The Metro

I have a really good excuse for not posting here recently. First, I went to the US for Christmas. Second, when I returned, it was mad work. Now, I present a brief photo-essay of Montreal's metro stations. I pass through many of these every day.

First, we have the Verdun station on the Green line.



This is one of my favorite stations. The images do not capture the feeling of the place; it is HUGE. The platforms are so far underground, there is no staircase up, only escalators. I haven't been to all the stations, but from what I've seen, this is unique to Verdun.



You can see the platform stretching far into the distance. Actually, the roof slopes down towards the train tunnel at the far end, giving the place a greater sense of distance. It is a cool effect, and as is true in much of the metro system, it would be cooler if the city had the money to keep up maintenance (in this case, replacing the burnt-out bulbs).

From there, I take us to Place-Saint-Henri. I've never gotten off here, but I took a meandering stroll one night with a friend, and we ended up at the station. As you can see below, the station has a similarly huge sense of scale to Verdun.



There is no set Montreal style when it comes to the stations, with many of them having a unique artistic flair. One of my favorite building ornamentations is simple glazed brick, and whoever designed Place-Saint-Henri must have had a similar interest. I like the use of different shades of brick in each section, and the effect is understated, which is not something always associated with the stations in this city.



Station Villa-Maria is not a very attractive station, but I really appreciate the use of colors in the seating. The first time I saw this station, I thought, "Oh, that's kind of cool." That's still how I feel about it.



Côte-Sainte-Catherine is a great example of one of the defining features of Montreal architecture: a heavy reliance on cast concrete in artistic shapes. For whatever reason, a lot of the construction from the 1960s and 1970s uses this rather bland technique to add - what? - artistic merit or visual interest to what is essentially a cheaply constructed concrete structure. There is something about this affected nod towards art, but with absolutely no financial backing, which reminds me a lot of Eastern Europe. Vast tracts of this city are incredibly ugly, and a lady died just this past summer when some of the concrete ornamentation on a hotel downtown broke off and crushed her while she and her husband were dining. If any Montrealais or Québecois can explain how stations like Côte-Sainte-Catherine are not horribly ugly abominations, I am all ears.





Despite my rant, I do think this zig-zag effect is pretty cool. See how the pattern is on an angle (look at the second picture)? The station feels clean, too.

In the same vein as Villa-Maria, Plamondon has a seating design which, when I first saw it, I thought, "That's kind of cool." Unlike Villa-Maria, I no longer think Plamondon is nearly as cool as when I first saw it, though I do like the use of color. However, the illusion was ruined for me when I noticed the horribly chipped paint on most of the seats. I am not sure if it shows up in the picture below, so you will have to trust me.



This tour ends with another one of my favorites: Namur. First off, Namur is a city in Belgium, the capital of francophone Wallonie, and I spent a serene week there the spring of 2006. So, I was predisposed to like this station. The platform looks almost identical, brick for brick, as De la Savane, the next station along the line, and the one closest to my office. However, while De la Savane is rather bland and uninspiring from the platform on up to street level, Namur has the most amazing art installation I have seen anywhere in the world, in any metro station. Unless you are braindead, this light sculpture is dazzling and utterly breathtaking as you come up from the dark station platform.



Finally, there were new ads in the metro cars today. They are for the Polytechnique, Québec's (and one of Canada's) premier schools for science and engineering.



I was looking at it, wondering if they used models or real students. "That blonde in front is awfully good-looking to be studying at the Polytechnique," I thought. But then, I noticed the guy in the blue polo, centered in the close-up below.



So, yeah, I'm pretty sure they used at least one real student.

A Tale of Two Cities

I went on my first business trip this past week. I spent two exhilarating days in Bolton, outside of Toronto, inspecting the first run of silicone-overmolded parts for the product I have been working on since September. It has been great experience to work with the early prototype stage of a product, and to watch it go through design changes (partially from my input), through to having steel cut on the molds, and to actually get final working parts that reflect work I myself have done.

As much fun as that was, this essay is not about my job. This is an essay about two very different North Americas, the one found here in Montreal, Quebec, and the other exemplified by cities such as Toronto.

