Well, on the train from New York to Princeton Junction I got to witness just such an event. A girl sitting opposite me stopped a chap who was passing through; it became clear that they had been in the same fairly close-knit social group in New Jersey at some point (probably when they were at school) but had since fallen out of touch. As it happened, both were now working in Manhattan: she as a personal assistant for some public-relations dragon, he spending eight days a week living it large in investment banking. It sounded to me like two stereotypical ‘young-adult jobs’ from a movie (cf. The Pursuit of Happyness, The Devil Wears Prada). Because of his lengthy working hours, he is living in New York in an apartment he shares with some mutual acquaintances, but she evidently still lives with or near her parents somewhere in northern New Jersey.

After a while, the well of ‘Did you hear about so-and-so?… No, she chucked him…’ conversation ran dry and so our friends turned to personal anecdotes to keep things going. I’m afraid I wasn’t in a position to take notes (it would have been too obvious, as we were facing each other), so can’t give direct quotations. However, the young lady told a story the gist of which was as follows:

She had been at a party and had somehow become quite inebriated. She then got into her car to drive back to her father‘s house (at this point, a collective sharp intake of breath from those of us in earshot and listening in on this not-at-all-muffled conversation: we could guess what was coming). Quite close to home she drove off the road into some sort of electrical substation, thus cutting off the power to the whole neighbourhood. Somehow, in spite of some fairly extensive injuries, she was able to drive away, and so went home.

About ten minutes later there came a ring at the doorbell, and she opened the door to two policemen. They had been sent to investigate the damage to the substation, and had seen her car in a sub-par state in the driveway. They asked her straight off whether she had driven in to the substation, and she replied that she had. However, she reserved her right to avoid self-incrimination as clarified by the fifth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and refused to answer any more questions. Her father hadn’t realized that she had come home, but attracted by the sound of the doorbell he came to find his daughter in conference with the long arm of the law just as the said long arm was trying to drag her down to its local lair, but he persuaded the knackers that it was more appropriate that she should be taken to the hospital for attention to her injuries.

The trial is pending. The defendant has already admitted that she drove into the substation, and so presumably will face a conviction for dangerous driving. But the more serious charge would be that she was Driving Under the Influence of alcohol (or Driving While Intoxicated: the crime is given one of the two names in the various states¹) when the accident occurred. This would certainly have a penalty on her licence, and possibly also come with time in gaol to match. However, apparently her solicitor has advised her that the police cannot prove that she was drunk when she had her accident; instead, it is supposedly a realistic proposition that she was so traumatized by the crash that she got home and immediately put away half a bottle of Bourbon, thus explaining her condition when the police showed up at the door. Even the defendant herself thought that this was a hilarious proposition, and those of us seated around who were purposefully not listening in exchanged amused glances. Anyway, good luck to her and her lawyer; I hope the jury appreciates her appeal to basic evidentiary logic. Evidently the lawyer comes from the O.J. Simpson school of defence (‘if the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit’).

Still, at least the crash happened in densely-populated New Jersey, and not as she was trying desperately to drive across the desert in the middle of the night.

Notes

1. In Austin, at the beginning of this trip, I was surprised and disturbed to find a fleet of taxis which bore the name ‘DWI Guy’ on the side. I wondered why any taxi driver would advertise the fact that he had been even accused, let alone convicted, of driving drunk, or indeed why any potential passenger would get in such a taxi. It was only as I was leaving that I realized that they were in fact advertisements for a local criminal defendant who specialized in drunk-driving charges. ↩

[I]n the same way that race is at the core of what it means to be American and at the core of an American experience and class is at the core of British experience, I think that language is at the core of Canadian experience.

—Official Languages Commissioner, Graham Fraser, quoted in the Hill Times, 31st August 2009

Can we really define these three countries that simply? This troubles me. I know that class-consciousness is far more acutely tuned in the UK than in other places, and my present travels through the southern United States—and elsewhere in the country—have shown that racial considerations are still a daily concern. In fact I can only disagree outright with the suggestion that ‘language is at the core of Canadian experience’: it is really a question of where you live, since, for example, residents of British Columbia can rely on English as a true lingua franca, whereas in some of the eastern provinces (primarily, of course, Quebec) the conflicting relationship between French and English is more of a concern.

What then, Mr Fraser, is at the core of the ‘Australian experience’? Apologizing for things you had nothing to do with? (Zing.)

