Well, Montreal was fun. It tried its best to make itself hated, what with freezing rain and high winds, but I still enjoyed the city, and would like to visit again in summer. Due to incliment weather and a faulty Memory card, there aren't a lot of photos of it, but I'll try to get those up soon enough. It all looks like a very chilly version of southern France in old Quebec, and the rest looks like a nice, not overly large, French city. You immidiately notice you are in France-Canada, not Canada-France. Everything is written bilingually, but unlike in Ontario, where the English on top is the same size as the french on the bottom, the Quebecouis make no such pretense and make the French about size 12 and the English about size 5. I had Poutine, which is very good and very filling, if you don't mind getting fat very fast. I walked up Mount Royal, which is actually covered in snow, showing that Montreal is delicately balanced on the dew point between rain and snow at this time of year, the difference really is only about 50 meters. Visited a very nice hostel, and can only recommend "L'Auberge Alternative" for the price, the awesome common room and free tea. Can't recommend it for the crazy lady in her 70ies who was apparently a muslim-chaser and lived full-time at the hostel, but I guess you can't blame the hostel for that.
And boy is the 7.5 hour drive from Montreal (aka, Mun-Tree-awl, which is how the Ontario people pronounce it, I think they're trying to be funny) dull. Prairie, clumps of wood, Prairie, a farm...hey, check it out, this goes on for several hours. Ontario has a lot of room, but sadly not a lot of landscape to fill that room with, and what is there is, in winter, singularily ugly. Except for the lakes. Oh yes, the lakes, vast shimmering expanses of sky and water, they really pull the landscape together.
But, nothing saves the towns. One of the reasons the way back took so long (except for the prerequisite traffic jam in Toronto) was that we detoured through several towns for stops. And as much as I love cities, and love the open countryside, I really hate towns. And Ontario gave me ample material to hate. Among the wonderful places we visited were
Kirkland (notable for the worst roads I encountered in Canada thus far)
Cornwall (apparently notable for its XXL truckstop and not much else)
Iroquois (full of white trash, fittingly)
Brockville (home of the 1000 island park, and possibly the sauce as well)
Kingston (notable for containing many sensible people doing the only sensible thing, leaving Kingston via bus)
Scarborough (already part of Toronto, but still 1.5 hours from city center, full of appartment blocks and highways)
The towns just kind of drift into and out of each other in a never-ending urban trickle. The lesson here is probably that I hate sprawl. My ideal city has a neat edge, and beyond that only landscape that is vertically challenging, not vertically challenged. I guess this is what, in my eyes, reifies Vienna, as it doesn't have a lot of noticable sprawl (there might be a yet hiding in there). Some people might disagree with me (looking at you, George), but while Vienna can't compete with the size of the GTA, it can compete with the population numbers in the respective urban core, and it manages them more efficiently and densely, in my opinion. If Toronto were Vienna, Biedermannsdorf would have been swallowed by faceless strip malls and highway junctions long ago. In this, I agree with Margaret Atwood, Toronto is a VM, a vile Metropolis, but only because it mirrors the typical US city so much.
But in any case, it is now 11:20, and in a scant 7 hours and 20 minutes I'm leaving Canuckistan behind for a few weeks, leaving for mountains, good food, and properly priced beer that I can buy at a supermarket.
A nice vacation, in my opinion. See you there, I hope.
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