, and New Brunswick. I think I'm going to address this later in one of my epic blog essays.
Montrealers also have a much more laid back attitude than a lot of big city folk in North America. People eat late and linger over dinner and coffee for hours. I love it. There are no losers answering their cell phones to close a deal at the table. I had some excellent meals there; the most memorable was a tuna steak wrapped with a thin layer of smoked lamb and seared. The tuna was really more for texture than anything because the smoked lamb drowned out the fish flavour. It was super delicious though. It was served on a traditional bed of veggies and potatoes and topped with a nice sweet red wine reduction.
Anyway, I do think Montréal is the greatest Canadian city and I really really hope to live there some time.
