This is a very lengthy article, because I haven’t written for such a long time. You can read from beginning to end, or else jump straight to the sections on Vancouver, my experience on the trains, Edmonton, Winnipeg, the trip north to Churchill, Niagara Falls, Toronto, or Halifax.

Note that my ‘nice, but dull’ label should only really be applied to the English-speaking places west of the Atlantic Provinces and south of the three Territories. If you had the opportunity to spend an extended period of time—at least a couple of months across seasons—in ‘the North’ (as the three Territories which comprise more than half of Canada’s land-mass are known), I’m sure you would have a fascinating, but challenging, experience. I also found the one place I visited in Atlantic Canada, Halifax, to be very charming, and I’m a little sorry that I spent so long in Vancouver and Toronto rather than going to other places in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Also, my first experience of French Canada was in St-Boniface, which has been incorporated into the city of Winnipeg. I found the whole idea of a small French-speaking community surrounded by the défi insurmontable of Anglophones fascinating,¹ and was happy to spend the morning there poking around the cathedral and the museum. I will be writing about my time in Quebec at a future date (I hope it’s the not-too-distant future), but will cover St-Boniface here.

Vancouver

When I say Vancouver, what do you think of? I’ve been there and I can’t come up with anything more than ‘lots of steel and glass, pretty waterfront, steam-powered clock’. There really is nothing iconic about Vancouver—nothing immediately recognizable on the skyline (except, perhaps, the concrete Harbour Centre, but even then you’d probably have to have been there in order to know it).

My time in Vancouver was affected first by my pulling my ankle again on my first evening there, which slowed me down a bit on the next few days, and by quite a lot of rain. In any case, though, I don’t regret the two afternoons I spent at the cinema because of the rain:² it’s not like I got antsy as I felt that I was missing out on something better or more productive I could be doing in the city.

I went to the Art Gallery, of course, which was packed when I went: it was the Labour Day public holiday, and the temporary exhibition of Dutch masters was about to close. The Dutch masters were nice enough, but when you’re jostling six deep it can be difficult to look at the paintings rather than at the other people. In the permanent collection, though, I enjoyed the structure surrounded by the main staircase, which purported to show typical living rooms for each decade from 1950 the present day on each level. Some you could only look at as you climbed the stairs, while you could go into others. I also spent a long time staring at some photographs printed at enormous sizes: about 12’ x 8’. The one which sticks in my mind is that of the departures board in Frankfurt airport: everything is very clear and sharp, you can read every letter on the click-clack board, and see everyone gathered below, staring up, struggling with luggage, queuing to check in. If you were shown the same photo printed at 6” x 4”, you’d probably look at it briefly before moving on: it’s only when you see it at this size that it gets really interesting. This got me thinking about some of my own photos… If any of you sees an enormous flat parcel coming up your path before Christmas, well, I hope you’ve got enough wall-space.

I also spent an amusing couple of hours at the Police Heritage Museum, which is probably made more interesting because it is slightly run-down. The most striking exhibit is of course the disused autopsy suite (the building is the former police mortuary), where Errol was dissected after dying pretty suddenly. I also enjoyed playing with the identikit software, making some of the most memorable and gruesome criminal suspects I could imagine.

I found Vancouver’s Chinatown to be remarkably sedate, given that there is such a large Chinese community in the city. The most prominent sights are the Dr Sun Yat-Sen Park, which is open to all, and the adjoining Dr Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, for which you must pay to get in: it was here that Sun Yat-Sen really lived on the occasions he was in Vancouver. These are two very pretty places, but visiting them certainly doesn’t take much time.

On my final full day in Vancouver, I went to Stanley Park, which is a large forested area (bigger than Central Park in New York), surrounded by water on three sides. I ended up walking all the way around the edge of the park, and looking at my GPS log that night I realized that I had walked 10 miles during the day. My ankle certainly didn’t thank me.

Dazed on the Trains

It feels like about half my time in Canada was spent on trains. In fact I spent a total of six nights and four days on trains as I travelled on The Canadian from West to East (breaking the journey from Vancouver to Toronto at Edmonton and Winnipeg), and travelling north through Manitoba to Churchill. I also took a few much shorter day-trips by train (Toronto to Niagara Falls and return; Quebec to Montreal; and Montreal to Toronto, returning by plane the same day), but in reality a pretty small proportion of my time in Canada was on trains.

Still, I got pretty used to sleeping on trains. Some nights were much rockier than others, particularly the two nights for the trip north. In spite of the fact that I was properly asleep, when I woke up in the mornings I generally felt absolutely exhausted. I began to wonder if all the long-distance trains are scheduled to leave late in the evening so that people will get on the train, go to sleep (badly), and spend the rest of the long journeys in a daze; docile and dazed passengers are less of a burden for the staff to deal with. I know, I’m a cynic.

More about single sleeper-cabins on Canadian trains than you could possibly want to know

My abundance of night-trains meant that I was able to road-test (or rather, rail-test) each of the three designs of single sleeper cabins that are operated by Via Rail.³ First was the one which you have to step up in to. The bed swings down from the rear wall of the cabin to cover the lavatory; the sink unit folds down and drains into the wall when you fold it back up; there is a small rack for luggage on the front wall. This was my least favourite cabin-design: the step up was far too high, when the bed was down it was very difficult to stand up, and the cabin stank of urine (this last was of course not an inherent design flaw, but it further marred my experience of the cabin).

Second is the cabin with no step and a fold-down bed which tapers off at an angle at the foot end. This curious shape is to accommodate for the basin which stands in the corner of the cabin, and thus is always accessible. There is a luggage-rack of the same size as the first cabin, this time on the back wall (above the seat/head of the bed). This was probably my favourite cabin-design, because with the shape of the bed you can stand up to dress even with the bed folded down. The narrow foot of the bed didn’t bother me: I don’t flail my legs about in my sleep and you’re well enough tucked-in that you don’t necessarily realize that your calves and feet only have about half as much space as the rest of your body. And, for Heaven’s sake, you’re on a train; what do you expect? I had this cabin-design for the one night between Edmonton and Winnipeg, and the two nights between Winnipeg and Toronto.

Third was the cabin which I had for two nights for the trip north from The Pas to Churchill. In this cabin the bed slides out from a space in the front wall, travelling over the lavatory and seat-cushion to click in to position when it reaches the seat-back. The basin, like in the first cabin, folds down and drains when you fold it back up. There is a luggage rack on the front wall, but the really good thing about this design is that you have a space under the bed when it’s slid away to put bags and other belongings. The only downside is that there is not as much room to stand when the bed is out, although it’s fairly trivial to slide the bed back a little way and stand in the space thus made available.

The reason for the variety of cabin designs is that they all fit together within the train carriages: when you put away the bed of the third cabin-type, you slide it under the floor of the first (step-up) cabin-type which is next door. However, I am unsure why you need to have these two interlocking cabin designs when the second (fold-down tapered-foot bed) is entirely self-contained, and at corridor level. Perhaps there is machinery under the floor of the step-up cabins by the side of where the next-door bed slides in?

Edmonton

Edmonton is a nice-enough city which is spectacularly dull. I’m surprised they don’t make its dullness an actual tourist attraction. It’s a city founded for mining, but it’s no longer solely devoted to mining; I’m not sure, but I think at some point the people decided that everyone being a miner would be too exciting, so they introduced some other industries to water it down a bit.

Probably the most famous attraction in Edmonton—certainly the Rough Guide makes a fair bit of it—is the West Edmonton Mall, which is the largest shopping mall in the Americas. I went to see what I could find, and it’s certainly an impressive structure: it’s only two storeys but is spread out over a very large area. What is perhaps slightly surprising for such a continentally pre-eminent centre of retail is quite how down-market the whole place is. I suppose it is catering to the needs of the local people.

Winnipeg, including St-Boniface

When I was in Denver Elizabeth asked me what on earth I was going to find to do during the two days I would be in Winnipeg, which she had visited and found pretty boring. She has never visited Edmonton, because Winnipeg almost felt cosmopolitan in comparison. Certainly when I later arrived at Winnipeg after my four days in the north of the Province, it felt like I was coming into the big smoke.

I enjoyed the time I spent at the Manitoba Museum, which has a history of the whole province, beginning with the arrival of the native peoples, and continuing to the present day. There was good information about the varied landscape of the province, with particular concentration on the arctic tundra in the north, as well as about the legends of the native peoples (which are evidently extensive and well-developed). Probably most interesting, though, was the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company—which owned much of the land of modern Canada, and which still exists today, most prominently as the Canadian department store The Bay/La Baie—and of the Hudson’s Bay Railway. The railway was an enormous undertaking, and construction could only continue during the summer months because of the harsh winter conditions. It was, of course, the Hudson’s Bay Railway which I would take from The Pas to Churchill.

As I’ve already mentioned, though, what was really fascinating in Winnipeg was my trip across the Red River to St-Boniface, a French-speaking settlement which was only incorporated into the city of Winnipeg in 1972. I went first to the ugly modern cathedral, built in the shell of the previous cathedral which had burned down in 1968. The new cathedral is supposed to resemble a wig-wam, and just looks pretty silly when compared with the rose windows and vaulted arches of the church whose remnants still stand on the site. I then spent quite a while at the Musée de St-Boniface, which of course covers the history of the settlement, as well as that of francophones in Manitoba as a whole. Manitoba—the first province after the original four to join the Canadian Confederation,⁴ formed from the Northwest Territories—was founded to pay particular attention to the needs of the Métis people, that is those with mixed native–European (mostly French) parentage. The champion of the Métis was Louis Riel, revered as a saviour by the other Métis, and considered a revolutionary by the rest of English Canada at the time, but who was almost entirely responsible for the foundation of Manitoba as a separate province.

North to Churchill, via The Pas

When I booked my long-distance Canadian trains in April I arranged to take the Hudson’s Bay railway line north all the way from Winnipeg to Churchill, which is a port on the shore of the Hudson’s Bay itself. However, when I was in San Francisco I received an email to say that because of work on the line my train wouldn’t run all the way from Winnipeg, but would instead start in The Pas: I should therefore take a coach to The Pas. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the train would leave The Pas at 2.30 a.m. What was I saying earlier that they carefully schedule things to make the passengers as tired as possible? I then looked at maps and timetables and realized that The Pas is quite a long way north, and would take ten hours to reach by coach. There was no way that I would willingly endure sitting on a coach for ten hours. Therefore I booked a flight on a dinky little Saab propellor plane to take me from Winnipeg to The Pas, stopping on the way at the amusingly named Flin Flon. I could deal with 90 minutes cramped on to a little plane instead of ten hours on a bus.

Getting to The Pas

On the plane we were asked if anyone one need a taxi after landing, because supposedly they were going to arrange it from the air. When I arrived and collected my bags from through the little window (no carousel here) there was a taxi outside the tiny airport. I asked the driver if he was waiting for me, and he assured me that he was not. He said that he would be able to take me in to town as well as his reserved fare, but I thought I should wait for the taxi which had supposedly been arranged for me. Well, after a while the reserved fare came out, hobbling along as he leaned on his stick, and the driver got out to help him in. At this point I learned that the driver too used a stick to walk. My taxi was nowhere to be seen and this driver insisted that I could come with them, so I put my bags in the boot and climbed in to the back of the people-carrier.

The conversation from the front seat didn’t involve me in the slightest, beginning with, ‘Did you hear about so-and-so’s accident: he’s paralysed from the waist down,’ (I never heard what actually happened) and when that topic soon dried up, ‘Well, the hunting season will begin soon.’ But rather than listen too intently I was watching the meter with a heavy heart. Never have I seen a taxi meter spring up so quickly: at one point it was climbing at a rate of 10c every four seconds. Admittedly we were on the deserted road from the airport to the town travelling at 100km/h, but I didn’t expect the airport to be so far from the town. When we pulled up in front of the station building the meter was at about $200 CAD. I had just enough cash to cover my share, but when I got out, the driver got out, opened the boot, and then said, ‘Bye, then’ and walked back to his door. The other passenger said, ‘Bye, then’, and together they left me, cash still in my pocket. Thank you, nice walks-with-a-stick taxi-man.

Filling the time at The Pas

I was then at the station with my bags. A sign on the door said that the station wouldn’t open until 11.30 p.m. Just then it was about 7 p.m. What on earth could I do with my stuff? I walked around the station building and on to the platform and a man came out of a door marked ‘Maintenance’. He seemed momentarily surprised to see me, then asked, ‘Here for the 2.30 train?’ I said that I was, and asked desperately if there was anywhere I could leave my stuff. He said that it would be fine for me to leave my things in his workshop, and that he had to stay there until the train left. I thanked him profusely and took my leave.

The trouble was, though, that I still had to find some way to fill the time before I could come back to the station and wait for the train. I walked a little around the town, getting barked at by increasingly menacing packs of dogs. I can also report that the local branch of Burger King stays open until 9 p.m. At that point it was dark and I began to despair of finding anything to do, until I realized that there was a cinema across the street. Gracious fortune struck again, this time in a 9 p.m. showing of The Time-Traveller’s Wife.⁵

We poured out of the cinema at about 10.45 p.m., at which point I decided to go along to the station to collect my bags and wait for them to throw open the doors at 11.30. The man I’d met earlier invited me in to his little office where we had a pleasant conversation about railways and the upkeep of sheep. The most revealing thing he told me, though, was that there was no maintenance work going on on the line between Winnipeg and The Pas. Instead, Via Rail simply couldn’t be bothered to run the train all the way in both directions three times a week, so decided that they would make one of the trains originate at The Pas. In other words, it was a bare-faced lie when I was told that I could not take the train all the way from Winnipeg because of ‘line maintenance’.