Notes

1. Yes, that’s right: I just coined a bastard compound. Deal with it. Or would you rather I’d written ‘glottaphiles’? ↩

# | View site

This photo is a stitch of ten separate frames; you’ll note that I didn’t photograph the floor or the ceiling, which is why they are just black holes in the panorama. You need QuickTime in order to be able to view it, I’m afraid, and it probably won’t work in Internet Explorer.¹ I will be publishing lots of photos from the Met and the Cloisters tomorrow or the next day, I hope; consider this a foretaste of things to come.

(It might take a while for the full image to load, because it’s quite big. Hint: hold down the shift key on your keyboard to zoom in, and hold down ctrl/control to zoom out.)

The gallery notes for this painting:

The picture covering the wall of this room is a rare survivor of a form of public art and entertainment that flourished in the nineteenth century. Invented in Great Britain in the 1780s, panoramas (Greek for “all-sight”) were displayed within the darkened interior of a cylindrical building. Illuminated by concealed skylights, these circular paintings offered the illusion of an actual landscape surrounding the viewer. Like Vanderlyn’s Versailles, panorama subjects were usually foreign landmarks. Visitors paid a small admission fee and were rewarded with vicarious travel to different parts of the world. During the Industrial Revolution, when urban populations expanded, global exploration blossomed, and tourism surged, the public crowded to panoramas as they do to movies today.

A native of Kingston, New York, Vanderlyn studied historical painting in Paris during the Napoleonic era and conceived his panorama project after seeing the American artist and inventor Robert Fulton establish a panorama theater on the Boulevard Montmartre. Vanderlyn made his preparatory studies at Versailles in 1814 and 1815 and executed the huge painting (circumference 166 feet) in a barn in Kingston three years later. He also raised money to construct, behind City Hall in New York, a handsome Palladian building called the Rotunda, in which he exhibited his panorama and historical paintings. The Rotunda was, in effect, New York’s first art museum.

In Vanderlyn’s panorama, the spectator stands at the head of the grand staircase on the parterre d’eau, or water park, with a view to the east of the massive western façade of the palace and to the west of the vast gardens, great avenue, and grand canal. Vanderlyn cast the scene in the warm sunshine of a late summer afternoon (according to the panorama program, between four and five P.M., in September 1814) and animated it with fashionably dressed visitors. In the center balcony of the palace stands King Louis XVIII, the restored Bourbon monarch, saluting a small crowd on the parterre below. On the right side of the view of the gardens is a circle of figures that includes Czar Alexander I of Russia (raising a monocle to his eye) and King Frederick William II of Prussia, who helped defeat Napoleon and restore the monarchy. (The location of these figures is indicated on the original diagram key to the panorama reproduced on the kiosk in this gallery.) The artist portrayed himself near the czar and the king, pointing out the sovereigns to an unidentified companion.

Notes

1. You should be using a modern browser, anyway. ↩

That’s the problem with loving typography. It’s always a pleasure to discover a formally gorgeous, subtly expressive typeface while walking along a street or leafing through a magazine.

Indeed. And, you’ve got to love the English language: consider the marked difference between the meanings of ‘formally gorgeous’ (of typefaces) and ‘formerly gorgeous’ (of washed-up movie starlets).

# | View site | via Daring Fireball

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>. ↩

Funny Words and Sounds

• Antigodish, NS
• Barrie, ON
• Bartibog, NB
• Chilliwack, BC
• Cranberry Portage, MB
• Flin Flon, MB
• Forget, QC (presumably really pronounced ‘forjé’)
• Hope, BC
• Knob Lake, NL
• L’Épiphanie, QC
• Medicine Hat, AB
• Moose Jaw, SK
• Nipissing, ON
• Sexsmith, BC

Reminiscent placenames

• Aberdeen, SK
• Aylesbury, SK
• Bangor, SK
• Bridgewater, NS
• Chatham, NB
• Chatham, ON
• Chester, NS
• Dartmouth, NS
• Gloucester Junction, NB
• Halifax, NS
• Kensington, PE
• Lancaster, QC
• Liverpool, NS
• London, ON
• Maidstone, SK
• New Carlisle, QC
• New Glasgow, NS
• Newcastle, NB
• Norwich, ON
• Oxford, NS
• Paris, ON
• Scarboro, Pickering, Whitby, Oshaw … Brighton; ON (adjacent along the railway line east of Toronto)
• Windsor, NS
• Windsor, ON
• Woking, BC
• Woodstock, NB
• Woodstock, ON
• Yarmouth, NS

First, that hilarious pronunciation, of which the French make so much fun. At Mass on Sunday the girl singing the Gloria managed to make the word gloire rhyme with père.¹ In fact many speakers’ vowels have been shifted so far from the pronunciation in the Hexagon that I really have to stop and listen hard in order to be able to understand what they are saying.