For readers of this blog, it should come as no great surprise that I hated Montreal when I first arrived. It was 35 degrees C, which in Fahrenheit translates to incredibly hot. The metro is not air conditioned, my house is not air conditioned, and the restaurant was not air conditioned, at least not effectively. I was having a lot of fun, to be sure, and there was a sense of freedom from expectations that I have not enjoyed since the summers of high school, but my impression of the city itself was negative. It was hot, dirty, and a lot of the architecture is unbelievably ugly (I am not alone in thinking this; it is often described as being Eastern Bloc-like by friends). Also, since I was working five days a week during the prime hours of the day, I had no chance to explore the neighborhoods. Not to mention, I was shocked, SHOCKED, that the St. Viateur bagels I ate were honestly not very good, and that I found poutine to be more disgusting than incredible* (even the poutine foie gras with frites fried in duck fat).

As the weather has grown colder and I have had more free time, I have gotten to know the city better and my opinion has changed for the better. Honestly, only parts of the city are incredibly ugly. The Plateau, especially around Parc Lafontaine and also along St. Joseph, is wonderful to stroll through, and even where I live (in working-class Verdun), the traditional urban fabric is very much intact. It is a wonderful city to live in, sometimes feeling European, but with the conveniences that North Americans love (like having shops open on Sundays).

Going, on the other hand, to Toronto was a shock to the system. First off, I have grown so accustomed to speaking in French, and to trying to understand the strange way Montréalais have of speaking it, that it was a little disconcerting to be able to speak only English. It was the first time I realized I might have some reverse culture shock when I go home. Secondly, Toronto felt like home, meaning Chicago, and it made me see Montreal in an entirely new light.

Toronto, the city, is almost exactly the same size as Chicago, although Chicagoland is nearly three times the Toronto Metropolitan Area. Chicago does feel bigger and busier, but Toronto has a lot of similarity in the grandeur of its downtown, the way the CBD sits on the waterfront (Lake Ontario stretching off to the south), the busy-ness of its public transit network. Both cities tend to overwhelm the human scale.

Montreal, on the other hand, has always felt small. If I were to run into someone I know in Chicago, unless it was near their home, I would be surprised. In Montreal, it has happened to me nearly every week, including just last night, but the number of people I know here is minute compared to back home. It is almost as if Montreal is a small town of 1.5 million people; it is not a metropolis.

Ultimately, Montreal is part of North America, but the trip to Toronto reminded me that this city is more like Madison than Milwaukee, even though it’s larger than both put together.



*I keep meaning to write an essay dedicated to poutine, and my contentious relationship with that food item, so you may be seeing that in the coming weeks. There is also another topic I need to cover, which if you think hard you can probably guess at, but I am not sure if it should be in a stand-alone essay, or included in a larger piece. Now you know more about what goes into writing these essays, and why I missed publishing a piece two weeks ago.

Busy Week of Thanks

I swore I would not do this again, but here I am, having spent another Thanksgiving outside of the US. Certainly, this year was nothing like 2005, but it is still an odd experience. I find that it focuses the feeling of being a foreigner, and I have found myself thinking it would be nice to be back home for the first time. But, this is still a great place, and the opportunities which I have had (and which continue to come around) are more than worth the momentary discomfort.

Then again, Christmas is just around the corner.

There will be no essay this week, as the time I usually spend writing the essay was taken up with two friends' visits to Montreal, as well as hosting a Thanksgiving party, for which I cooked. I do hope that seeing the city and Quebecois culture through my friends' eyes, both of whom are essentially newcomers to Quebec, will give me a couple avenues to pursue in the coming weeks. For now, though, I eagerly await the coming of winter.

January will be great.

This Is a Country and It Is Vast

To Canadian readers: what follows may at times be uncomfortably patronizing. My apologies for this, but it is an unfortunate element of the Americo-Canadian relationship. This short essay is an attempt to view Canada differently, as a country, and the American attitudes towards our oft-mocked neighbors.

When I lived in England, my sense of distance was horribly skewed from the local norms. I never understood why my classmates complained about going home for a weekend visit; they lived only two or three hours away from Nottingham. No one I knew lived even half as far as Gustavus is from Chicago, and Minnesota is fairly close to Illinois by American standards.

That was when the immensity of America’s sprawl worked its way to my core. We have been blessed (through numerous wars, shrewd land deals and broken treaties, as well as a fair amount of hubris) with a nation that makes the great states of Europe look miniscule: Great Britain is the same size as Illinois and Wisconsin combined.

The density of Britain also made an impression, because Illinois’ total population of 13 million is equal to London’s metro area. While Chicago’s metro makes up the vast majority the state’s population, England has an additional 37 million people crammed into an area 7,000 square miles smaller!

So, yes, my sense of perspective has been defined by my native country, and I will never fully lose my sense of claustrophobia in Old Europe (not that I do not enjoy that feeling). However, this American has been schooled by Canada. If I thought America was immense, this place is Brobdingnagian*.

