Outpost 302, signing off.

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.

Heureka!

-Which is Greek and means "give me a towel, quickly!"

Well, I figured something out last night. I've been feeling rather morose and stressed out the last week, and there was a mounting feeling of discomfort I'd been dragging around with me for the whole last month. I boiled it down, and after a ridiculously small amount of honest soul-searching, it hit me.

My Thesis.

Yes, my thesis is what I am afraid of. The realization of that was so utter and so straightforward it kind of boggled my mind. But yes, I'm stressed out about it. Why? Well, I have a reading list, I have some preliminary work, I have a lot of notes, but I didn't know what exactly to write on. So I resolved to narrow down my choices, scrap my old research questions, and basically start a new page in and on the face of my writer's block. I had that slated for the next couple of weeks, maybe compare with the notes I left in Austria, but that apparently wasn't necessary.

Because I had an epiphany.

Epiphany: An epiphany (from the ancient Greek ἐπιφάνεια, epiphaneia, "manifestation, striking appearance") is the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something.

I was walking home from my last lecture for this semester, only today, and as I was just plodding along through Queen's park, with my thoughts on nothing in particular, suddenly, A THESIS APPEARS! I had a realization, a revelation, and I wrote it down immediately, ultimately expecting it to be bogus upon considering it again at home. But it works, somehow. I have a vague idea what book ties into what part, and I actually know what exactly I want to write now. Now all I have to do is write it!

This, my friends, is seriously good news for me, and it verily did brighten my day considerably. I doesn't save me from another 300 pages of soul-destroying urban geography for the test on Monday, but it did give me something I can work on, finally. The new sense of direction is dizzying, and I hope it lasts, because I need it to last for, oh, 80+ A4 pages of rough draft.

It also means I'll have to freight myself down with a few extra books. Oh well, I'm still too amazed with how positively this influenced my general mood that I won't bother with cold realism right now.

Some observations...

Well, the finals are still rolling, but with only one test left next Monday, I do have some breathing room, so here a short little update so you know what I've been up to.

Over the weeks, I have narrowed down my lingering disdain for the house to my own room, and in that mostly the virtual lack and placement of windows. I have one, as you know, so all my activities necessarily are near that window, as my desk is there. What little light it provides is partially swallowed by the dark brick wall opposite the window, as the distance between our house and the next is only about 3 meters. in that narrow space is wrenched the fire exit, which is my second problem, as the smallness of the room forces me to have the window open most of the time, or die of heatstroke (yes, even now that the daily average is in the single digits, the room is still too hot) and since everyone on the top floors uses the fire exit as a convenient back door, I'm constantly having people walk by my window. That rattles me, and annoys me.

Soooooo, I asked Coop to tell me if any other rooms become vacant, and I might consider moving. The main argument against that is that I actually like the people I live with pretty much, and elsewhere might be worse. But it might also be better! So let's see how that pans out, maybe I'll stay here for the rest of my stay, maybe not.

What else has been happening? I tried to get some christmas shopping done, but seeing how I usually get my christmas ideas by close observation of my family from October to December, I'm in a bit of a bind this year, and I hope I think of SOMETHING because I only have about one week of uninterrupted shopping left. What happens then?

Oh, I'm going to Quebec for a week.

Yes, trip time! I'll be leaving for Montreal on the 13th, after my last test, and return the 19th, fly home on the 20th, arrive on Austria on the 21st. Kinda cramped, my schedule. And while I am sure that there will be opportunities for some shopping while I visit the crazy french-Canadians, I will also have other things to do, I hope. Well, I will, I'm not going alone, but with some people from the exchange who, like me, missed the original Quebec trip.

We're planning on going to Quebec city as well, and we were going via car. As far as I know my license is not valid in Canada, which is both good and bad. Bad because I was supposed to drive, good because I don't want to drive. Not in wintry conditions, not in a country where I have never driven a car before, not a rental car, not from Montreal to Quebec City. There will have to be another way, and if the others rent a car, I am taking the bus on my own. Yes, I do not trust them enough, and I've had enough highway hijinx during the Huron trip to last me for another 4 months.

Also, I figured out that instead of giving you another long article about what Toronto is, I'll end today's installment with one of the few things which it is not: Ein österreichisches Bundesland. It is, however, a province of China, a district of Singapore, a prefecture of Japan, a subdivision of Russia, a state of Germany and several other things. There really are a LOT of foreigners.

Canada vs. Austria, Round 1: FIGHT!