On the Hudson’s Bay Railway

After 11.30 the man led me through to the station where a couple from Florida had arrived to await the train. In fact it would only be the three of us catching the train from The Pas, and for most of the following day. Although the train was in the siding, we couldn’t get on until after the crew would arrive at about 2.15 a.m. The lady from the station brought me some coffee, and kindly photocopied an elderly document with precise details about the route for the three of us. Fortunately the crew seemed to arrive a little earlier than had been predicted, and we were able to climb aboard the train and get ready for bed at about 2.10 a.m.

The first stop the next day didn’t come until the middle of the afternoon, at Thompson. At that point quite a lot of other people got on, two or three taking open berths in the sole sleeping car, the others all in the coach cars. Most people—aboriginals—got off at some of the various native communities through which the train passed that evening, such that there were about fifteen or twenty of us who got off when we arrived at Churchill at about 8.30 the next morning, two nights after leaving The Pas.

Finally, at Churchill

After two nights on a very rocky train, I was wrecked when I arrived at Churchill. Fortunately I was able immediately to check in to the place I was staying and crash on the sofa for a couple of hours. I then spent the afternoon wandering around the town a little, and visiting the Eskimo Museum which is run by the Diocese of Churchill–Hudson’s Bay.

The town is small, with a transient seasonal population which averages at about 1000 throughout the year. I was there at precisely the wrong time, between the summer months which offer fascinating flora, and the winter months when the town is under thick layers of snow and ice (the Hudson’s Bay itself freezes over in winter) when the polar bears are very much in evidence.

In fact Churchill bills itself as ‘polar bear capital of the world’, and apparently there were lots of polar bears to be seen on the tundra around the town. There are famously, however, signs which warn against wandering off in to the wilderness so as not to be attacked by the bears (which, despite their cuddly white appearance, are ferocious beasts). What are offered are polar-bear-spotting tours of the tundra in specially designed ‘buggies’. The trouble, was, though, that the low season and my own lack of organization meant that I couldn’t go out on one of these tours: the offices were all closed on the Sunday and Monday when I went, and I should have tried to make arrangements on the day I arrived, Saturday.

For all that, I wasn’t too disconcerted not to see any polar bears, and was perfectly content to spend three days doing not very much other than catching my breath and watching life in such a small and remote sea-port. The only access to Churchill is by rail, air, or boat; there is no road connecting it to Canada’s highway system. I thought that was rather impressive until I read about the Nunavut Territory (formed as a territory separate from the Northwest Territories in 1999), where there are no highways at all!

My day at Niagara Falls

I had arranged to make a day-trip from Toronto to Niagara Falls by train. When that day dawned I refused to be put off by the rain in Toronto as I left. When I got to Niagara Falls the rain had stopped so I got my camera out and started walking down from the railway station to the falls themselves. About halfway there, it began to rain. Hard. Like, so hard that I was wetter than I’ve ever been in my clothes.⁶ The trouble was, though, there was no shelter anywhere along the path I was on. I was desperately trying to keep my camera under my flimsy waterproof until I got to a little wall next to a house under a few trees, when I peeled my bag off my back, put the camera in its compartment, and pulled out the bag’s waterproof cover (which tucks in to the lining of the bag when it’s not in use). Eventually I got to a large hotel which had a Starbucks at street level. I disappeared into their facilities to try—in vain—to wring water out of my socks and then sat for a while drying off.

After lunch things cleared up a bit and I was able to see the falls properly. And, while Niagara Falls are impressive, they’re not nearly as spectacular as they’re made out to be. It could be that my overly pessimistic attitude comes from the fact that I spent that day soaked to the bone. Certainly, the falls are a natural wonder, and people should probably go and see them if they get the chance. I pulled my camera out and turned it on, and… nothing. The camera wouldn’t turn on in spite of my best efforts to keep it relatively dry. The thing is, though, in all that rain, ‘relatively dry’ means ‘really quite wet’. As a result, I was stuck taking photos with my iPhone. All things considered, I’m not displeased with the photos I got but results would have been markedly, um, different if my proper camera had been working.

Before long, though, it was pouring with rain again, and just wouldn’t let up. I went down to the ‘tunnels behind the falls’ where you can see the more-impressive Canadian, or horseshoe, falls both from the front (but half-way down the creek wall) and from behind. I got pretty wet again, again from water falling from the sky rather than that plunging over the waterfall. Feeling that it had to be done, I dutifully queued up for the Maid of the Mist boat trip. I’m glad that I did; I was wearing my flimsy waterproof and two tourist ponchos (the first from the tunnels, the second from the boat people), but still I got soaked.

When I got back to Toronto that night I charged the battery from my camera and left the camera’s two doors open in an effort to let things dry out. The next morning I put the battery in and, bingo, the camera turned on. But I was rejoicing too soon: before long I would realize that all was not well with the camera.

Toronto

My day at Niagara Falls was in fact my second-last full day in Toronto. I said earlier that there is nothing ‘iconic’ on the skyline of Vancouver. Well, that holds true for Toronto too, with one significant exception, the CN Tower. Or, as I quickly began to think of it, the upright-needle-spearing-a-giant-lump-of-chewing-gum. I would have gone up the tower to see what I could see, but while in Toronto I had to deal with migraines, poor weather (cf. Niagara Falls, above), and cameratic malfunction (ditto, and below).

I did, however, get to Fort York, which is the original British military settlement which spawned the city of York, later renamed Toronto. (At no point did I see any explanation for why the name of the city changed.) The fort is very well preserved, as well it should be, having been violently defended throughout the years as urban expansion, and highway-building in particular, has called for its crushing.

I also spent a very enjoyable Sunday afternoon at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which has a very large, and impressively varied, collection. I began with the ships’ models in the basement, worked through the European renaissance art, and got to the modern stuff on the top two floors—among which was some extremely pleasant photography—before ending up in the Canadian artists’ galleries. I have to say I could do without the somewhat dull (there’s that word again) work of those darlings of the Canadian art scene, the Group of Seven, but I did really like the work I saw by William Kurelek, a Catholic convert.

The day after my time at Niagara Falls I was on my way to the Royal Ontario Museum when I decided to test my camera. Well, it turned on, but that was about all it would do. Pressing the shutter would result in error messages until the camera was turned off and on again, the lens wouldn’t autofocus, I couldn’t set most of the basic exposure settings. In short, it was acting as if it had been soaked in water. Oh, wait, it had. Evidently I had to deal with this rather than go to the R.O.M., so I searched Google for a likely-looking camera shop with a service centre, and walked there. It turned out to be quite far. They looked at my camera and listened to my litany of problems, and said that they could send it to Canon for service, which would take at least 21 working days. The trouble was, though, that I would be leaving Canada in two weeks. Oh, they said, you should go direct to Canon since they are in a position to be able to expedite individual repair-jobs. Thank you very much, I said.

The headquarters of Canon in Canada, including their service centre for professional photography equipment are in Mississauga, an industrial satellite-city of Toronto. When I tell you that Toronto’s busiest airport is in Mississauga, you might reasonably expect (as I did) that getting there by public transport wouldn’t be too difficult. Well, sorry, buddy, it is. Regional public transport out of the centre of Toronto is handled by a mob called ‘Go Transit’ who might be more truthful if they called themselves ‘Go if you can work out how and where Transit’. I knew that their hub is at Union Station in Toronto, so I went there, examining their website on my phone as I went. You know how in most city transit websites you can type in a starting and ending address and it shows you a route including walking and line-changes? Well, not in Toronto. Toronto is only the largest city in Canada and yet their public transit agency can’t tell you how to get to where you want to go. So, I asked at ‘Traveller’s Aid’ in Union Station. The sweet old ladies there dutifully asked me for the exact street address where I wanted to go, looked it up in their gazetteer, scratched their heads for a while, and then suggested that I take the subway as far as it would go (changing lines half-way) and then catch a bus. I tried doing this, but no bus—or bus stop—was in evidence when I got to the end of the line and had to take a taxi. Getting back in to Toronto was no less of a tortuous experience, involving two buses, two subway trains, and far more time than that warranted by a journey of about twelve miles.

My time at the Canon Service Centre, though, was remarkably quick and easy. The woman who dealt with me went out of her way to be helpful, and assured me that while there was no way the camera could be repaired by the time I was to leave Toronto for Halifax the following day (I never expected any such thing), they would be able to diagnose and repair the problem before I was to leave the country a fortnight later. What’s more, they would do the repair under warranty. In fact on my first morning in Halifax she rang me to say that the camera had been repaired, and was ready for collection: it had only been at the service centre for one full day. However, I wouldn’t be able to return to Toronto to pick it up until I would get to Montreal, when I spent the day going by train and coming back by plane. Until then I was able to put to good use the little camera I had got as an emergency in Toronto before leaving for Halifax.

Halifax

I really enjoyed my time in the city of Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia. The landscape is so different from anything else I saw in Canada—although I would have said that it’s more like Cornwall than most of Scotland—and the people seemed even more pleasant than the other Canadians I had met.⁷

The three principal attractions I visited in Halifax were the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, the Art Gallery, and the Halifax Citadel. The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic—like much of the city—was overrun by American tourists who had arrived on their cruise-ship that morning. The most striking exhibits are those relating to the sinking of the Titanic by the terrorist iceberg on the night of 14th/15th April 1912; it was boats from Halifax which were the first to arrive at the scene, and many of the victims’ bodies were transported to, and some later buried at, Halifax. The stories of the constant arrival of fresh bodies for several days, particularly those of the unidentifiable bodies, were pretty devastating.

The Halifax Art Gallery is an impressive little collection given that the city is hardly on the world circuit. There were a number of modern pieces produced by aboriginal artists—that is to say, not traditional Inuit/Eskimo/aboriginal art but rather pieces which reflected on contemporary aboriginal self-identity. There were also a few slightly-too-ambitious modern installations which were entries for a competition, and then some mixed Canadian and European art of the last few centuries. I was particularly glad to see another couple of William Kurelek works!

The Halifax Citadel is very impressive: it is a preserved barracks which had been built by the British to defend against—who else?—the French before the hostilities over the control of Quebec later broke out. I spent an enjoyable afternoon wandering around the citadel, exploring every nook, watching the guides playing the bagpipes and wearing military uniforms from the period of the citadel’s most active service before the heavens opened once more and and the rain dropped therefrom as does gentle mercy, thus forcing me back to my hotel.

After tortuously twisting the bard’s words I can but conclude

Look, I’ll be honest with you. When I started writing this several days ago, I knew it was going to be long, but I didn’t think it would be nearly 6,500 words. If you’ve read every single one of them, well, you are to be congratulated. Pat yourself on the back. Buy yourself a drink.

And so I return to my original dismissal of English-speaking Canada as ‘dull’. Don’t get me wrong: it’s very interesting to compare the country as a whole with, for example, Australia because they have so much in common and yet there is probably one big difference in particular: Australia doesn’t share the longest border in the world with the U.S.A. I’m inclined to think that Canada and the Canadians have fixed themselves in the mindset that they are always duty-bound to play second fiddle to the U.S.’s lead, which isn’t true, and is sad. However, I suspect that this in large part is what makes English-speaking Canada so ‘nice, but dull’.

Certainly this idea fits in with my suggestion that the non-dull places in Canada are the North, the francophone parts, and the Atlantic provinces. The Atlantic provinces and the northern territories are distant enough from the U.S., with no significant land border, not to worry about identifying themselves with their powerful southern neighbour; the harshness of life and the concentration of native peoples in the North means that those parts simply cannot fit in with some dull cookie-cutter ideal of ‘North America’ (whatever that means in practice). In the same way, the francophone parts (Quebec and French-speaking Manitoba) can use their culturo-linguistic difference as a barrier to the imposition of some ‘like the U.S., but not as good’ identity. Pretty much wherever I went in Canada I found that the Canadians love their history, love their Queen and constitution, and are proud of their country. What is sad, therefore, is that so much of the country can’t find a really strong identity other than ‘nice, but dull’.

Notes

1. Manitoba is an officially bilingual Province. ↩
2. First I saw District 9, which I enjoyed very much, and thoroughly recommend (it was hilarious in an understated, ironic, way). The following week I watched Inglourious Basterds, which was expectedly gruesome, but of course had a good story. Nevertheless, while I enjoyed the film, I came away wondering if Tarantino really has just started taking his own eccentricities to the extreme. ↩
3. Via Rail is the Crown Corporation which operates the vast majority of passenger trains in Canada. ↩
4. Canada likes to refer to itself as a ‘Confederation’, even though the country isn’t a Confederation on the Swiss model ↩
5. The Time-Traveller’s Wife is a beautiful film, although that’s not too surprising given that the stars are Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana. Bana’s American accent amusingly slipped slightly at a couple of points in the film, and I kept asking myself the typical questions which come up with any narrative dealing with matters of time-travel, but for all that I enjoyed it enormously and found it to be of a quality higher than my low need-a-film-to-fill-these-empty-hours standards required. ↩
6. Except, presumably, from the time I fell in the lake at Lightwater Valley. ↩
7. However, let it be said that I’ve never met a Canadian I didn’t really like. I was proud of myself when, at some dinner at St Anne’s I was sat next to a graduate student whom I asked, after about three minutes of conversation, where in Canada she came from. She was impressed and keen to know how I was so certain that she wasn’t from the U.S., which is what apparently most people thought. Well, I had been hedging my bets slightly when I assumed she was Canadian, but I don’t think I offended her when I said that what tipped the balance was that she had used the pronunciation ‘a-boat’ for <about>. ↩

The Fraternas’ house in Denver is within the parish building of a parish whose church is used both in the Latin rite (‘St Elizabeth of Hungary’s parish’) and the Byzantine rite (‘Sts Cyril and Methodius’ parish’)—one priest confusingly celebrates in both rites. Add to that the fact that the parish centre is called the ‘St Francis Centre’ (or rather, ‘Center’), and suddenly you’re faced with a place under the patronage of four separate saints. Not that that’s a bad thing, mind.