Here is an example: I live an hour and a half from the US. If I were to drive 1000 miles south, I would be in South Carolina. If I were to drive 1000 miles north, I would, well, I would be in Québec, if I could drive 1000 miles, but the country is so vast that no one has ever built a road up there.

Here is another: If you leave from the Montana border with Canada and drive to the northern border of Alberta, you will have covered a distance nearly as great as driving from the border with Canada to the border with Mexico. However, you will only be halfway to the northern coast of Canada, deep in the middle of the vast boreal forests.

The realization that Canada dwarfs the US is just one of many ways in which this neighbor to our north is becoming a real place to me. I am not one to belittle foreign countries, but how many Americans follow with rapt attention the political machinations of Stephen Harper or the misfortunes of that lovable goof, Michael Ignatieff? The grand total could dance on the head of a pin, without disrupting the chorus line of angels.

I have realized in the three months since arriving that Canada, as much as I have loved the idea of this country for most of my life, has never really been more than the butt of jokes. That is harsh condemnation, and overstated, but therein lies more truth than I would have admitted in July. Have you heard the one about how they named Canada, eh? But have you heard about the Battle of Vimy Ridge?

Canada is a real nation, with a culture similar to, yet distinct from, its small southern neighbor. I was as surprised as you to learn this. Gosh, it is nearly impossible to write about Canada without falling into tried and true clichés and jokes based on their supposed goofiness and imitation-nation image. But that is completely opposite of what I am trying to convey.

I went to see a documentary the other night on the Alberta oil sands. It was produced by Canadians, and I was surprised to find that the filmmakers went beyond the customary anti-Americanism and actually expressed a clearly pro-Canadian stance, bordering on jingoism. That is not something I would expect from a slightly goofy nation of wanna-be American posers.


*Sometimes, a thesaurus is just what a writer needs.

Rue Duluth

I used to work on Duluth. Those were hard days of labor, and the conditions poor. In the early morning, when we got off, the staff would eat a meal together, and in those exhausted moments I was happy.

I work now on Mayrand. It is a great job, and I am much happier than I was at the restaurant, but I do feel that I have lost something precious. The grime and heat, the grueling hours and the horrible aches from my back and legs, despite all of that, I worked with Québecois and I spent my time immersed in the culture of la belle province. My French improved and I learned a lot about the incredible people of this nation within a nation.

My coworkers on Mayrand are Canadian, but they are not Québecois de souche. I get no long-winded explications on the proper method of making tourtière or expositions on Québecois nationalism. And I miss that, because anglophone culture is so similar to American culture that I feel like I went to a foreign country and then that foreign country was taken over by Americans.

Last week, the President who will remain unnamed visited Montréal. My boss took a full day off of work to go to the private, invitation-only luncheon to hear him speak. This same guy listens to Rush Limbaugh and watches every New York Giants game.

I have some ideas for reconnecting to the culture - mostly they involve bars and hockey - but I have yet to find the time or the will-power to step out of a full and comfortable life in English and delve into French headfirst.

I hope that even in my admittance of having nothing to write about, you can find something interesting. And, by “you,” I am referring to my mom, since I know she (and maybe no one else) will read this.

Of Sinus and Cire

I have had a painful two weeks, quite literally. In fact, I hardly remember anything of last week. This post will be less an essay with my observations on Canada and more a rumination on living abroad and the difficulties which come with that.

Our scene opens on night, just before Canadian Thanksgiving, a Thursday. The setting is a quiet apartment in the working class neighborhood of Verdun, far outside the shadows of Mount Royal. The light rain patters against the front bedroom’s window, and the radiator is not on to fight the creeping chill.

It was on this night, I believe (because things start to get blurry around this time), that my story starts. As some of you may know, I work at a company which manufactures earplugs for hearing protection, hearing aids, and high end earbuds (for the iPods of the world). Being in this environment, it was sooner rather than later that someone stuck a probe in my ear and discovered, surprisingly, that I have a lot of earwax. So, I purchased an over-the-counter treatment to fix this problem and administered it after returning home from work. It all went smoothly for an hour.

And then the pain started.

The pain started in my left ear, as a slight ear ache. It radiated out into my jaw and, as the hours rolled slowly by, the pain increased until I could not keep my left eye open. Eventually, after about four hours of failed sleep, the pain began to ease. As I drifted off to sleep, I thought to myself, “That sucked, but at least it’s over.” My last thought that night was that having a little earwax never hurt anyone.