There is also a tendency to hyper-nasalize French nasal vowels, which also shifts the individual vowels’ position. For example, the word pain (bread) is hyper-nasalized to be pronounced more like [paeeeng].² Similarly, as I write this on the train from Quebec to Montreal, the woman behind me is on her mobile phone making arrangements for a taxi to meet the train, which she pronounces [traeeeng]. These vowels are often nasalized to such an extent that that final [g] becomes really audible.

However, not everyone I’ve met speaks with such a strong Canadian accent, in the same way that not everyone in the U.S. speaks with a southern twang or a New Jersey whine.³ (Or, indeed, that not everyone in Australia speaks with a rough-as-guts fair-dinkum accént.) I have come across several people who have evidently been brought up speaking in the French-French fashion. Those are the ones, of course, whom I have the least difficulty understanding.

I’ve also been struck by the way people use the various phrases of greeting. I think that in fact there is a general confusion about the correct formula to use at a given moment, or at least a far greater elasticity of what is permitted/expected. On my first evening I went to a very pleasant Breton restaurant: I arrived and the waitress (in traditional clothing, including the funky lace bonnet) called to me across the restaurant, ‘Bonjour!’ I checked outside, it was still dark; I responded (out of habit), ‘Bon soir!’ When she came over to my table with the menu, again she said, ‘Bonjour.’ Weird. Meanwhile, in Geneva I got particularly accustomed to the departure-formula, ‘Bonne journée’ or ‘Bonne soirée’.⁴ In Switzerland the use of the departure-formula became so ingrained in me that when I returned to English-speaking lands I really had to fight the urge to say ‘Have a nice day’ when taking my leave. Here, however, it seems to be far less commonly used, and when it is used at all it is not so rigorous. I have said ‘bonne journée’ to people and have just had ‘Merci’ in response, or, even worse, silence. Meanwhile, I have also heard lots of people just using the greeting-formula at the moment of departure, hence one waiter saying ‘bon soir’ to me as I left the restaurant.

One other point of confusion was the meaning of the word déjeuner. You learn in about lesson two, of course, that déjeuner means ‘lunch’, but in Quebec they use it to mean ‘breakfast’. Déjeuner is of course a literal translation of breakfast (and/or vice-versa)—jeûner is ‘to fast’. Indeed, the introduction to the Wikipédia article on the subject suggests that déjeuner meaning breakfast was universal until the nineteenth century, at which point petit-déjeuner began to gain currency, ‘spécialement en France’.

I always learned that the response to ‘Merci’ is ‘Je vous en prie’, or, less formally, ‘De rien’. What I have occasionally heard here, though, is ‘Bienvenue’. Evidently this is a direct translation of the English ‘[you’re] welcome’. Thinking about it, the English phrase makes relatively little sense (there is an argument for saying that it’s an abbreviation of something along the lines of ‘you’re welcome to the act of kindness which I have just performed for you.’), but in French, to my ear, ‘Bienvenue’ is even more nonsensical. And thus hilarious.

Nowhere have I seen the standard word boisson. In its stead the universal word is breuvage, which I suspect is used since it sounds like the English ‘beverage’. I obviously haven’t got access to my massed ranks of dictionaries here, but when I looked up breuvage on wordreference.com it was suggested that the word is only ‘littéraire, humoristique’. As you might expect, a list of words with peculiar Quebecker usage is available—where else?—on Wikipédia.

However, there are some things which you might expect to change, but which have been kept very much in the French fashion. Compound numerals are used as in France, so seventy is soixante-dix, and ninety is quatre-vingt-dix. In Geneva—as, I believe, in Belgium—you hear septante (with the [p] pronounced) and nonante, and further east in Romandy (certainly by the time you reach Lausanne) people say huitante for eighty. When I was in Saint-Boniface, a French-speaking place which used to be a separate city but is now incorporated into the city of Winnipeg,⁵, I asked the girl at the museum about the non-compound numbers: on her face she portrayed a mixed look of confusion (having never heard of septante or nonante) and disgust (because, she seemed to reason, that is a ridiculous way to count or to speak). Another Francism which is maintained is the orthographic convention of writing the unit of currency after the price: so, for example, not ‘$4.40’, but ‘4,40 $’.