I understand that the present accommodation is too small for their growing Denver community, and so they are all hoping and praying that they will be allowed to move into a larger place in the not-too-distant future. At dinner on that first night I am introduced to the members of the community who were there at the time (five, including Elizabeth, plus one postulant ‘Ami’) and they tell me, in all seriousness, that Elizabeth’s favourite place of all around Denver is the local Walmart. Sadly, though, we never got to go there.

South to Colorado Springs: the Garden of the gods and the Manitou Cave Dwellings

The following day I am set the task of ‘fixing the printer’ on Elizabeth’s computer, which I complete by deleting and re-installing the Windows-shared printer driver on her OS X machine. Problem solved for now, at least. She and I then set out south to Colorado Springs and beyond, with the principal intention of visiting the Garden of the gods, a large rock formation in the Rockies. We arrive at the park and realize that it’d be better to eat sooner rather than later so as to avoid grumpiness, and we head back down to Manitou Springs.

After lunch the chilly wind and ominous clouds show no sign of letting up, and Elizabeth is feeling cold. On the way back up the hill we stop at a Walgreens where Elizabeth bought her later-infamous ten-dollar green hoodie and I bought lip-balm (the air at that altitude is very dry) and leather-conditioner for my tired-looking boots. Evidently as we left Manitou Springs we didn’t take the exit we were expecting and so didn’t end up back at the Garden of the gods, but rather at the entrance to something called the Manitou Cave Dwellings. We were relieved of $10 each at the entrance and then poked around for a while. It was interesting enough to look around the cave dwellings, carved in to the rock-face, but we both felt that the entrance fee was disproportionately high. Add to that the fact that the passage around the attached museum led us carefully through the inordinately large gift-shop, and we couldn’t help but feel that someone was out to fleece us.

Rain was falling on the mountains in the middle-distance as we drove to the Garden of the gods proper. Because of the troubling weather we were leery of roaming too far from the car, but we were able to make a good circuit within the garden, accompanied by several large groups of tourists without falling victim to the rain.

On the way back to Denver Elizabeth announced, ‘Now would be a good time for a cup of tea.’ So, as we passed through Colorado Springs we saw (only) one likely-looking place, which turned out to be a Mexican diner complete with fluorescent lighting and brightly-coloured tiles on the walls. The only ‘tea’ they had was ‘iced’. I use the term under advisement since what came out of that urn was not particularly cold, but it wasn’t hot, either. So, yes. Elizabeth and I sat there drinking luke-warm tea.

North to Camp St Malo and the Rocky Mountain National Park

The following morning I got to experience some ‘real life’ that I wouldn’t otherwise see on this trip. Elizabeth needed curtains for her bedroom, so we went to explore Bed, Bath, and Beyond in search of those. Then to a religious supplies store for crucifixes for Elizabeth to take to the communities she was going to visit in Colombia and Ecuador. Then to Office Depot for some stationery as well as to investigate filing cabinets. Denver really has got everything you need. That is, if you need curtains, crucifixes, and filing cabinets. There are probably some other things available there too, but I can’t confirm this for certain.

After lunch we set out north with Libby, the Ami discerning with the Denver community. We were headed to Camp St Malo, which is a retreat centre run by the male equivalent of the Fraternas, the Sodalits (that is, the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae). The retreat centre proved to be very comfortable, and the night we stayed there there were very few people—those who had come for a large congress were leaving just as we arrived and apart from a few hangers-on, and the resident community, we had the place to ourselves.

One of the big claims to fame for Camp St Malo is the fact that the late Pope stayed there for a few hours while he was preparing for World Youth Day in Denver in 1993. None of us was assigned the room the Pope used, though. While there he did set out on a trail into the woodland which borders the Rocky Mountain National Park. The trail has since been declared to go all the way to a waterfall within the Park (the Pope didn’t get that far) and now, sure enough, bears the name ‘The JPII trail’. Elizabeth couldn’t go all the way to the trailhead either, since about half-way along we had to turn around to be back in time for dinner at the retreat centre.

The following morning we set out to go to the National Park proper, driving to Bear Lake with the intention of walking one of the many designated trails from there. We settled on the idea of going to Emerald Lake, and set out: the route would lead us past Bear Lake, Nymph Lake, and Dream Lake before eventually arriving at Emerald Lake. All along the way we were greeted with spectacular scenery—what I always imagined to be ‘quintessentially Rockies’.

It was when we had arrived at Dream Lake, however, that I was stepping forward towards the lake and I felt my left foot slip from under me. I had been aware that I was standing on a protruding tree-root, but I seem to have shifted my weight unevenly or something as I moved off it because my foot suddenly snapped sideways. Stars appeared in my field of view and I felt both faint and nauseous from the waves of pain. As the nausea began to pass, and with it the dizziness, I wanted to be able to sit down on the mossy ledge which was about four feet behind me so that I could catch my breath, because surely everything was just temporary. It was at that point that I realized that I simply could not move: I was rooted to the spot and simply could not lift my legs.

Somehow I did manage to stumble backwards and sat down somewhat awkwardly. However, the pain did not subside as I had hoped it would. Instead we were left with the realization that (a) we couldn’t continue up the hill to Emerald Lake, and (b) we had to go back the four miles (or so) we had come to get back to the car. Elizabeth had the bright idea that I should use my tripod as a walking stick, and after a little while we set off down, me walking sideways since I could not rotate my left ankle up or down.

When we got back to St Malo I was able to get my shoe and sock off, and was greeted by an ankle the size of an orange. It evidently wasn’t broken but that was only minor consolation given the pain. Libby, who had stayed behind to continue studying for her Registered Nurse qualification, got me ice and found some ibuprofen to help with the swelling. I had had some paracetamol¹ in my bag which I’d taken at Dream Lake, and that had certainly helped me come down to the car.

It was fortunate that the following day I would start my 30-hour journey by train to Sacramento, since it meant that I could spend most of the time with my leg propped up, not having to worry about moving about. We had a stop of several hours at Salt Lake City, when I wanted to go and find an extension cable (the placement of the power socket on the train meant I couldn’t plug my computer in) and a bottle of water. It was then that I realized how stiff my ankle was, as I limped along the platform onto a tram (which took us past the big Mormon temple and tabernacle), off the tram, along the street, around the shop, back along the street, onto the tram, and back along the platform to climb back up into the train. With my left leg stuck out at an angle of at least 45º as I walked it struck me that I was doing more than a passable imitation of House. I just needed to work (more) on my misanthropy, guitar-/piano-playing, and easy ability to steal Wilson’s food.

I sprained my ankle on 20th August. Now, more than six weeks later,² I am still wearing a supporting strap around my ankle every day. The ankle is obviously still weak and so I have stumbled in Seattle, Vancouver, and Toronto, each time causing a certain degree of pain. Even when I don’t stumble, I can’t stay on my feet or walk for too long since the pain will just set in anyway. I try not to let it affect me too much now, but I have got to factor in considerations for my ankle when planning my days: in short, my whole trip has been affected by some degree simply because I stood slightly badly on a tree-root.

Notes

1. I have always thought of paracetamol as the generic term, and indeed it is in the U.K. and Australia. But in the U.S. the word seems not to be known at all; the same drug is known generically as acetaminophen, while the brand-name Tylenol seems to be even more commonly used. ↩
2. Yes, I am painfully aware that I have been miserably slow in posting content to the site. I am doing my best to make amends. I had hoped to write and prepare lots while I was on my long train journeys across Canada, but it turned out that the broken sleep during the nights on the train meant that I was good for very little in the way of rational thought during the days. Stand by for more updates very soon. I hope. ↩

Where San Francisco seemed laid-back and natural, Seattle felt self-consciously artificial: a city which always wants to live up to its manufactured image, even if this image isn’t accurate. I was also very surprised by how seedy much of the city is: there is a massive discrepancy between the extremely smart boutique shops covering about four blocks of the downtown area, which is surrounded by pawn-shops, dodgy liquor stores, and other insalubrious places. Don’t get me wrong, though: Seattle is a very interesting city, with a very pretty skyline, and I enjoyed my time there. It’s just not as close to what I had experienced in San Francisco, which is what I had been expecting, more or less, before I arrived.

San Francisco

San Francisco is the city I have most enjoyed visiting so far on this trip (as I write this, I am on a train trundling through central Canada). It’s a clean city, with every amenity that you might otherwise expect in London, Paris, or Sydney. In fact, people do often make the comparison with Sydney, and while I wouldn’t go overboard, it does give off the same sense of ‘global city’¹ which people feel in Sydney.

The geography of the place requires little introduction. On one side of the city sits the Pacific Ocean, and downtown San Francisco is almost cut off from the rest of California by the San Francisco Bay. The almost-daily thick fog which comes into the Bay through the Golden Gate (the opening of the Bay into the ocean) is famous: I heard someone saying that it comes about because hot, dry air trapped inland south of San Francisco by the hills can only meet cool, moist, ocean air across the Golden Gate. On the evening that I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and back again to take photos, though, there wasn’t much fog in evidence. The hills really are as steep as—if not steeper than—they are portrayed in film and on television: so steep, in fact, that I felt far happier walking uphill (in spite of the considerable effort) than downhill, because of the worry that I would do some classic Flynn manoeuvre and end up ankle-over-shoulder. The effort was worth it, though, since at the top of each hill there was another little neighbourhood to poke around, and a new view over the city and bay below.

In retrospect I didn’t ‘do’ much in San Francisco, except walk around the city itself. What I particularly enjoyed was just the general vibe of the thing, really. Thinking about it, San Francisco is a city of very distinct neighbourhoods which still make up a coherent whole. I spent (and enjoyed) half a day in the large Chinatown, but the Chinese influence is not confined to those city blocks: signs on streets and in buses have Chinese in addition to the English and Spanish I had seen everywhere else I had been so far.² On the other hand, I got the impression that the whole city was perfectly happy to pull together when needs must. When I was there, for example, there were notices everywhere—especially on the buses and trams—about the closure of the Bay Bridge for essential work to strengthen it against earthquakes, which was to take place over the forthcoming Labor Day weekend.³

The city does seem to be very conscious of its own history. One specific excursion I made was to the Cable Car Museum. The cable cars are iconic of San Francisco.⁴ However, as the museum makes clear, after the 1917 earthquake nearly completely destroyed the city, the cable car lines were not re-built. In fact, it was lobbying by the rubber and oil industries for the use of buses that led to the city government’s decision not to re-install the cable cars. The Franciscans⁵ revolted and wrote letters in their hundreds to the city council, and ensured that four of the original cable car lines (there had been many more before 1917) were re-built. Their arguments principally revolved around the fact that the cable cars were part of San Francisco’s history, and that they were iconic of⁶ San Francisco: everyone else, after all, had buses!

This historic consideration does not seem to extend, as far as I could tell, to a pervasive consciousness of the city’s origins: to the Spanish missionaries which had founded the place and given it its name. I’m sure people are aware of it, and in fairness I wasn’t specifically looking for any such detailed history (having already got the idea in San Antonio and Los Angeles), but it seems to me that this particular aspect of its history doesn’t fit into much of the city’s modern self-image. That said, there are a huge number of very beautiful and well-maintained churches all over the city.

The one thing which I really wanted to do but was unable to, was to visit Alcatraz. Ferries run to and from the island several times a day, and there are extensive guided tours of the infamous (and now closed) federal gaol which housed Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly. I don’t think I’d realized how popular an attraction this is, and so tours are booked up at about a week in advance, if not longer. I’ll be able to visit some other time, I hope.

Seattle

If you were to watch Frasier (and I have, believe me), you might end up with the impression that Seattle is a city populated by high society: a place where ridiculously snooty Frenchmen can sell a can of dog-food for $6;⁷ where the residents of a building which doesn’t allow dogs but doesn’t mind exotic birds will throw out a tenant who tap-dances;⁸ or where if you are not ‘seen’ at the gala event of the day people will assume that the wife from whom you have recently separated has ‘won’.⁹ Maybe these things do exist in Seattle, but I certainly wasn’t aware of them when I was there.

I was staying in Belltown¹⁰, which the Rough Guide to the USA says ‘was the home of the grunge music scene in the 1980s, but has since developed into ground zero for yuppie-friendly condominiums and fancy restaurants’. I could see this to a certain extent, but I didn’t feel especially safe walking around the area in the evening or at night. On the Sunday afternoon I went to the university district (‘the U-district’), principally because Google Maps was leading me to a laundrette there, and that wasn’t a terribly nice neighbourhood either. Don’t think me naïve: I don’t expect student neighbourhoods to be luxurious (cf. the Cowley Road), but this was downright dodgy. It was also poorly maintained: I tripped on an uneven paving stone and twisted my already-sprained ankle. Perhaps that pain coloured my reaction to the whole place, but I don’t think so.