The ear is not externally connected to the sinuses. Nor is the left ear connected to the right sinus. So, I am sure that what happened on that Thursday before Thanksgiving (what a weird country in which I live) had nothing to do with what happened the next week. A strange coincidence, at the most. Rather, and I am supported in this opinion by a number of medical professionals, my cold which I mentioned two weeks ago in my non-post and had not been able to shake, turned into a sinus infection. Still, the proximity of the earwax treatment’s mystery pain and the incredible mind-numbing pain (and I am not one to use that term lightly) of the next week’s sinus infection feel somehow connected.

So, whether you want to say that the story continues on Saturday night, or that it all started then, is up to you.

Either way, I met up with some friends to celebrate Thanksgiving. We were a Scot, two Americans, and a Canadian who does not celebrate the holiday at home. We ate chicken - delicious chicken the size of a small turkey, but a chicken nonetheless). It was a great night which devolved at one point into a somewhat drunken intellectual orgy on cosmology and quantum physics. Surprisingly, I had nothing to do with that. I only participated after it became clear the war was lost and the conversation would continue whether I sat there silently or not. Eventually, we realized the last metro was running in 10 minutes, so the Canadian and I set out to beat it to the station in full merriment. Ho!

And then the pain started.

So, you tell me, does the story continue, or has it all started again? I believe Kundera would call this the mad myth of eternal return. Certainly, its inanity is annoying, if not irreparable.

As I said, the pain started. It radiated out from my right ear, but was much more forward, running along my cheek bone, before descending through my rear molars. They tingled in their numbness, and yet still hurt with the lightest of touches. It was an odd sensation, none too pleasant, but I figured it would go away. Mostly, I figured it was just my other ear having a delayed reaction to having its earwax so unjustly emulsified and drained out.

Sunday, I felt horrible, just tired, lethargic even. I did get around to seeing Coco avant Chanel, but Monday dawned much too soon and I spent my precious day off being truly lethargic. The pain had continued, and was now starting to get worse. This, by the way, is not a story about pain, but pain is central to the story. If you have not figured it out by now, I was in a lot of pain by Tuesday, and I was even more tired, since I could not fall asleep the night before from that pain which I just recently assured you this story is not about.

I ended up going in a good hour and a half late. It is an interesting feature of being in the early throes of a painful illness - and this same thing happened in the months after my back injury - but the realization that one is in pain does not necessarily translate to an awareness that one’s normal functions are impaired by that pain. Which is all to say that I felt horrendously bad about coming in late, as though I had somehow done something wrong, even though I had been lying in my bed at 3 am, five hours after turning out the light, grinding my teeth together in a vain attempt to calm down the throbbing pain in my right cheek.

Luckily, as I sheepishly walked into my boss’ office, my first question was, “How do you go to a doctor in Canada?” And this, if not at least twice before, is where this story starts.

Canada, we all know all too well, is a socialist country with socialist medicine. And I am not covered by that socialist medicine. I have an arcane foreign healthcare policy, which requires mailing in forms through the mail! And I was not sure if I could just go to a doctor’s office and make an appointment, or if I had to find some special place that accepted degenerate Americans. And, although I did not realize it at the time, my ability to function as a normal member of human society was quickly degrading. (One of the founders of the company, upon seeing me yesterday, said, “Welcome back. I don’t want to insult you, but you were a sack of **** last week.”)

As best I understand it, a sick person without a regular physician and Medicare coverage has two options: the first is to go to a walk-in clinic; the second is to find a private doctor willing to take on a new patient. In both cases, the charges are to be paid up front. So, figuring that any competent doctor would be able to help me, and not yet being in truly terrible shape, I opted to get up early and go to the cheaper walk-in clinic on Wednesday morning.

And that is what I would have done, if I had been able to sleep that night.

It was even worse than the night before. I spent a good two hours of that night seriously thinking about using my paycheck (I got paid on Thursday last week) to pack it in and go home. By the time Wednesday dawned, I had not slept soundly in two nights, the pain was as acute as, well, it definitely ranked with the worst pain I have ever experienced. The pain was to the level of disrupting my every conscious moment, and preventing sleep, and that is a very bad place to be in when trying to get up early to go to a clinic in a foreign country, knowing I will have to pay out of pocket after waiting for three hours just to see a doctor for five minutes who promptly said that the pain was not in my sinuses or my ears, but that I had a tooth abscess.

Despite not a single visible sign in my mouth of any problem, he declared it a tooth abscess.

Despite having had a cold for two weeks, he declared it a tooth abscess.

