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While Classic is rebooting I'll make a note -- this was more or less all written well after the fact, so the chronology is liable to be a bit erratic here and there. Some was written when I was there, some not. It's all genuine impressions, though.
The blithering, as always, is at 100% purity.
Impressions of this trip to Montreal (composed beginning Tuesday evening)
The Jefferson Smurfit Company still amuses me. I want to know what the bleep is in there for.
WZLX has a range that reaches up a good bit past Manchester.
Dinner at a tavern with a ghost; no ghost put in an appearance, but the food was nonetheless good, even though we got there just before the kitchen closed. (They got onion rings right.) There was a sign by the door as we left that gave directions back to the highway.
Rest areas in pull-offs on the highway, the usual matching pair, which seemed to consist entirely of a small building for bathrooms and a huge warehouse for liquor. I'm really not sure about the logic of this.
It's really nice when one's not feeling sure about what sorts of things are welcome to have someone be decisive about it.
Stopping at the Visitor Center in Montpelier is useful even though it's closed by eleven; they have a board out front with a listing of hotels and stuff.
My major problem personally with certain accents is that I have to hear the words three times when I want to get information, and I don't know how much of that is some slippery combination of my memory and my hard of paying attention or because I honestly have a hard time understanding them. (Usually with people I can flip back and do a replay on the words to decipher them.) This is difficult when one's trying to figure out a room-rental form and can't figure out how much of it needs to be marked in.
Easy to shop for partners: collectors of AOL CD-ROMS. This one had leopard spots.
Being held very tightly and spoken to very firmly can work wonders for certain forms of terror.
An entire aisle (well, half-aisle) of a grocery store devoted to wines, bottles and banks of them. I didn't explore it, though.
The grocery with the impressive wine section had no quarts of milk of appropriate fat content in plastic bottles.
Huge banks of Black-eyed Susans, mounds of them, turning entire small hills orange spangled with the solemn staring orbs of those solitary eyes. Stunning.
Two, I presume metal, whale tails emerging out of a hillside. This is good for a double-take; I didn't know we had land cetaceans.
There's this white globey thing on top of a mountain in Vermont, and I can't figure out if it's a telescope or a water tank.
As soon as we got out of Vermont, all the mountains went away. I want to know what Quebec did with all the mountains. Deportation? (Well, not all; I commented on this and Brooks pointed out a fairly solitary one on the horizon, with a cluster of dimmer, more distant ones beyond it.)
It's somewhat strange to my noticeably in this case provincial attitudes to realize that the interstate highway we took into Quebec turned promptly into one of those meandering highways with twenty to forty kph drops in speed limit at each town.
Great moments in reading comprehension: recognizing that so-and-so followed up by '& fils' was referring to so-and-so and son.
Does the Aubergin Inn seem likely to serve eggplant to you, too?
Other great moments in reading silos: a name that I think was Polish. This satisfies me for some obscure reason.
Still other great moments in reading comprehension and stuff: deciphering a sign that said 'mais sucre' (non-ASCII not copied) as 'sweet corn' on cognates.
Spending some time trying to work out how bad the exchange rate would have to be to make the gas prices break even, with only very shaky metric conversions on volume to go by.
Moments of stunning revelation: realizing that the "O" in the signing and in the directions to the hotel was for "west". (Oeste in Spanish; I don't recall the French. It might be the same, for all I know.)
The reason the mileage in the instructions was confusing was, of course, that it was kilometrage.
The more I hear people speaking French around me, the more my random bits of casual conversation come out in Spanish. This does not help my ability to communicate any. I'm a polyglot with a terrible filing system.
The hotel room does not seem to have broadband access after all. It does, however, have a couch. What I theorize may be the fridge is in a box, and the box inside the box is locked. There's a key on the top that seems to fit the lock, but won't do more than about a sixth of a rotation, which is insufficient to open it.
I'd get a lot more work done if I wasn't playing Tropico.
There's nothing like feeling constrained from expressing affection to really hypercharge the urge to do so.
The third sex: Dinner for three is served. "Monseiur," for Brooks. "Madame," for me. "Voila."
The waiter at the place we had dinner overheard me say 'Boston Red Sox' and exclaimed, in his rich accent, "With Pedro!" Apparently the Sox are his American League team.
We went to an exhibit of photographs called "Earth from Above." Well, I think about two thirds of one -- it's set up along a sidewalk, and goes on for quite a while, and we didn't get to the end.
One of the photographs, of fish nets in Morocco, uses the same set of colours as my mother's Moroccan paintings. I was thinking it looked like them, somewhat, and then read the caption. . . .
A lot of them looked like Mom's paintings, actually, back when she was still seriously doing the painting with a hose stuff. Fractals, macrocosms and microcosms.
(Oh, hey. I just found the stereo switch on my portable CD player. Whoa, that makes a difference.)
It's deeply weird to have a broken libido while curled up with one's lover.
Two people neither of whom is capable of making a decision should not go out searching for breakfast without drawing straws to see who's responsible for having a brain first.
Mmmm. Touch good.
Chapters has a Really Bargain Bin. In this I find a bunch of stuff, including a book originally ten dollars (Canadian) marked down by 75%, as a gift for my mother-in-law, who, even if she doesn't find it useful, will be most likely amused.
Its second floor is Really Incredibly Warm. Buuuuuh. And that's where the religion books are.
I considered getting something to drink and snack on but there wasn't anything in the bookstore's Inner Starbucks.