Seattle Center

Seattle Center certainly has a run-down feeling to it. It was built for the 1962 World’s Fair (the ‘Century 21 Exposition’, from which the international group of estate agents take their name), and while it wasn’t nearly as deserted or decrepit as Daejeon when I went there, it still felt like it could do with some rejuvenation followed by some intense promotion. The most famous attraction today is the Space Needle; the observation deck is very well laid-out, with the opportunity both to sit inside and to walk all the way around on the outside. On the day I went up the clouds meant that I couldn’t see all the way to any of the mountains, but there was nevertheless a good view over the city and over Puget Sound.

I believed the Rough Guide when it suggested that the science museum within the Seattle Center is really for children, so gave that a miss. There is a building housing a run-down food court within the complex: I walked through there, and was not particularly attracted by any of the offerings. There was however a small display-case containing brochures and other souvenirs which were sold for the 1962 World’s Fair: they were fun to look at, although it’s a pity that so little attention is given to them.

Seattle Art Museum

I was able to spend a few hours at the Seattle Art Museum, whose collection is quite large, and best described as ‘eclectic’. There are quite a lot of modern pieces—some very interesting, others what I would describe as ‘because we could’ art.¹¹ There was an exhibition of work by Andrew Wyeth, whose work (and name) I had not previously encountered. There was a very pleasant—if disparate—collection of European art, as well as some (Australian) Aboriginal paintings. Then there is a large amount of African tribal art on the top floor. See what I mean about eclectic?

Pike Place Market

I spent a very enjoyable afternoon at Pike Place Market. I had had a very pleasant lunch in a French restaurant within the market with a friend of my parents, and then wandered around, watching people come and go, taking photographs of colourful stalls. It’s easy to see why this is such a tourist attraction: there is much to see and do without thinking about what the weather is doing outside.¹² Imagine the Covered Market in Oxford, scaled up slightly, with fewer pig and cow carcases hanging from the ceilings, and more fish and flowers in their stead, and you’ve got an idea of Pike Place Market in Seattle. 

Opposite the main section of the market, in Pike Place itself, there is the ‘first’ branch of Starbucks. As I have noted elsewhere, that title is somewhat misleading because the first branch moved within a relatively small area a couple of times before sticking in its present location (this all happened before any other branch was opened, which is why this one can always be called the ‘first’ outlet). I stopped inside very briefly and was perhaps slightly surprised to see no tables and no drinks being served: this branch still operates as it always did, selling coffee beans and grinding/espresso equipment. The Rough Guide snootily (or, perhaps, ‘snottily’) refers to this Starbucks location before going on to suggest that ‘you’re better off sampling a local brew that you can’t find in your hometown minimall.’ It doesn’t make any allusion to the fact that you can’t find any ‘brews’ in that Pike Place Starbucks. Bang-up job, Rough Guide!

Museum of Flight

I spent the day before I left Seattle at the Museum of Flight, south of the city, at Boeing Field, where Boeing’s first operations began. Boeing still operates a large number of facilities around the Museum of Flight—including the landing-strip and private airport—but their principal plant is now thirty miles north of Seattle at Everett. The Museum of Flight is probably the best museum of its kind I’ve ever been to: the number of exhibits is huge; the information about each exhibit is detailed without being completely overwhelming; and the whole place is very well maintained.

The one exception to this last is the open-air Airfield, where you can see a B.A. Concorde; a Boeing C-137 (the military designation of the 707) as used by several U.S. Presidents; an American Airlines 727; a NASA 737; and the prototype Boeing 747, City of Everett. These aircraft all had a pretty neglected look to them, with faded paint and every impression of the unfortunate onset of corrosion. I was also sorry that you are only allowed to walk through the Concorde and the Presidential plane, although this is understandable given my already-stated concern about the planes’ exterior decay; I wanted particularly to be able to see what was inside the prototype 747.¹³ In fact, this was my first time on board Concorde, and while I knew that things were poky inside, I was surprised at how small the seats were, and how little leg-room there was. Passengers on these aircraft were effectively on a supersonic omnibus.

There was so much to see in the museum that I decided to concentrate particularly on the passenger aircraft and those on display in the museum’s main hall. I pretty much ignored the exhibition devoted to space exploration, and passed very briefly over the aircraft and other exhibits used by American airmen in the two World Wars. I did, however, enjoy the ‘tower’ exhibit, wherein you can watch over Boeing field, listen in to the field’s ATC tower, and watch the planes come and go; there was also a computer showing all aircraft in U.S. airspace at that moment. There were a lot of those.

Final paragraph, in which I attempt to make some perspicacious observations, thus bringing this whole article together and to a close

As I have been writing this I have come to realize that I did really very many enjoyable things while in Seattle, especially compared to how little I did in San Francisco except simply ‘seeing the city’. I think what this leads me to say is that Seattle has got a lot to attract the tourist, but that I could never be so beguiled by the city as I was by San Francisco, which is somhow entirely something else. The bay, the ocean, the hills, the people, the variety—all these things somehow work together to make San Francisco such a charming place.

Notes

1. In fact, using the terms of the categorization cited in that Wikipedia article, Sydney is a more international place than San Francisco. ↩
2. As far as I could tell the Chinese was universally in the more-complex ‘traditional’ script, prevalent in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, but not really in mainland China. ↩
3. As it happens, this closure was extended because, during a thorough inspection of the bridge after it was closed, a significant crack was found. An enormous new piece was manufactured in Arizona in the middle of the night and flown especially to San Francisco, and engineers seemed to work extra-hard to get the bridge repaired as soon as possible. I read about all this from afar, in Vancouver. ↩
4. Is something ‘iconic of’ something else? I am writing this without access to the Web; I’ll have to check the OED later. ↩
5. That is to say, the inhabitants of San Francisco—this what they really do call themselves—and not the order of friars which goes by the same name and which was founded by the saint whose name the city bears. ↩
6. There’s that construction again. ↩
7. ‘The Perfect Guy’, S05E17 ↩
8. ‘Taps at the Montana’, S06E18 ↩
9. ‘Moon Dance’, S03E13 ↩

10. Niles: Belltown is sort of, er, a sketchy neighbourhood, wouldn’t you say?

    Martin: Oh, Niles, to you a ‘sketchy neighbourhood’ is when the cheese shop doesn’t have valet parking.

    —‘Hot Pursuit’, S07E18

    ↩

11. That is to say, art where, to answer the question ‘Why?’, the artist responds, ‘Because I/we could.’ ↩
12. In fact, the day I was at Pike Place Market was the one day in Seattle that it rained. I am reliably informed, however, that on average Seattle gets the same number of rainy days as New York, but still suffers the reputation of being a disproportionately wet city. ↩
13. The 747 is, of course, the Queen of the Skies. ↩

Los Angeles

Los Angeles should perhaps really be called the ‘town of Our Lady, Queen of the angels’¹, but now of course Our Lady has been largely written out of the town’s nomenclature and this massive city—the epitome of massive urban sprawl—now just bears the end of its original Spanish name.

At the risk of sounding too negative, here is a list of the things I didn’t do when in Los Angeles:

1. See any movie-stars or other celebrities;
2. Go to anywhere with ‘Hollywood’ in its name;
3. Go on a tour of any of the movie studios (which for a long time have mostly been in Burbank, rather than the inner-L.A. suburb of Hollywood);
4. Go on a bus tour looking at Hollywood stars’ homes;
5. In short, do anything to do with the movie industry;
6. Travel on buses by night (from what I saw on the buses during the day, I could easily imagine that all the horror-stories I’d heard about late-night buses in L.A. were true);
7. Go to the Getty Center (which is something which I did rather want to do, but I’d planned to go on a Monday. The Getty Center is closed on Mondays. Just my luck. So, instead, I went to the beach. What a compromise.)

Instead I was able to wander around downtown Los Angeles on the Sunday, poking around some of the principal downtown neighbourhoods. I suppose, in retrospect, I didn’t really ‘do’ very much, but nevertheless I feel like I got a feel for the place. The photos show much of what I saw downtown, but I feel that the photos don’t quite ‘capture’ L.A. as I experienced it. It was certainly extraordinary (and entirely unplanned) to be able to see the sparsely-attended parade in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Ecuadorian independence, and to see the subsequent celebrations in the old town.

I had always heard that, contrary to the common idealized misconceptions about Los Angeles as the glitzy city of the movies, it is in fact an awful city to visit, an endless sea of concrete where the car is king. When I flew from Sydney to Austin via LAX on 30th July, the arrival at LAX supported this view of the city: as we descended, I saw a city that was endless grey and brown, whereas 14 hours earlier we had climbed over a city that was remarkably blue and green. When I got properly downtown in L.A., though, I was pleasantly surprised to find a town which is quite easy to walk around, peppered with trees and benches and green spaces: so much nicer, in short, than disappointing Austin.

What’s more, while it’s true that many Victorian buildings were pulled down en masse in the middle of the 20th century to make way for numerous concrete monstrosities, this didn’t happen universally. Dotted around the downtown area there are some fine buildings of the late-ninteenth and early-twentieth centuries, many retaining traces of advertising slogans painted up in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s. This is a city which isn’t completely devoid of character.

One thing which I had been told and which did ring true was that the Metro underground railway system is massively underused. Someone—I forget who—suggested once that most Angelenos² don’t even know that there even is such a system! It’s not very extensive, with only three lines covering the inner suburbs, and at present there isn’t even a ticket barrier system! The tickets I bought had no magnetic stripe or any other machine-readable marking. I did however see signs at the Union Station Metro station saying that ticket barriers would be coming into service in the next few months.

At the beach

Those who haven’t got a car are left to taking buses to get anywhere beyond the limits of the Metro. The bus system is extensive, and seems pretty efficient. It was when I was on the bus to Santa Monica, though, that I came to realize the full extent of Los Angeles’ choked-up sprawl. The trip, about ten miles, took 90 minutes. During that time I was able to watch the mostly Hispanic corpus of passengers come and go.

I know that in the strictest terms places like Santa Monica are separate cities, but I find it difficult to think of them as little more than ‘suburbs’ of Los Angeles. Of course, this all really boils down to a question of terminology. Santa Monica has a pretty Pacific beach, and a famous pier. According to my Rough Guide, there is a large ex-pat English population in Santa Monica; I certainly encountered one English family, parents in their thirties bringing their five- or six-year-old son to have lunch with his benevolent American uncle (‘Aw, gee, yes, pull your pants up. I learnt at an early age that it’s good to keep your pants pulled up. Well, I learnt it a coupla weeks ago, really.’, said the uncle to the child as the latter stopped running to hug him, worried by the downwards creep of his waistband.)

After a very nice lunch (lobster sandwich, root beer float) I was walking back along the beach when I was accosted by a girl arranging subscriptions for a charity. I have always found this concept very difficult to deal with. (‘Oh yes, stranger I’ve just met, let me give you my bank details so that I can give money regularly to some cause that I heard about thirty seconds ago. That sounds like a perfect idea!’—does anyone seriously think like this?) Anyway, I knew she was just doing her job, so I responded appropriately to her limp handshake and her request for my name, and waited patiently for her spiel—about sponsoring poor Mexican children—to finish before saying that, really, I couldn’t… ‘You can’t, or you won’t?’ She spat out the last word. At this point I was angry with this girl. I had so far been a paragon of politesse. ‘A little bit of both, in fact.’, came my reply, as I tried to be rid of her in the swiftest way possible. ‘Well, have a nice day.’ Little did I know that those four words—so harmless, almost pleasant, on the page—could harbour so much venom. I don’t remember her name, but I do remember that she had a front tooth which was badly chipped: had she been so rude to some previous victim as to have driven him to violence? The experience certainly soured the rest of my afternoon.³

I then spent most of the afternoon making the pleasant walk of about three miles south along the coast to Venice Beach. Where Santa Monica is quite gentrified, Venice Beach is unashamedly hippy. The boardwalk was packed with people come to see the stalls, and to be seen themselves. The most frequently seen businesses—right on the boardwalk—were those whose sole purpose is to demonstrate that you suffer from one of the limited number of medical conditions (including ‘stress’ and ‘migraine’) for which marijuana can legally be prescribed in California, and then to supply it. I believe that when the law came into effect in the last few years, the federal government tried to overturn it, but of course was not able to interfere in the state’s affairs. It was fun to watch some of the people at Venice Beach with an outsider’s perspective, but I wasn’t sorry to leave to take the bus back downtown. I certainly wouldn’t want to have been there after sunset, when surely the crazies would really have come out of the woodwork.

San Diego

For all that I enjoyed spending time in Greater L.A., and that it didn’t feel nearly as ‘unreal’ as many people had said, when I arrived in San Diego for the day I felt like I was in a really ‘real’ city. It struck me during the day how much like Sydney San Diego is: Sydney is at latitude 33º51’S, while San Diego is at 32º43’N. They have very similar climates, although it doesn’t get as cold in winter in San Diego as Sydney does,⁴—my inner amateur meteorologist suspects that it gets warming winds both coming north from Mexico and points south, and across the Mojave desert, from which it is barely separated (unlike Sydney and the Blue Mountains). Another link between San Diego and Sydney is that they are on the Pacific coast—what an experience, academically at least, for me to look across the Pacific from the east. Finally, both cities have a proliferation of Westfield shopping centres. It appears that this Australian retail giant owns three locations in San Diego (as well as tens of other malls throughout the U.S.A., including a large city-centre mall in San Francisco).