He prescribed me an antibiotic (clindamycin). I asked him if I should see a dentist, and the incompetent doc said the thing which probably saved me from a week of pain. He said, “No, no need to see a dentist. Just take this prescription, and if my diagnosis is correct, you should feel better before a week.”

Why hadn’t he told me he was incompetent when I walked in?

Needless to say, I went to the office, which was my only link to people who knew how to find English-language medical care, and told my boss that I needed to go to a dentist. By this time, it was too late to call for an appointment that day, but we agreed that as soon as I came in the Thursday morning, he would call his dentist, who was accepting patients, and send me over there. And that is what happened.

Really.

What a great dentist! He took x-rays, tapped on my teeth a bunch (to find which one it was that hurt), talked to me about how bad O’Hare is (yeah, I know, I’ve been hearing that since England in ’05), and then said that it was nothing dental. In no way was my pain being caused by a dental problem, but that a simple evaluation had shown him that my sinuses were hurting and that clindamycin was not the antibiotic to be used for the treatment of that. And then he only charged me for the x-rays. Seriously, he was a great guy, and I owe a debt of gratitude to him for seeing me on less than an hour’s notice and for giving better medical advice than the doctor the previous day. If you ever need a dentist in Montreal, I can highly recommend Dr. Peter Weinstein at Côte-des-Neiges and Queen-Mary.

So, it was back to the office, which at this point I was only returning to for help in getting treated, since Tuesday was the last day that I could really do any work. This is where my story enters this strange, bizarre world that can only come from working for rich Jews. I am not making this up. No one else in the world would give me the advice that came next.

Adam, the aforementioned founder of the company, came up to me and said he knew a private doctor who “took cash.” The man had saved the life of Adam’s brother, had once headed the ER of Montreal’s largest French hospital before getting tired of the life, which evidently included his wife, who Adam told gleefully told me the good doctor had left for a hot young thing who now carted him around. Because, behold the insanity, this doctor only makes house calls. And when I say he “takes cash,” I mean that only takes cash.

I will withhold his name, because people like him are not the sort of people that need publicity or their good works rewarded in overly long and effusive essays posted on public blogging sites.

I called his number and was informed that the doctor would be around my office between 11 am and 3 on Friday, and that the doctor accepted cash for the consultation fee, which was not an insignificant sum.

He arrived in stately glory, a worn medical bag at his side, and the reassuring look of a French country intellectual (think Michael Lonsdale). I told him my problem, through gritted teeth and wiping my eye of tears, and he listened. Which is what the dentist had done. Which is not what the free clinician had done. But, unlike the dentist’s, there was no sense of urgency, no sense that there were other patients to be seen. So, we sat in the boardroom and he listened, and then we chatted a bit, and he asked a few more questions, and we joked around. And, it was, dare I say, luxurious?

I told him that the doctor at the free clinic had misdiagnosed me, and he said that usually happens.

I told him the dentist had given me a better medical consultation than the doctor, and he laughed. I do not know why he laughed, since it was not funny but simply a sad statement of fact, but he laughed. And I relaxed.

I told him I was on clindamycin from the clinic, and he looked befuddled. But, quickly, understanding came to him, and then he looked both amused and professionally insulted. “Oh,” he said despairingly under his breath, “for an abscess.”

He checked me for mono and a quick check for meningitis. He looked in my mouth and my ears, and he listened to my lungs. All of which, I would like to add, Dr. G. A. Thon of the Vendôme walk-in clinic had not done. Finally, he diagnosed me with a sinus infection and joked about him giving me a shot of vancomycin (which was hilarious at the time).

And he wrote me a prescription for Biaxin, and at this point I did not care that I was taking my second antibiotic in two days, because, you see, luxury relaxes tensions and, as I hinted above, this visit was luxurious and I was now relaxed. I looked back and realized how tense I had been since Saturday and that was all gone now. I knew I would take the pills and then I would be well. And that is exactly what happened.

After I paid him 150$ in cash.

The Yeoman's Lurgi

I was "under the weather" both literally and figuratively this past rainy week. I had a fever last weekend, and a wicked cough this weekend, with lots of sleep in between. So, I did not get an essay written for this week. I do have a couple ideas floating around, so I might get something up next weekend, but don not count on it.

I will, however, post a picture of the most evil, hideous machine designed by man or beast. As if dealing with one of these was not bad enough, I had to struggle mind and soul while so weak I could hardly stand. The machine on the right, I have no idea what it is for, but the orange and blue behemoth on the left can only be for making us humans look as ridiculous as possible.