Notes

1. Also at Mass, the greeting at the sign of peace which I heard being used was ‘Paix du Seigneur’, and not ‘Paix de Christ’, which I know from France and Romandy. But of course, that’s not so much a linguistic difference as one of the liturgical practice of the locale: ‘…according to local custom’, and all that. ↩
2. I’m afraid I have neither the time nor energy to write proper IPA here. ↩
3. I was quite excited in the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax to overhear my first Brooklyn accent of the trip: a mother, trying to take a photo of her children, saying ’Yeh took so lawwng that it [sc. the camera] tunned awwf…’ ↩
4. Indeed, in Geneva especially, there is a third departure-formula, ‘Bon dimanche’, whose use is generally prescribed for during the day on Saturday and in the morning and early afternoon of Sunday. People don’t seem to mind, however, if you forget and use the more generic journée/soirée, options. ↩
5. Saint-Boniface and Winnipeg are each the seat of its own diocese, though, the former covering the south-east portion of Manitoba, the latter stretching to the border with Saskatchewan to the west and quite far north. ↩

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. ↩

1. When looking at a photo, click on it. The photo will then open as big as your screen will allow. Squint no longer. Or squint less, at least. If you click on the enlarged photo again, it will disappear and leave you back where you started.
2. When you’ve blown up a photo like this you can then select alternative sizes from the list along the top: the biggest size available is called X3 (as in ‘XXXL’). If you choose that, you will be able to use the horizontal and vertical scrollbars in your browser to pan around the image.
3. You can also use the left and right arrows on your keyboard to navigate between photos within an album. This even works when you’ve enlarged a photo as described above: if you press the right arrow on your keyboard, it will open the next photo in the sequence already enlarged.
4. When looking at the ordinary view (without an enlarged photo in the way) you can click on the button labelled ‘Map this’. A new window/tab will then open with a map from Google Maps showing where each photo was taken. Cool, huh? You can drag the map around with your mouse, change from the default ‘Satellite’ view to ‘Map’, and zoom in and out using the control at the top-left of the map panel (but you can’t use your mouse scroll-wheel to zoom as you can on Google Maps’ own site). Some disclaimers: sometimes it just doesn’t work, even though it should—for example, at the moment the Texas and Arizona gallery isn’t showing geodata. Also, some photos won’t appear on the map, because there is no geodata for them: this is often the case for photos taken indoors, where my GPS tracker can’t get a fix on the positioning satellites, or for those photos where (for whatever rare reason) I didn’t in fact have the tracker with me and turned on.
5. There is another button next to ‘Map this’, called ‘Style’. Clicking on that brings up a menu from which you can choose different ways of viewing the gallery. The ‘Journal’ option is, in my opinion, an excellent way of browsing my photos. Try it out—make your browser window as big as possible for the best effect. I have vacillated about making it the default option, but it has some downsides, including the fact that you can’t make the photos any bigger than just fitting into your browser window (unlike the way I described above). You can easily change back to the default view-style, which is ‘SmugMug’. Your browser will remember which view-style you were last on the next time you come to look at my photos.

The event which really made me consider this situation was when I was dining in Fairbanks in an upstairs restaurant. A fellow diner across the room sat there, nonchalantly chewing the cud with his cap wedged on his head. I suppose you think that I shouldn’t have let it bothered me, but it did. I’m sorry to say, I judged that man. And he didn’t come out well.

Sadly (or not) I haven’t got the self-confidence, poise, or menace of Tony Soprano in these matters:

YouTube - Sopranos - Power of suggestion [From S01E09, ‘Boca’. It should be noted that Tony Soprano goes on to send the couple a bottle of Montepulciano.]

Meanwhile, further indication of the significant mental deficiency of the baseball-cap-wearing masses:

People have been saying that every man has a desire to re-introduce the Fedora, but apparently America hasn’t heard. Fortunately, someone has the right idea when it comes to these things. I hope someone out there is listening.