The three-hour railway journey south to San Diego was itself highly enjoyable, closely following the coast line: at some points it felt like the railway was only about ten yards from the shore. The journey afforded me the opportunity to place various SoCal towns which previously I had known by name only—Anaheim, Orange County, Oceanside, Mission Viejo, etc.

After the train arrived, I went to the William Heath Davis house, which is in the historic Gaslamp District (which has apparently been cleaned up in recent years, having previously been a somewhat seedy neighbourhood). Davis is seen as the father of modern San Diego, having been involved in the planning of the city in the nineteenth century, and his house was subsequently used for various purposes, and was even moved around the city. The museum is very well presented, with the different rooms laid out according to the different ways they were used throughout the years.

That afternoon I had wanted to go to Balboa Park, which is where there is a huge number of diverse museums. I purchased a day pass for the buses, and took a bus north to the park. Looking at the map, I saw a huge expanse of green representing the park, so I got off the bus at the park’s northwest corner (opposite the entrance to the zoo), thinking that it would be a pleasant walk to the museums from there. Boy was I wrong. I ended up having to scrabble down a steep dust bank before walking through a rather hot sandy valley. Eventually I got to a pavementless road: I followed it for a while, went past the naval hospital, but before too long the road turned into a proper highway, which I definitely couldn’t walk along. I crossed at a pedestrian crossing, and my trusty phone showed that I should just walk in some direction to meet an ordinary city street. Well, I ended up having to scrabble up another steep dusty bank, avoiding the numerous broken bottles in the process, my bag on my back, sweat on my brow, pain in my feet.

Eventually, after a bit more walking (this time in properly paved streets) I caught the same bus and got off at the stop I should have used in the first place. By this time I was too exhausted, I didn’t have the energy to take in any museums properly, and anyway the ones I wanted to go to were closing since it was now 5pm. I wandered along the Prado, the path past the museums, and eventually got another couple of buses right down to the shore.

There I was able to buy a return ticket for the ferry across the little bay to Coronado, which runs once an hour in either direction. At this point I direct you to my photos of San Diego from the boats, and from Coronado itself.

After a light supper in Coronado I caught the ferry back in order to get my return train to L.A. It was on that journey that I was amused to overhear a phone conversation from the seat behind mine. The train arrived soon after 11pm, and I still had to pack all my stuff to be ready to leave fairly early the following morning to take the train north to Oakland and San Francisco.

Notes

1. Inasmuch as the original Spanish settlers of the site in 1781 called their new community ‘El Pueblo de Nuestra Dama, la Reina de los angeles’. ↩
2. I go back and forth on how ridiculous I think the demonym ‘Angeleno’ really is. It is used, though, to denote people who live in Los Angeles. As far as I know, no one uses the forms ‘Angelini’, ‘Angelena’, or even ‘Angelene’, the latter to refer to several women or girls from Los Angeles. ↩
3. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that this is a worthy cause. However, if these charities think it’s worthwhile to send people out on to the streets (and it probably is worthwhile), they should train them to give leaflets and URLs and things to those (eminently sensible) people who simply will never agree to support these causes without careful consideration, nor give out their personal information to unknowns on the street. The fact that I was treated so rudely by this girl, my sole contact with the organization, ensures that in the future I will never have anything to do with the charity in question. ↩
4. Therefore it would be rare in San Diego to hear the words, ‘It’s like winter in Sydney.’ ↩

The Grand Canyon, when you get there, is undoubtedly spectacular.¹ This enormous canyon has an average depth of a mile, with sheer red rock-faces giving way to rock stacks dotted throughout its middle. It is so large that the Colorado River is often barely visible from the rim of the canyon. While it was about 70ºF where I was on the south rim (at about 9000 ft) in August, temperatures inside the canyon were then reported to be about 120ºF.

So, the Grand Canyon is an attractive sight (and site) for tourists. For the most part things are set up pretty well for tourists, with a ‘Grand Canyon Village’ located on the south rim, where there are lodges and shops, as well as clear and fenced paths along the rim of the canyon. However, I couldn’t help comparing the experience with that of being a tourist at Ayers’ Rock, which is a similarly remote natural wonder. As someone without a car, I found it relatively difficult to arrange transport to and from the canyon, which surprised me; when I got there there were often no clear paths to walk from the tourist village where I was staying to the paths along the rim.

I took the train west from San Antonio to get to Tucson nineteen hours later. Looking at the map when I was planning this part of my trip, it seemed evident that I should be able to fly from Tucson to Flagstaff for transport to the canyon. When it came to booking that transport, though, I found only one company with regular ‘shuttle’ service from Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon, which only operates two trips a day in its people-carrier. Fortunately, one of the times to go north to the canyon just about coincided with the schedule of my flights from Tucson via Phoenix, so I was able to take the trip with the shuttle. But when it came to leaving the canyon, there was nothing which would leave at the right time for me to check in efficiently for the flight to Los Angeles via Phoenix. I would have had to leave the canyon far earlier than necessary, which would have meant my spending at least five hours in the rather dull town of Flagstaff rather than walking along the canyon rim. As a result, I had to book a private taxi to take me the 70 miles from the canyon back to Flagstaff airport.

At the canyon itself, there is a well-organized network of shuttle buses to take people to different points in the village and along the rim path. This was fine—although some of the bus drivers I encountered were excessively officious, to the point of rudeness—but when, on the evening I was there, I wanted to walk from the lodge where I was staying to the rim (a distance of about half a mile), I found it ridiculously difficult so to do. There was a sign giving instructions about how to get to the rim from that point, but the instructions made no sense, and seemed to be self-contradictory. Evidently I wasn’t the only one who had difficulties, because I kept seeing several other groups of people wandering around scratching their heads. Eventually I found myself at the rim, having walked much further than strictly necessary, following the road open only to the shuttle buses and ending up at the Visitors’ Centre at the eastern extremity of the village. Later that evening, having walked west along the rim until sunset, I felt sure that I would be able to find the ‘proper’ pedestrian path back to my lodging. Surely, after all, many of the other people there with me would be doing the same thing? No, of course not: they all jumped in to their cars, a few got in to a shuttle bus, and drove back to the village. I pulled out my torch and took myself along the pavement-less road for the fifteen-minute walk.

As I say, this all felt remarkably different to how things work at Ayers’ Rock. When you get to Alice Springs, the first thing you see at the airport (apart from the signs about low-octane non-sniffable petrol) is a number of stalls advertising different tour companies to take you to the Rock. There is a wide array of different options: some offering everything to you ready-made, others just providing transport with the expectation that you’ve got or can make arrangements for accommodation at Yulara tourist village. Alternatively, you can fly all the way to Ayers’ Rock (Connellan) airport and be met there by shuttles which run to the accommodation at Yulara. Yulara is a few kilometres outside the national park, but again there are various options for shuttles into the park if you haven’t got a car.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have any serious difficulty at the Grand Canyon, but it struck me that some things are made unnecessarily difficult for those without a car—or rather plans haven’t really been made for people who would rather walk than go by road. I suspect that better options for transport to the Grand Canyon are available from Las Vegas,² but it seemed more sensible to me to come to Flagstaff, which is closer to the south rim, and in the same state as the canyon. Maybe I was wrong there.

Notes

1. Well, it’s got nothing on the valley of the mighty Windrush. Or something. I heard so many variations on this ‘joke’ when I was at the Grand Canyon that I guess it must be in some of the guide books. The most memorable version was one man saying to another, ‘Bah, mais nous, on a le Massif Central, quoi?’. ↩
2. The famous Las Vegas in Nevada, as opposed to the smaller town by the same name in New Mexico. ↩

The Alamo

The Alamo is the site of a show of brave Texan spirit. In 1836 about 200 people fighting for Texan independence were besieged by the Mexican president, General Santa Anna. After thirteen days, they were driven out and slaughtered by columns of Mexican soldiers. The Alamo is thus firmly lodged in the Texan state consciousness, as it symbolizes the Texan spirit of independence, being an example of great courage in the face of adversity. The only thing is, it would have been considerably more remarkable if they had in fact succeeded in defending the Alamo—a real David and Goliath story—but, as it is, we have a story of some men getting besieged and then getting defeated by the far stronger army which surrounded them. Say what you like about spirit of independence—and it is remarkable that they were able to hold out for so long—but it was still a resounding defeat.

I suspect as a result that your reaction to visiting the Alamo today depends on whether or not you are a Texan. The site today is laid out as a shrine to the men who died in its defence, with strict enjoinments to remove all hats, and an aura of hushed silence inside. To my outsider’s eyes this all seemed massively overdone. I wonder if there is an equivalent tourist destination in Mexico which takes an opposing viewpoint? Or if one day the Mexicans will be forced to say ‘sorry’ to the families of the brave Texans who lost their lives in the Texan revolution?

All over Texas—including in the Capitol in Austin—is the phrase ‘Remember the Alamo’. As my mind wandered, I began to work through different ways of punctuating the three-word phrase to give completely different meanings. Here are some of the ones I came up with: ¹

• ‘Remember the Alamo!’—a wife wants her husband to pick up an Alamo for dinner tonight.
• ‘Remember? The Alamo?’—two girls revising for their Texan History exam: one has forgotten and is being reminded by the other of that important step in the path to Texan independence.
• ‘Remember ‘the’, Alamo?’—a little Spanish boy being corrected sarcastically by his school teacher since he can’t remember the definite article in English.

Can anyone think of any more?

San Antonio River Walk

When it comes down to it, there’s little reason why the San Antonio River Walk should be as much of a tourist draw as it is. It is just really a series of pavements along a c. 4-mile stretch of the San Antonio river (from which the city takes its name) and associated canals. However, this is presented as one of the key attractions of the city, and I can understand why.

The paving along the side of the river is wide and smooth, and there are lots of trees and brightly-coloured flowers all along the route. As a result the walk is pleasant and shady. It is also much cooler than being on the street: you are about ten feet below street level, and rather than having a dry heat reflected back up at you from a wide street, the heat is absorbed by the water of the river. As a result, even though the temperature in San Antonio was about 100ºF every day I was there, I could happily eat outside at the restaurants along the river walk. Those restaurants are an added bonus: they are, I suppose, an application of that ‘café culture’ which I thought was so lacking in Austin. All in all, the river walk makes for a very pleasant way to spend your time in the centre of San Antonio.

San Fernando Cathedral and the Spanish Governor’s Palace

The cathedral of San Fernando is proudly described as the oldest cathedral in the United States still operating today. It was founded in 1731, which certainly makes it pretty old. It is very well maintained inside, as I hope my photographs show.

Rather than explaining the history of the Spanish Governor’s Palace in San Antonio in my own words, let me quote selectively from the leaflet I was given when I visited:

The Presidio de San Antonio de Béjar was the result of a rivalry between Spain and France in the early 1700s for dominance of the territory that is now a part of the southwestern United States. King Philip V of Spain ordered Don Martin de Alarcon, along with fifty soldiers, to build a mission and presidio between the San Antonio and San Pedro rivers. Upon Alarcon’s arrival in 1718 he found an Indian village encamped at the head of the San Antonio River and San Pedro Springs. On May 5th of that same year he established the Presidio de San Antonio de Béjar to protect the newly established Mission San Antonio de Valero. […]

This building, traditionally known as the Spanish Governor’s Palace, was the original Commandancia (residence and working office) for the Captain of the Presidio. After the threat of French encroachment in East Texas was gone, King Carlos III appointed the Marquis de Rubí inspector of frontier presidios. Rubí’s inspection resulted in the Royal Regulations of 1772 that ordered the capital of Spanish Texas be moved from the Presidio at Los Adaes, near Natchitoches in Louisiana, to the Presidio de San Antonio de Béjar. Rubí’s orders also stipulated that the Governor would move to San Antonio and take command of the presidio.

It’s a pretty little building, and worth a quick visit. However, I didn’t find much there to captivate me for very long.

All in all I greatly enjoyed my time in San Antonio. There are many things I didn’t do—including, for example, visiting the other former missions dotted around the outskirts of the city—but I was satisfied with what I did do and see, even if that did largely involve the relatively untaxing time spent on the river walk.

Notes

1. Fine. Perhaps the heat had got to me a little bit. ↩

In fact I was able to go to a number of impressive museums in Austin. Having since then been to San Diego I would suggest that that city is a close contender, if not a victor, in the number-of-museums-per-capita stakes.

Austin Museum of Art

When I was in Austin there was an exhibition covering the idea of ‘art as memory’. As with many exhibitions of modern art, it was as much about the way every individual work fitted in to the exhibition as a whole. There was a great deal presented to think about, but some well-worn anecdotes got trotted out, including the inevitable reference to Proust and A la récherche du temps perdu. No one mentioned Augustine, Confessions book X, though.