Okay, so there are a lot of stereotypes about Canada floating around in Europe, and I thought I'd comment on the ones I know. Please take note though that I am writing these answers from the perspective of somebody living in downtown Toronto. Also the list is incomplete, but if I wait until I finish this entire thing, it will both be too long and people will start complaining that I never update. Again, yes, I know.

1: There are maple trees everywhere.

True. The things are all over the place downtown. The city has at least a dozen of every common member of the Aceraceae family in every district, and at least one or two of the more obscure ones from Asia, heavily interspersed with Platanus trees. This leads to the parks currently being covered in every expected and some very unexpected (violet?) colour of the fall. This also leads me to comment that Toronto has no parks. They have green lots, true, and some nice public gardens, but no parks. Why? My personal definition of a proper park is “standing on one edge of the park, one cannot make out the other edge, be it for distance, terrain or vegetation.” Queen's Park is one of the biggest in the city, and even though it's north-south size is pretty impressive, it's so criss-crossed by major streets it's not really one park. But anyway, maple trees, lots of em, woo! Go Leafs! Oh, right, Leafs, this leads us to -

2: Everybody is all about Hockey.

This is true for Canada by far and large, but I feel the Torontonians have it hard. Their home team is one of the oldest, the best paid and one of the winningest (that is SO a word) teams in North American hockey...or at least it was. The Maple Leafs are currently suffering the longest victory drought of any major hockey team in Canada. The poor dears. But otherwise, yes, Canadians get worked up about hockey, far more than the average Austrian about football (yes, it is that impressive) which leads me to-

3: Canadians are really friendly.

This is both true and false. Let me explain. Being used to the general low-level non-personal animosity the average Viennese has for the world at large and everyone in it, I was taken aback by how helpful and friendly everyone is here. At first I was deeply suspicious of people because of that until, after meeting the sixth or seventh Canadian outside of a service setting, I realized that they really are THAT friendly, which is almost creepy at times. It's not even that superficial “American Friendliness©” that makes some salespeople in the US seem like somebody laminated that smile onto their unblinking visages, it feels at least partially sincere. After living here for three months, I'm actually starting to genuinely like the lunatics I'm billeted with.
So Canadians are very friendly. Until they aren't anymore. I'm casually going to point over my shoulder at the Vancouver “hockey riots” for a second. Trust me, Toronto had a field day because of that. But now on to my point. Toronto Canadians, when angry, get incredibly verbally aggressive incredibly fast. It's like an American swear-word vocabulary, backed by a British temper. I've seen two immaculately dressed businessmen in the financial district getting in a face-to-face shouting match (apparently because they bumped into each other while busy texting on their Blackberries) that used words I would not even throw at my worst enemies. The F-word is only the start, accusations of deviant sexual behaviour in either parent a small stepping stone. The volume was pretty impressive too, because I overheard every word across a four-lane road, while wearing headphones.

But at the same time, random strangers jumped in and tried to calm them both down. Canada.

4: Canadians are paragons of political correctness.

Oh jeez, are they ever. Toronto is fiercly proud of being one of the most cosmopolitan cities on earth, and living downtown, I have to agree it is. In the first week of being here, I managed to extend my “list of countries whose citizens I have met personally” by Mexico, China (about a dozen times), Taiwan, Singapore (about a hundred times, seriously, are people left in Singapore?), Ghana, Colombia and Iran. And that was before going to the Student Exchange Orientation. This, paradoxically, does not lead to widespread stereotyping and suspicion, but it leads to everybody being very friendly, and when you want to label a street in Mandarin Chinese and English, the district council will pay for it, and maverick politicians who paint feverish conspiracies about foreigners taking over are ignored and overruled instead of deadlocking the debate for decades and making a mockery of the legal process by ignoring ruling from the supreme court. How odd is that?

Ahem. It also leads to all white people being very nervous about possibly being inadvertently racist. They have signs on the subways, buses and in major public places (usually worn, and covered in stickers, attesting to their age) that warn you about verbal racism being an infringement of humans rights, and so on. Canadians in general are pretty law-abiding, and coupling that with the utterly dazzling array of pro-civil and anti-racist campaigns going on at any time, I get the feeling they're hiding something...oh right, the First Nations. Hm. Asides from that, it feels like the big-brother vision of PC-enforcement sometimes. To give a crass example, if I walked up to a random person, kneed them in the genitals and called them an old word for a plantation worker from the American South, the fine for what I said would be a lot higher than for what I did. No joke. Speaking of crime -

5. There is virtually no crime.

In the last two months, there were about half a dozen murders, numerous muggings, break-ins, one kidnapping and several instances of random gang violence in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) and yes, there were many instances of gta in the GTA. Harhar. So no, Michael Moore's crime-free Canada, should it exist, is not here. And to hope that a urban region of nearly 4 million people would be crime-free would also have been a bit naive, no? Still, the crime rate is very, very low for a North American city, and the third-lowest in the area after Montreal and Ottawa, which are both a lot smaller. While the KIND of murder is different from the average in the United States, the number of murders per year makes Toronto an average Northern American city in that respect.