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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. ↩

No, I’m on my way to L.A. I’ll be back in Santa Cruz on Monday: I have to go back to work. Well, I’m going to be picked up by Jenna, Jonno, and Kelsey. We’re going to meet up with Jasmine in L.A. then we’re going to drive to New Mexico tonight. Well, I guess Jenna’s car doesn’t have air-conditioning, ¹ and we don’t want to drive across the desert during the day without air conditioning. Well, y’know, we have to cross Arizona. The journey will be about twelve hours, and we’re leaving at 11, maybe 12, so we’re going to have to travel during some daylight. Shut uuuup! It’s going to be soooo miserable… I agreed to do it, then Jenna just dropped this bomb on me. [Later] It’s gonna be fine. I just have to keep telling myself that. [And so on, for about ten minutes, with frequent repetition of the ‘It’s gonna be fine’ riff.]

It sounded to me like a recipe for disaster. I myself was exhausted on the train, and couldn’t possibly contemplate getting to L.A. and starting a nice, safe drive to New Mexico that night. When I arrived in Tucson last week at 10.30 p.m., it was still 90ºF. Central Arizona—including Phoenix—is even hotter. I hope Jenna, Jonno, Kelsey, and un-named train girl arrived safe and sound, and that they are still talking to one another.

Notes

1. This is a really confusing usage which both fascinates and frustrates me. I can’t work out if it’s specifically Californian (or even specifically valley-girl slang), or else in widespread usage across the U.S.A. In this context, ‘I guess’ doesn’t mean ‘I guess that’ or ‘I suppose that’, but rather it means ‘I know that’, or more specifically, ‘I have recently learnt that it is definitely the case that…’. ↩

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. ↩

When I got to Tucson by train from San Antonio—after nineteen hours on the train—it was 10 at night, but the temperature was still a remarkable 90ºF. I got across the road from the station to my rather idiosyncratic hotel, where I was told that there was no air-conditioning. Glug. But, I was told, there was an evaporative cooling system (which is affectionately known here as ‘swamp cooling’) which works with the assistance of a ceiling fan and the window being open about a foot. This did seem to work rather well but because the window had to be open my room was filled with the noise of the busy street below. Fortunately I was so exhausted from the journey that I quickly fell to sleep and woke the following morning. On my way to Tucson airport for the journey to Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon via Phoenix, the taxi driver told me that that night had been the first for weeks when evaporative cooling was effective. Previously the conditions had been too humid for the evaporative cooling to work. Phew.

At the Grand Canyon, the temperature was considerably lower: about 76º–80ºF. This is a result of the altitude of the canyon rim: about 9000 feet. This high altitude presents its own problems for the unwary traveller because of the thinner air. I certainly found that the relatively easy walk along the rim required more energy than I expected, and that I had to go more slowly as a result.

Arriving in Los Angeles from the Grand Canyon, it felt extremely humid indeed. Fortunately I was able quickly to re-adjust to being at sea-level after the altitude at the canyon, and I soon came to realize that it wasn’t as humid as all that. In fact my time in L.A. was remarkably comfortable: it was sunny, with an air temperature of about 80ºF. This was aided by regular gusts of breeze coming in off the great Pacific. As a result, my experience of L.A. wasn’t of the sticky city covered by smog and cloud which I’d been told to expect: instead I saw a bright and breezy city with plenty of wide spaces and shady places. What a surprise!

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. ↩

Sorry, but social networks simply aren’t cool anymore among the 15-to-24-year-old crowd. […] Why? It seems the older crowd—people 25 and older—has given social networks the unmistakable stench of being not cool. Why would an 18-year-old kid want to mimic the lifestyle of a 30-year-old?

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WARNING: this building contains substances known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

Well, that’s certainly one idea of a friendly welcome. Apparently, in fact, this is a sign which is used so often throughout the state that it has lost all meaning. But still, I hurried down that flight of stairs quicker than I might otherwise have done.

Having been regaled with stories of queues at LAX immigration stretching for hundreds of yards, I expected the arrivals process to take hours. In fact when I did get down the stairs from the cancer-ridden doorway I found a long hall with hundreds of staff members encouraging the newly-arrived passengers to go down as far as possible since, as far as I could see, all the immigration desks were then manned. There were ‘welcome’ announcements specifically for my flight from Sydney, and I went straight to the desk where I was directed. Understandably enough I was interrogated fairly closely about what I was doing, but everything was civil and only lasted for a maximum of five minutes. The most boring part was queuing to take my bags through customs/quarantine, but even that didn’t take long.

Talk about efficient. Heathrow could stand to learn a thing or two about my experience. Perhaps I just got lucky?

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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.

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Still, it’s a fun game and no one has claimed that it’s realistic. My high score so far is 48. At that point the massive four-engine jets are coming in so thick and fast that I tend to ignore one side of the screen, with tragic consequences.