One British artist had typed what she could remember of the plots of Shakespeare plays from when she had read them at school, without any reference to books or other outside sources: each play typed on to a separate sheet. Some plays merely had a title at the top of an otherwise-blank page, while others were much fuller, albeit with omissions and errors due to the passage of time. Another artist’s work consisted of a series of black-bound books on a shelf. Each book had on its cover a type-written description of a Polaroid photo from her childhood, while inside the book were millions of 0s and 1s, the binary representation of the digitized photograph. Both these pieces are interesting enough in their own right, but I was left wondering what significant artistic value they offer to the world.

Mexic-Arte Museum

Down the street from the Austin Museum of Art, this museum—as you might expect—consists of artefacts from Mexico over the course of several hundred years. Nothing really sticks in my mind from the museum, apart from several revolutionary posters, and the fact that much of the display seemed to be about the museum’s founder, and the very great contribution the museum has made to the life of the Austin general population.

The Lyndon Baines Johnson Museum

This museum, on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, is in a building which has been leased by the university to the Federal government in perpetuity. The museum is extensive, covering nearly the whole of the twentieth century, starting from when Johnson was born in 1908 (in the rural settlement of Johnson City, Texas, which had been founded by his ancestors) to beyond his death, just after the museum and associated library were opened. His wife, Lady Bird Johnson, ² survives to this day.

The exhibits of the museum are interesting, even if facts which to me seem obvious were explained in the greatest of detail. Of course, the Second World War didn’t really start until 1942/3 when the Americans got involved! The exhibits really picked up with the discussions of Johnson’s own presidency. The former school teacher had wanted to be remembered as a president who had pushed through massive education reforms; instead, the story goes, he was saddled with the mess of the war in Vietnam which had been left by J.F. Kennedy when he was so inconveniently assassinated. The museum, being so pro-Johnson, can’t present any idea other than it was all Kennedy’s fault. No one would dream of saying that the Americans should have learnt from the Korean War, or that they simply didn’t know how to deal with jungle warfare, or that they had simply ignored intelligence about jungle warfare being offered to them by the British following their experience in Malaya. Of course not.

One interesting exhibit was the dictaphone recording of Lady Bird Johnson’s account of the day in Dallas when J.F.K. was shot (the Johnsons were in the car with him), and the photograph of Johnson being sworn-in on the presidential plane seven hours after Kennedy’s assassination, his hand on Kennedy’s Missal, which had been sitting on Air Force One.

The Bob Bullock Texas History Museum

This museum was very large, and very interesting. The first thing I saw was a temporary exhibition about immigrants who had arrived in the U.S.A. through the port of Galveston Island, on the Texan coast of the Gulf of Mexico. What was possibly the most amusing were the various boards throughout the exhibition which offered visitors the opportunity to write and pin up their answers to various questions posed, along the lines of ‘What hardships do immigrants today have to endure?’ The answers to these loaded questions ³ seemed to have been almost entirely written by tween girls with the attendant curly/bubbly handwriting and txt-speak spelling.

The permanent exhibits provided a very full account of Texas’ history, beginning really with the Spanish missionaries’ first interaction with the local indigenous peoples. Thanks to the museum I now properly understand who the American settlers were who were living in Texas while it was under Spanish control (as part of the Mexican colony) and later independent Mexican control. These are the people—brought in by special arrangement with the government in Mexico City to farm the land—who subsequently got sick of being mistreated by the newly independent Mexicans, leading them to revolt and gain independence for Texas. The museum also of course deals with the more recent history of Texas, including its involvement in the American forays into space exploration.

I then tried to go to the Harry Ransom Center, the museum attached to the University of Texas at Austin, but was unable to go since it is closed on Mondays. I would later be presented with the same difficulty with the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Anyway, as a result, I was able to visit the Texas Capitol, which was very enjoyable.

The Texas Capitol

I walked through a door and was suddenly inside the Texas Capitol building. I half-expected someone to come up to me to tell me to go to some formal visitors’ entrance, but no such thing happened. In fact, I was impressed that the public were free to roam around inside unaccompanied. I did then join a tour group, which was helpful since the guide explained things which I would not otherwise have known, such as the fact that the Texan Congress is only in session for about six months every two years, on odd-numbered years. In fact, the State Congress sat from January to June this year, and won’t be seen again until 2011! The House of Representatives (the lower house) can be recalled in case of some emergency, as can the State Senate, but a small group of senators led by the Lieutenant-Governor effectively runs the show while Congress is not in session.

I think that my photos give a good impression of the inside of the Capitol building, so won’t write more here.

Impressions of Austin

While I did many interesting things in Austin, it is not a city which particularly captivated me. The effects of the intense heat (~102ºF most days) were only compounded by the large expanses of concrete with little shade. This is a city which is not particularly geared-up either for tourists, or for pedestrians. My subsequent experiences of San Antonio, Los Angeles, and San Diego have reminded me how a city can promote itself to tourists, with helpful street signs, comfortable places to sit, and so on. In Austin, though, it’s almost unimaginable that you won’t have a car. Previously when I heard the term ‘café culture’ applied to various neighbourhoods of Sydney, I always thought that it denoted a rather vacuous or meaningless way of life. However, one thing which would immediately have improved Austin in my eyes would have been something of a ‘café culture’! I have mentioned that I could find very few worthwhile restaurants in downtown Austin, and there was also very little proper shopping: a few tourist shops ⁴ and a medium-sized convenience store (drugstore), but that’s about it. Evidently all the serious shopping takes place in retail parks away from the city centre.

I suspect that the character of the city changes entirely both when the students are in residence at the U.T. Austin campus, and when one of the many annual conventions is in town. But even then I don’t see how the deficiencies of the city (in my eyes) can be resolved without serious development. I wasn’t particularly sorry, therefore, to leave Austin for a train south to San Antonio.

Notes

1. ‘Greetings, foot-people! How are things back in the twentieth century?’ ↩
2. All the while I was in the museum, and to this moment, I could never get over the fact that this woman is called ‘Lady Bird’. Seriously. ↩
3. Many of the questions were really of the ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ genre. ↩
4. For everyone I know I almost bought a bumper sticker which had a Texas flag and the word ‘SECEDE’, which I found hilarious, but eventually I decided against it. ↩

View as PDF (best option) | View as PNG image

What you can see from the timeline is that there is a gap where I studied nothing between the 5th century B.C. and the 1st century B.C., and the a shorter gap between the end of my Medieval French paper (1530) and the 17th-century portion of my Ancient and French Classical Tragedy paper. Otherwise there was always theoretically something which I was studying during the period between the 1st century B.C. and the late 17th century.

What I haven’t included on the timeline are those things on which I was examined which are less easy to place in a historical continuum, such as current-day Romance linguistics (as opposed to the history of the development of the Romance languages, which conveniently bridges the gap between my Classics papers and the Medieval French paper), or my various French translation and language papers. The fact is, however, that the majority of my papers were based around some period of time (even if they were not strictly ‘history’ papers). The one paper which is split up into three distinct periods—coloured red—is Ancient and French Classical Tragedy, which covered fifth-century-BC Greek tragedy, the tragedy of Seneca the Younger (1st century AD), and 17th-century French tragedy. All the other papers are grouped together, organized by colour; I have included a note over the relevant periods giving the name of the paper in question.

Preparing the timeline

Some brief observations about the timeline itself. I prepared it using BeeDocs’ Timeline application (the non-3D version), which I used at the beginning of my revision period to give myself an overview of the content involved in each paper (or most of them, anyway). It’s an application I like—a very clean Mac application—but it has some shortcomings.

The biggest problem is probably the inability to change events’ vertical position. Timeline works out where it wants to put an event (based on the event’s dates) and then you can’t do anything to change the position. For the most part this doesn’t matter, but sometimes things get laid out in a somewhat boneheaded way: Augustine’s baptism in 387, for example, should come just below his conversion experience in 386 and just above his consecration as Bishop in ?395, and not right at the bottom of the page.

Another big shortcoming of Timeline is the fact that you can only have one font style for the whole document. Again, this makes sense from the point of view of simplicity: when you change the font, you can be assured that all the events and all the other text is now being set in that font. However, it would be good to have some character-level styling too. In particular I wanted to italicize the names of individual books, but that’s simply not possible.

Finally, there seems to be some slightly buggy behaviour in the version of Timeline I’m using. I decided to show the era only for events which involved dates B.C. This is pretty easy in Timeline: you just select one or more events at once, and change the relevant setting in the Events inspector. There are numerous options for displaying eras: ‘BC/AD’, ‘B.C./A.D.’, ‘BCE/CE’, etc. I wanted to have ‘B.C./A.D.’ but at some point I must inadvertently have selected ‘BC/AD’ (without the full stops) for some of the events. Try as hard as I might, I could not get those to display in the timeline document with the full stops, even though the Events inspector for those events showed that they were indeed set to ‘B.C./A.D.’. What eventually worked was saving the document, restarting the application, and reapplying the era-display change. That’s most certainly a bug.

Anyway, it’s time to start forgetting about most of this stuff now, I suppose.

All that changed for me last week. On Friday I was due to fly from Heathrow back to Geneva after the short university Easter holiday. I would be flying from Terminal 5, the day after it had opened to the public. At 11.19 p.m. on Thursday BA sent me a text message and an email saying that my flight had been cancelled. At that point I hadn’t heard about the chaos which had unfolded that day at the new terminal. Fortunately I was under no particular pressure to get back to Geneva on Friday, and so I was reasonably happy to rebook my flight for Sunday afternoon, assuming that two more days would allow BAA and BA to resolve those first-day problems.

My parents were still due to leave for Sydney on Friday evening from Terminal 4, so since I was still in England, I accompanied them to the airport to see them off. It was my experience that evening, and my subsequent experience at the new terminal on Sunday, which really opened my eyes to how much of a mess Heathrow is in.

BAA, you’ve successfully turned Terminal 4 into a backwater

For the last year or so the outside of Terminal 4 has been a maze of building-work as the car parks are reconstructed. There are sections of car park and road outside the terminal building which are completely boarded-off, which makes getting around the outside of the terminal increasingly difficult. A round-trip from a car parked by the curb to get a trolley for luggage has in many places been lengthened exponentially (depending where you are able to park, of course) as you try to navigate the construction-work hoardings.

Inside the terminal there was a certain degree of chaos precipitated by BA’s recent large-scale departure (although BA had moved most of its operations to Terminal 5 the day before, there are still some BA flights from Terminal 4; meanwhile the other airlines were expanding to fill the now-available space). We got past this and my parents were able to check in. The whole terminal is decidedly battered, but in a (to me) friendly, ‘lived-in’, kind of way.

Looking for the buses

The fun really began when I tried to get the coach back to Oxford. As far as I could see, there were no signs in any of the places I had been which gave details about how to catch buses from the terminal. I got outside and spoke to a BA employee standing on the curb; she said that buses leave from the bottom level (the departures are at the top). I negotiated the building works to get down to the bottom.

Outside the terminal at that level there were only signs to numbered bus stops, but no information about which buses leave from which stops. I went in to the terminal building, and eventually found (in spite of the lack of proper signs) something called ‘Bus information’ where there was a handwritten note saying that since the day before (when Terminal 5 had opened) buses only left from the central bus station which serves Terminals 1, 2, and 3. In order to get there, the sign said, you would have to take the (free) Heathrow Connect inter-terminal railway service from Terminal 4 to Heathrow Central. From the other end of the terminal building. Of course. Now, it would have been more helpful if the person I’d spoken to had told me that so I could have gone straight to the train, but perhaps she herself didn’t know that Terminal 4 is the new end of the universe from which the only way out is via Heathrow Central.

The ‘express’ train which isn’t really

The Heathrow Express is the much-vaunted express railway service from Heathrow to Paddington. I vaguely remember once hearing it described as ‘the most expensive railway in the world’ based on distance travelled vs. ticket cost. It used to be that you could get on the HEX at Terminal 4 and be in Paddington within twenty minutes. That is no longer the case—BAA, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that the HEX no longer needs to run to Terminal 4. Instead, the new(ish) Heathrow Connect service, which is a ‘slow train’ (in the common usage of the term) runs from Terminal 4 to Paddington (via Hayes, Southall, Hanwell, West Ealing, and Ealing Broadway).

In order now to get the really express service to Paddington from Terminal 4, you have to change trains at Heathrow Central. If I were someone arriving at Heathrow for the first time, having just stepped off a long and tiring flight, perhaps not being too comfortable with English, I wouldn’t be best pleased to be told to change trains in order to get the quickest service to Paddington. Terminal 4 is now officially a backwater.

On my way down to the railway station at Terminal 4, I was stopped by a Japanese girl looking for the Piccadilly line. I looked around for an obvious sign to the Underground, and since there’s nothing obvious in the vicinity, I assumed that like the Heathrow Express and the buses, the Underground no longer deigns to go to Terminal 4.² When it became painfully clear that this girl’s English was so limited that she couldn’t understand my suggestion to take the train for free and change at the first station, I said that I would take her to the Heathrow Central Underground station.

When we arrived at Heathrow Central station (for the HEX and Heathrow Connect), there were no signs anywhere of how to get to the Underground station.³ Because I was familiar with the basic layout of the place, I was able to follow my nose to the Underground station. We walked for about ten minutes, and it was only when we were within 100 yards of the Underground station that we saw a sign indicating its presence and both heaved a sigh of relief.

I then had some difficulty finding the Heathrow Central bus station, once again due to a lack of proper signs. When I eventually got there I was relieved to see that there was an Oxford bus sitting in its stop taking on passengers.