But seeing how the next two cities of comparable size are Detroit and Chicago, Toronto by comparison is a gated community. Of which there are a bunch too, in fact. There is one down the street from where I am, in the middle of the Annex, the second richest residential area in the downtown area. Some people don't feel safe unless their AC checks the fresh air for ID before letting it in, apparently.

6. The ancient “Canada and the US are the same” argument.

Well, in some respects, the situation of Canada vs. the US is a bit like Austria vs. Germany. Mostly in the respect that Canadians are far more concerned with differentiating themselves from the USA than people from the USA are giving a damn about the existence of Canada, unless they live near the border. And when they do, they see Canada as a place where they can buy cheap drugs, legal and otherwise. Other than that, Toronto feels a lot like New York and London had a child, and that child is going through a mid-teen identity crisis. On the one hand, everybody loves not being Americans, and generally likes Europe and the UK, but every diplomatic contact with the UK is seen as a possible avenue for covert political subversion. At the same time everyone loves being North American, and to hang out with the USA, but every attempt at closer ties to the US is seen as cultural hegemony in the making. Schizophrenic, but feels familiar somehow.

This debate, of course, leaves out the Quebecois, who are close enough to Toronto to be noticable. They are, at least while in Toronto, the most and least french people in the world at the same time. From an Ontario perspective, the most widely felt step in their struggle for independence from the rest of Canada in general, and Ontario in particular, seems to have been allowing its citizens to buy beer in super markets instead of purpose-built cornerstores, which always sort of feel like a prohibition era bootlegging operation set up shop in an abandoned pharmacy. Ontario has one of the highest taxes on alcohol and tobacco, and one of the strictest law systems for the regulation of the same. I blame the proximity of Pennsylvania.

[To be continued once finals are over. Nasty finals.]

Happy happy? Go to hell.

I'm feeling under the weather today. I have no idea why, as there is nothing tangible affecting my health or my mood, least of which the weather, which has been (except for most of yesterday) been another two weeks of sunshine. Maybe the lack of bad weather is making me grumpy, you never know.

This is what it basically still looks like, though the photo is a week old, and the tree has lost considerable amounts of leaves since then.

More of that here.

Yes, still looking pretty, but at the moment, I couldn't care less. You ever have those days when you wish that everybody just left you the hell alone? I'm having that today. Normally that would mean me retreating into my room and being happy to ignore the world outside for a few hours. Somehow, I can't quite do that here. It just doesn't feel like home yet, I guess, still feels like I live in a hotel.

Oh well, tomorrow is a new day, and I just might feel like finishing the way-too-long post about Toronto and living here that I started yesterday. Do stay tuned.

Later.

It has been a while...

*blows dust off blog*
*coughing fit*

Oh-kay, I suck at blogging. Or at least I suck at uploading photos. A month after the trip, here is the Blue Mountain photodump, without commentary, because that would take even longer.

Tell me if this doesn't work, Google+ has emasculated my formerly working Picasa albums into drooling automatons. I know it may not occur to Google, but I just so happen to want to post a link to my album, not share it with one of over 600 different possible configurations of my "circles". Thank you social media for making me be old before I actually age. Anway...

Aha!

Well, there we are, photographical evidence of the bandit who keeps climbing the fire exit in the middle of the night! Caught red-handed (they don't have paws, they have these weird, furry people hands) the perp then...

...ignored me completely and just kept climbing around out there. Well, they do get kind of large, this one is about 1.5 times the size of a common house cat, though at this time of year they're eve fatter than usual. The reluctance of people to properly dispose of garbage because it's cold and the raccoons eating more because it's cold go well together. Almost symbiosis. And here is a little teaser of the Lake Huron Hike, just so you don't think I made the whole trip up. I've uploaded 300 photos I still had on my camera to the PC now, and will be sorting them out, uploading them to the net, and then commenting them, this takes time, and time is what you'll give me.

Or, well, no photos, which would suck.

Later!