Terminal 5 tries to be too clever by half

I was quite looking forward to my time in Terminal 5, even more so following the problems of the terminal’s opening. (Yes, I revel in that sort of thing.) The building itself is as impressive as everyone seems to be saying—there are huge amounts of natural light streaming in to the building (at least on the departures level, and compared to the dark Terminals 1, 2, 3, and 4) and the structure itself is quite ingenious. Of course, it remains to be seen whether a pile of concrete, steel, and glass will still be considered good design in ten, twenty, or fifty years’ time. Terminals 2 and 3 in particular are very much architectural victims of their own ages.

Ultimately I didn’t have too bad an experience at Terminal 5, but the place was pretty empty, presumably as a result of the number of cancelled flights. My impression, though, is that there are a number of things which can go wrong, and which (sooner rather than later) will go wrong. There’s a large amount of innovative technology throughout the terminal, which I fear hasn’t been thought through properly.

My brother-in-law Toby kindly drove me to the airport. In the car park we found that there are green lights which appear over empty spaces, thus allowing you quickly to identify an empty space from a distance. However, I noticed a few lights over occupied spaces flickering on and off as we drove past.

I had checked in online the day before; I now simply needed to drop off my two bags. The woman at the desk I went to told me immediately that it was her first day—not only in the new terminal, it seemed, but this was her first time doing the job anywhere. There was an unnecessarily complicated series of buttons she had to press in order to get the belt to move my bags in to the hidden void beyond.

Then, when I got to security, I found that the system there is almost totally automated—you move a tray onto the moving rollers so that it automatically goes through the X-ray machine; then it’s supposed to stop automatically for you on the other side (I’m not quite sure how that’s supposed to work). You then go through the attendant rigmarole of emptying the tray: returning your coins, keys, and phones to your pocket; desisting from holding up your trousers long enough to put your belt back on; returning watch to wrist; and replacing your shoes. Once all that has been effected, the now-empty tray is supposed to take up its journey once more, and move to the end of the track where there is a unit which automatically drops the tray onto a lower-level track which moves in the opposite direction, ready for someone at the beginning of the process to take the tray and put it onto the top-level track replete with his own belongings.

Sounds frightfully clever, doesn’t it? I only had to watch for about thirty seconds to see that the system is inherently flawed. I watched one man grapple with the machine which had stolen his laptop from him: the tray had started moving again before he had taken his computer out, and had moved into the unit which drops the tray on to the lower track. It was only with the combined struggle of this hapless passenger and one of the security staff that the laptop was rescued from the inner workings of the machine. Then I watched as another tray couldn’t get into the transfer unit because it wasn’t precisely straight on the track (it had been skewed slightly by the person removing his belongings from it)—it got stuck at the entrance to the transfer unit, while the following trays began to crash into it. I can see that system getting old very quickly for staff and passengers alike.

Finally, when I got on the plane, and after everyone was seated, it was announced that the baggage hadn’t yet been loaded on to the flight.⁴ We were told this like it was the most normal thing in the world, and the Captain said that it would only take fifteen minutes or so. After an hour we were finally ready to depart. It’s been widely reported that the problems with Terminal 5 stem principally from the baggage-delivery system. If that system is as dunderheadedly ‘innovative’ as the track at the X-ray machine, it’s easy to imagine why the whole thing fell over on the first day.

I can conclude with little else than to say that BAA desperately needs to sort out Heathrow, and fast. But I think that they know that already.

Much of this article was written while listening to a live audio feed of communications with Air Traffic Control for the final approach to JFK airport in New York, which helped to keep me in the right frame of mind. John happened to send me the link on Skype while I was sitting here writing!

Notes

1. Nevertheless, I freely acknowledged, and frequently complained about, the problems with arriving at Heathrow. All too often when on a long-haul flight landing in the early morning we would have to sit on the tarmac for an extended period after landing because the requisite ground staff hadn’t bothered to show up for work—either to operate the airbridge, so we couldn’t get out—and/or to supply the generator, so we had to sit in darkness because noise restrictions at that time of day prevent the use of aero engines on the ground. Then there are the long queues at immigration, for both the UK and outer-darkness sections, often thanks to the Home Office and BAA only employing a tiny number of people at any one time to man a much larger number of available desks. Then there is the almost interminable wait for bags to show up on the carousel. All this makes for a slow arrivals process—at Sydney my record is seventeen minutes from touchdown to standing on the curb outside the terminal; it’d be a good day at Heathrow if I could manage the same thing in forty-five minutes. ↩
2. As it turns out, I was wrong here—the Piccadilly line still goes to Terminal 4. The Underground station was closed between January 2005 and September 2006 while the junction for the new section of track going to Terminal 5 was built, but the station is once again fully operational. It seems that half of all Heathrow Tube trains go on the Terminal 4 loop and then to Heathrow Central; while the other half go to Heathrow Central and then on the new spur to Terminal 5. The fact remains, however, that there were no signs for the Underground in Terminal 4 that either the Japanese girl or I had seen. ↩
3. This is where BAA perhaps suffers from a conflict of interest. On the one hand they have some duty to their customers—the passengers—to provide understandable signage to all of the services available at the airport, including the Underground trains. However, because they own the Heathrow Express and part-own the Heathrow Connect (with First Great Western), they want to trap people into using those services rather than the Tube, from which they don’t stand to make any profit. ↩
4. I’m going to say nothing of the fact that BA managed to stuff up my seat-selection. When I got to the gate, they were hyper-apologetic because the system was giving them a bizarre message saying that I wasn’t checked-in, which was patently untrue. I didn’t cotton on that part of the reason they were being so apologetic was because I had effectively been moved from a front-row window seat to a back-row middle seat. I was told to speak to the senior member of crew on board the plane, who was not nearly as dignified as his colleagues at the gate and brushed me off in a highly discreditable manner. ↩

I am living in a flat in Geneva, going to classes in the university. However, I had to wade through an awful lot of red tape to get here. I’m not going to go into details of the process of applying to the university, which was further complicated by the fact that both Issy and I were initially rejected to come and study here for a year. ¹ Nor will I bore you with the details of my seemingly interminable flat-hunt, since that wasn’t hindered by layers of bureaucracy so much as a very constricted accommodation market for Geneva with very little advertised on the Web. No, what follows is an account of the lengths to which I have been forced to go to establish myself as a resident in Geneva.

Swiss Consulate, London

The first thing to do was to find out what would be required of me as an Australian passport-holder going to study in Switzerland for a year. The website of the Swiss consulate in London provided absolutely no information for people wanting to travel to the country; it merely gave a few details for Swiss citizens living in the UK. So I sent an email to the consulate asking what I should do. A reply came back to me on the fifth day after I’d sent my original request, saying that I would need to fill in the attached form in triplicate (of course), provide photocopies of my passport ‘including valid visa and previous Swiss visas’ (it didn’t define the ambiguous phrase ‘valid visa’), a curriculum vitae with ‘explanation of the intentions of the applicant in Switzerland’, ‘Written confirmation that the applicant will leave Switzerland after the permitted period’ (that one made me laugh), examination certificates, an ‘attestation’ (little did I know that I would become pretty intimate with this word) from the university in Switzerland that I had a place, proof that I’d paid my university fees, and evidence of financial resources to support me during my time in the country. Phew, what a lot of paper: I knew that they just wanted to make sure that I was bona fide, so I set about gathering everything together and filling in the forms.

The only thing I lacked was the formal acceptance letter from the University of Geneva. When eventually that came, I made arrangements to travel to London to present my application at the consulate (sorry, ‘Embassy of Switzerland’) near Baker Street the following Monday. They would only receive visitors between 9am and midday, so I took the 7.30 a.m. train from Oxford to Paddington. I arrived at the consulate at 8.58, and joined the short queue of people already there waiting for the doors to be flung wide. Well, when I say ‘flung wide’, I mean we were let in one by one by a man who sought to examine our passports and establish that we were there for a productive purpose, gave us a numbered ticket, and invited us to sit down in front of the two windows established for serving non-Swiss nationals. Of course, only one of the windows was occupied. I was fifth in line.

Eventually my number was called and I went to the window, which was manned by a German-speaking woman. Perhaps I should say that it was staffed by a German-speaking woman? I said that I was applying for a student visa, and presented the requisite pile of documents (about half an inch thick!), at the top of which was a covering letter I’d written, giving precise details of each of the documents which formed my dossier.

If I had to sum up my experience in the consulate in just one word, I would say exasperating. The woman kept asking me where this or that document was, and I had to keep drawing her attention to the numbered list on my covering letter which she had glanced over but had evidently not taken in properly. Even though I had only been told that I would have to provide three copies of the application form, when I said that there was only one copy of all the other documents, I was greeted with a sharp intake of breath being sucked through teeth, as if to say, ‘What’s all this, then?’.

I had provided photocopies of all my exam certificates—GCSE, AS-level, A-level, the one AEA I did at school, and the type-written summary of the results of my first-year Oxford exams (the Preliminary Examination). These copies had been certified by my College’s secretary, since that had been demanded when I made the application to the university. Apparently that wasn’t good enough.

‘How do I know that your exam certificates are not forgeries?’ I assured her that they were, of course, not, since I was not in the business of forging examination certificates.

‘Well, people will try anything to get a visa.’ I couldn’t think of any appropriate response, and so let that comment hang there between us. I had no reason to disbelieve her: I’m sure people will try anything to get a visa.

Then she got annoyed with me because I didn’t know exactly what date the term here would begin, or when I would need to be here for language examinations. ² ‘You have to make things easy for me. I have to write a letter on your behalf to the authorities in Switzerland.’ Again, all I could do was apologize. ‘Where have you written that you will need to sit an exam before the beginning of term?’ I had written it nowhere. So she went away and came back with a blank piece of paper for me to write that fact on before giving her paper back.

Then came the next blow—the Australian bank statement I had provided as evidence of appropriate financial resources was ‘too old’ (since I get my statements quarterly, this one had been printed two months previous). She asked if I could arrange for the bank to send me an up-to-the-minute statement. I said that I could, but knowing that would be a hassle, I suggested that I could equally just make a print-out from my Internet banking records. Oh yes, she said, that would be fine. Oh no, you can’t use this computer (I would have been surprised if I could, to be honest); you’ll have to go to an Internet café near Baker Street station. Brilliant.

She then asked me what language the teaching would be in. When I said that it would be in French she went away again to get a form which had evidently been photocopied many times, which had rows for German, French, Italian, and English, and columns for different levels of linguistic competence, ranging from ‘Keine’ to fluent. She muttered under her breath, ‘English, obviously fluent’, and asked me if I spoke any German or Italian. I apologetically shook my head no to both questions. She then started talking to me in French, asking me to define my competence in the language—a question which I evaded just by carrying on talking, saying that I didn’t really know, but that I was a student of French at Oxford and had been taught well, such that I could hardly be described as ‘fluent’ (and of course I forgot the word for ‘fluent’–how appropriate!) but I could hold my own. Evidently this seemed to satisfy her since she ticked some box or other (I don’t remember where it was on the matrix) and added that form to the now-bigger pile of papers.

But the linguistic assessment wasn’t over, oh no! She went away again to get another blank piece of paper, and came back, and said to me—in French—that I would need to write something. But what should I write?, I asked. It doesn’t matter, she said, just as long as I did it all on my own. She sent me away to a table stacked with promotional literature while she set about dealing with my papers. She called me back after a brief moment to ask (still in French) what I would be studying, since the attestation from the university simply said ‘Faculté des Lettres’. She asked if that meant that I ‘speak’ Latin, and I said no, ‘But you’re good at it?’, and I conceded the point. I returned to my writing and she started dealing with the next person. I sat and wrote a hundred words or so, hammering home the point that I was just going to go to Geneva for a year, just to speak some French, like just about every other third-year Modern Languages undergraduate in the country.

I really didn’t mind this linguistic assessment. What I found utterly ridiculous, however, was that absolutely no mention of any such test was made in any of the extensive documentation I’d seen about applying for a visa. In fact, it felt like the woman behind the glass was just trying to find more things to throw at me in the hope that something would trip me up! After I‘d finished my oeuvre I waited for her to finish with that person, and then dashed up to the window to hand it in, slightly confusing the person who was in fact next in line.

I then went to the Internet café to print out my banking records. Having got back to the consulate, I was able to do my trick of dashing up to the window after one person left and before the next got there. When I handed it in, the woman seemed to be pathetically grateful that I’d actually come back. It would take six to eight weeks for my application to be approved by the appropriate authorities in Switzerland, after which time I would have to come back to the consulate to have the visa inserted into my passport.

While in Australia during July and August I got a voicemail saying that my application had been approved (that was a relief!). I go to London when I get back to the UK to hand in my passport. Of course, the visa couldn’t be stuck in there and then: it would take twenty-four hours. When I return the following day to pick up the passport, it is accompanied by a very confusing document, or rather a fragment of a document written in French which seemed to imply that the visa in my passport wasn’t really a visa. The document also said that I would need to go to the ‘relevant Cantonal authorities’ within eight days of my arrival in Switzerland. I already knew this latter fact, but decided that that was their purpose in leaving me this document, rather than that stuff about ‘this visa isn’t really a visa’. It turns out that I didn’t need to have worried about whether or not I would get turned away upon arrival, because when I handed my passport over to the immigration official at Geneva airport open at the non-visa visa page, he said in surprise, ‘Un visa? Dans un passeport australien?!’

In search of a residence permit

I knew that I would have to go to the Office Cantonal de la Population ³ within eight days of my arrival in Switzerland: it had said as much on that strange part-document I’d got when I’d retrieved my passport from the Swiss consulate, and on the back of my original acceptance letter from the university.

The thing is, though I had heard many different accounts of what documents I would need to take to the OCP: one school of thought said that I would only need my passport, university acceptance letter, passport photos, and 130 CHF to settle the relevant fees; while Issy—who had arrived earlier than me and had already had a frustrating experience at the OCP—suggested that I would need everything which I had already taken to the consulate in London.

I decided to play it safe, and took everything. Fortunately I was able to find two passport photos in my wallet (a couple of years old now, but I don’t look that different!) because otherwise I knew there would be unpleasantness and I would be turned away.

By all accounts, the office would get very busy indeed, and so having worked out the best bus to take (thanks to information from Issy), I arrived there at about 8.50 a.m. Although the office was due to open at 9, there were already people—members of the public—milling around inside. So I push my way in.

The first stage was to queue up at the outer reception desk in order to inquire exactly what I would need to fill in and what documents I needed to present in order to get my residence permit. The man behind the desk—we speak in French, even though he had been dealing with the previous enquirer in curt English—kindly gives me a certain form for non-EU citizens and tells me to take a numbered ticket. My first of very many numbered tickets over the coming days.

I go in to the main room, which has a large waiting area and about ten windows on one side where the appropriate business is taking place. In spite of the fact that it is still before 9 a.m., the room was chock full of people. According to the number display showing who was currently being served, I was about one-hundred-and-tenth in line. I sit down to look at the form and fill it in as best I can: it was in fact largely the same as the form I’d already filled in for the consulate in London, which included requests for details that just didn’t apply to my situation as a student-resident, such as who my employer in Geneva is.

The numbers are being called forward very slowly. Evidently this is going to be a long, long wait. After about fifteen minutes, however, a woman breezes through asking that anyone who has come to study at the Université de Genève wait in line behind desk K. Hooray, the opportunity to queue-jump! I was fourth in line in that queue. It turned out that there were about thirty students doing the same thing as me on that day, which wasn’t too surprising since it was exactly a week before the term was due to begin and it was the first day that the university was open for the registration of new students.

When I got to the front of the queue, I handed over my form. The woman sent a minion scuttling away who brought back a thick file, which contained all of the documents I’d originally submitted in London. It was something of a strange experience to see them all again—I’d come to get used to the idea that once you submit a form, you don’t see it again! Evidently this is a country which hasn’t embraced the possibility of scanning documents and dealing with digital versions (which take up far less space)…

While this was all going on I began to wonder why exactly I was required to hand over two passport photos. One would have sufficed for them to stick on to my residence permit, and I had already submitted passport photos attached to each of the three application forms I’d handed over in London, and which, as far as I could tell, were all sitting on that desk in front of me.

Things were moving fairly quickly. Once I’d paid the fee (nothing in officialdom here can happen without the payment of the appropriate fee, I’ve now discovered), the woman gave me a receipt, and returned my letter of attestation from the university, complete with the all-important stamp saying that I’d shown up at the OCP. She then told me that they would need me to post them something which I would receive from the university, but I was distinctly unsure what document she meant. I decided I would surely be told at the university itself. And so, after she’d told me that it would take three–four weeks for me to receive my residence permit, I went on my merry way, rejoicing that thanks to the special (and completely ad-hoc) students’ queue, my time at the dreaded Office Cantonal de la Population had been short. Little did I know that I would be returning for an extended stint…

Registering at the university

The university had informed us that we would need to register there during the week before term began, after going to the Office Cantonal de la Population, taking the letter of attestation stamped by the OCP as proof that that was indeed the case. I had originally planned to go to the university on the Tuesday, but that was because I’d been counting on having to spend an extended period at the OCP. When I got out of the OCP before 10 a.m., blinking in the sunlight, I decided that I seemed to be on a roll and so should go and register at the university that day.

I ended up spending four hours at the university. When I finally got out of there, I looked back on what I’d in fact achieved, and realized quite how inefficient the whole process had been. This is what needed to happen during my registration:

1. Have my photograph taken;
2. Show the originals of all my examination certificates—the same examination certificates of which I had sent certified copies with my university application;
3. Give information about my address in Geneva, and fill in a questionnaire about the information available to me while I was applying to the university (I had fun with that one!);
4. Pick up my student card, the invoice for the first semester’s fees, and a few leaflets for new students at the university.

Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? Well, it should have been. But this is how it worked:

1. Go in to the building to be greeted by a friendly student helper who looks at my university attestation stamped by the OCP and hands me a stack of documents which include the forms I need to fill in, together with the all-important numbered ticket; he directs me to the second floor where all the fun’s happening.
2. Arrive at the second floor to find hundreds of people sitting around on the few chairs and on the floor leaning against the wall. There are a few student helpers standing around. I go up to one, and show her my numbered ticket; she says that I will probably have to wait about thirty–forty minutes, but that I could go and have my photograph taken now at the booths next to her. So I have my photograph taken. To this day, I’m not sure what purpose that photograph served since there is a photo pasted into my student card which is just one of the passport photos I submitted with my university application.
3. I sit on the floor and wait. And wait. Fortunately I had a book with me ⁴ to pass the time. Thirty–forty minutes’ wait? Er, try more like ninety.
4. Eventually a block of numbers which includes that on my ticket is called forward: I follow the crowd. We then have to wait in a queue for about ten minutes more before being let into a medium-sized lecture theatre at the front of which a woman is standing taking people’s forms and tickets. I hand mine over, and am told to sit down (it really wasn’t clear what was going on), and my name would be called once she’d pulled out my dossier. After waiting another ten minutes or so, she starts calling out people’s names and we go to pick up our dossiers, after which we queue at the back of the room. I leaf through my dossier, to find absolutely everything I’d originally sent to the university: all my application forms, my covering letter, my passport photos, even the FedEx air waybill which had accompanied the packet of documents I’d sent!
5. I stand and queue for another half-hour. A girl a little way behind me is having an argument with one of the members of staff: she is a returning student, and wants to know what she should be doing; he says that registration this week is only for new students and so she shouldn’t be there; she says that she received a letter telling her to come this week; he assures her that no such letter was sent; she says that even if it wasn’t sent, she got it; he storms off. Good times.
6. Eventually I get to the front of that queue and am invited to a desk with a bearded man sitting behind it. He asks to see my dossier, and my original exam certificates. He establishes that I’m just there for two semesters. He pulls my student card out of the dossier (I’d already seen it, of course), folds it, and hands it over to me. He holds on to the dossier, and directs me to the desk next to the exit.
7. I go to the desk next to the exit, hand over the questionnaire I’d had to fill in, and in return receive the bill for my fees. What an exchange!
8. Finally I am able to leave. No one has told me anything about the document which I need to send to the OCP, so evidently I’m going to have to do some more investigation.

What seems so ridiculous about this chain of events was where I had to go through the rigmarole of picking up my dossier (hand in form and ticket to woman, sit down, wait for name to be called, receive dossier which includes the form I’ve just handed in) only to hand it to the bearded man! It was like a very slow relay race, where instead of a baton, there’s a stack of documents in a yellow file; instead of a high-speed sprint, there’s a lot of standing in queues. What a waste of time! Surely it would have been far more efficient to have made the bearded man my first point of contact? He could have then fetched my dossier for himself! Or, indeed, even more efficient would have been for him to have pulled up all my records on the computer system (I know that they had been entered in a database, since there was a print-out of my record in the dossier), and used the information there to speed things along? I know, crazy stuff.

Inside a Swiss bank

I needed to open a bank account (yes, a Swiss bank account, heh) as soon as possible, since I needed to pay for things like rent and my university fees, as well as to settle the deposit on my rented flat. And so, after leaving the university following my experience of the process of immatriculation (to use the French word), I had some lunch and took myself to the branch of a bank I’d previously identified as suitable for my needs.

Inside the bank, everything was plush and quiet. I went to the reception desk and said that I wanted to open a basic current account. They asked for a proof of identity, and I handed over my passport. But didn’t I have my residence permit?, they asked. No, I didn’t, I explained: I’d been to the OCP that morning and wouldn’t receive any such permit for another month or so. But didn’t I have an attestation to that effect? There’s that word again—attestation.

The only attestation I had thitherto come across was the attestation that I had a place at the university—the same one which had been stamped that morning at the OCP and then subsequently re-examined at the university. I brought this out as proof of my bureaucratic experience until that moment.

They looked at the university attestation and said no, that wouldn’t do. What someone in my situation needed, apparently, was a specific attestation from the OCP that although I didn’t yet have my residence permit, they were aware of my presence and would in due course deign to send me one. Once I came back with that particular document, they said, I’d be able to make an appointment to open an account.

So, that was that. I had to go away to go to the Office Cantonal de la Population to get the document to allow me to have an appointment to open a bank account. Not in the least bit convoluted.

By that time I was pretty tired and called it a day. Anyway, the OCP was closed by then: they close at 3.30 p.m. ’Nuff said on that matter.

Back to the OCP for the attestation

The following morning I decided to ring up the OCP to find out how I should go about getting the attestation required by the bank. I dreaded to think how long before my call would be answered, but in fact it was answered within one or two minutes. The woman at the other end of the line asked me for my name and date of birth so that she could find me on the computer system (see, they do use computers!). Yes, she said, I could get the attestation that day by coming to the office and filling in the appropriate form. But I should come quickly because it was already pretty full. Big surprise there.

So I return to the OCP, now familiar with the bus route. I go to the first reception desk, explain that I merely want an attestation that I would be receiving a residence permit (permis de séjour) and they say that that’s pretty simple. For a fleeting moment the vision of the man just producing the attestation there and then flashed before my eyes. I should be so lucky. He handed me the appropriate form, and I took a numbered ticket and entered the main room.

If I thought there had been a lot of people there the day before, I would need to reassess my interpretation of ‘a lot of people’ today. According to the electronic number display, I was one-hundred-and-eightieth in line. I was in for a long wait. I filled in the form as best I could—once again it didn’t quite apply to my situation, since it implied that they would be posting the attestation to me. I wasn’t going to queue for an extended period—five hours, as it turned out—just to be told that they’d post me a slip of paper.

I sat and waited. And waited. And read. And waited. And got restless. And went to the loo. And came back. And boy, was it mind-numbing.

Eventually my number was called. I pinched myself to see if I was dreaming, and then hurried to the designated window before they had the opportunity to think that I’d done a runner and call the next person. I explained what I wanted, and handed over the form. The woman tapped away at her computer. She then proceeded to write out the document, and print it. She asked me to read it, to make sure it said what I wanted it to say (oh, how kind!); when I said that it seemed fine, she stamped it and asked for the fee. They print the receipt onto the document itself, to prove that it‘s a fully paid-up official document. Then the area where the receipt has been printed (by a dot-matrix printer) has to be stamped and initialled to prove that the receipt is valid. So, the attestation (the document I was after) needed to have an attestation that it had been paid for (the over-printing of the receipt), which in turn had to have its validity attested (by means of the stamp and initials). Why stop there?

As I was leaving the window I asked the woman in passing what the university document was that I would have to post to them—she said that it was the bill for the fees which I’d been given yesterday, and held up a copy of someone else’s as an example. I said that I had it with me—would she be able to take a copy of it and save me the trouble of posting it in? Yes, she would. I was worried that she would charge me for the copying, and then go through the rigmarole of printing the receipt on the copy and doing all that further attestation stuff, but happily it wasn’t to be. Evidently I had discovered a very slight degree of flexibility within the very rigid system.

I was particularly glad to get out of that building and back into the sunlight. I returned to the bank that afternoon to be told that I wouldn’t be able to make an appointment to open an account until late on the following Thursday afternoon. But at least I had my attestation.

I think that’s probably enough of that. Don’t even get me started on the rigmarole involved in getting the phone line connected…

Notes

1. My application (and Issy’s) was originally rejected on the grounds that I hadn’t done any maths or science for A-level. In Switzerland, like in France, school-leavers are all but forced to do at least some maths and science for their Baccalaureate exams, and so a local student applying to a university without any qualification in those subjects would be decidedly suspicious. In the UK, however, the fashion is only to do three or four subjects for A-level, all of which you choose according to what interests you and what contributes to whatever subject you want to study at university. ↩
2. At that point I was under the mistaken assumption that I would have to show up early to prove my competence at the language. I was later told, and was very glad to hear, that as an étudiant libre, I would have to suffer no such thing. ↩
3. For those that don’t know, Switzerland is a confederation, whose member-states are called ‘Cantons’. So the Office Cantonal de la Population might be called the State Population Office in a federation of states like the USA or Australia. ↩
4. At the time, I was reading Storm over Uluru: The Greatest Hoax of All by Peter English. It’s a really fascinating account of the handover of Ayers’ Rock to its so-called traditional owners (when in fact the corporation which presents itself as such is nothing of the sort) which took place in 1985. The book is out of print now (and is quite poorly written in places), but is still fairly widely-available second-hand. I had rescued it from the downstairs of the Shed before leaving Witney: even though the book hadn’t been immersed in the flood, the low-grade glossy paper cover has wrinkled from sitting in the very damp post-flood environment for a mere few weeks. ↩