And it files 'Canadian politics' next to 'Nouveau-Age'. Or whatever the French was for that 'new'; I don't remember anymore.
I always go to the left side to start reading the menu; I got frustrated that this one didn't have any English on it at all. Then I read the other menu. . . .
If I saw "Club La Boom" in a book I'm not sure I'd believe in it.
Eight hundred and fifty words and stalled out on not knowing enough about poker to do the next bit.
My Caesar salad has bacon in it. This isn't weird enough. The weird bit was having the salad served in a large tortilla chip, folded into a bowl about a hand high. (That's horse hands, not spans.)
The little MP3/CD player that comes with OSX is really fucking cool. I mean, really. It does the whole play CD things, but the important thing is that if I jigger with the settings a little, it blanks my screen and starts to play visuals, manipulations of colour and light based roughly on transformations of what I presume is the sound waves (and once I think it did two waves, what I'm guessing are the different tracks of the stereo). I watched this for about two hours while worrying about where Brooks was.
Gods, I hate wigging out.
This damn bottled lemonade is _sour_. Stomach-unsettlingly so.
Is it called a European city because everyone smokes, or because there are sex clubs on the main drag?
Got asked if I had issues with engineer-talk. I pointed out that I collected them. They asked me to explain, and I explained: everyone I have dated since I was sixteen has been either an engineer, an engineering student, or a student at MIT. This perturbed them immensely. It also satisfied at least some of my feeling-tangled-up-in-being-closeted issues. (Hm. I should ask![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
erispope about whether or not we should sort out whether or not our relationship counts as dating, since we've recently established it to be a secondary relationship by some means of counting. In which case I'd have to add chem majors, though I don't recall if she was doing biochemical engineering stuff.)
New Tarot deck. Mmmmmmmmmmmpretty.
Obscure Canadian Celtic rock bands are more or less exactly as obscure in Montreal as they are everywhere else I've looked.
Found a teddy bear for Suzi's mother. Lovely thing with very soft fur. Put it in Brooks's suitcase; we'll see how long it takes him to notice.
Called Kevin to talk for a while, because I missed him. Got the mobile to work. The damn thing's actually useful for something; who'dathunkit?
New game of Tropico: I set this one to seventy years rather than fifty, so of course I achieved almost all the goals I had in mind for this scenario, which were fairly difficult for my skill level, within about thirty.
Sasha is a good bit taller than he was. And he has the sort of vampire teeth I had at that age.
It's a nice city to walk in, but my leg fell off again. My kingdom for a functional goddamn hip.
Jo and Emmet were as amused by the tamagotchi nature of my mobile as I was. (I should see if I can get a photo of that.)
Really nice vanilla ice cream. . . .
Time to noticing: about six hours, maybe seven. But in fairness, he wasn't in for most of it. Probably fairer to call it the second entry.
I don't think the corn is any taller on the way home than it was on the way up.
"Rendez-Vous Erotica" is an interesting name for a building in a small farming town. Yay different cultures.
Okay, the mountains don't stop right at the Quebec border; there are a few on that side. I checked on the way home.
A heron. A gods-be heron. (Or at least some wading bird that flies with its head sitting on its shoudlers.) Flying in the most incredible slow-motion across the road. Wow. Coolness.
Only took five hours to get home, not the six-plus-border-crossing that Shane told us about. I don't know where that came from.
There's probably more that happened, but I don't remember it now, so I'm going to post it. Maybe I'll have addenda.
The blithering, as always, is at 100% purity.
Impressions of this trip to Montreal (composed beginning Tuesday evening)
The Jefferson Smurfit Company still amuses me. I want to know what the bleep is in there for.
WZLX has a range that reaches up a good bit past Manchester.
Dinner at a tavern with a ghost; no ghost put in an appearance, but the food was nonetheless good, even though we got there just before the kitchen closed. (They got onion rings right.) There was a sign by the door as we left that gave directions back to the highway.
Rest areas in pull-offs on the highway, the usual matching pair, which seemed to consist entirely of a small building for bathrooms and a huge warehouse for liquor. I'm really not sure about the logic of this.
It's really nice when one's not feeling sure about what sorts of things are welcome to have someone be decisive about it.
Stopping at the Visitor Center in Montpelier is useful even though it's closed by eleven; they have a board out front with a listing of hotels and stuff.
My major problem personally with certain accents is that I have to hear the words three times when I want to get information, and I don't know how much of that is some slippery combination of my memory and my hard of paying attention or because I honestly have a hard time understanding them. (Usually with people I can flip back and do a replay on the words to decipher them.) This is difficult when one's trying to figure out a room-rental form and can't figure out how much of it needs to be marked in.
Easy to shop for partners: collectors of AOL CD-ROMS. This one had leopard spots.
Being held very tightly and spoken to very firmly can work wonders for certain forms of terror.
An entire aisle (well, half-aisle) of a grocery store devoted to wines, bottles and banks of them. I didn't explore it, though.
The grocery with the impressive wine section had no quarts of milk of appropriate fat content in plastic bottles.
Huge banks of Black-eyed Susans, mounds of them, turning entire small hills orange spangled with the solemn staring orbs of those solitary eyes. Stunning.
Two, I presume metal, whale tails emerging out of a hillside. This is good for a double-take; I didn't know we had land cetaceans.
There's this white globey thing on top of a mountain in Vermont, and I can't figure out if it's a telescope or a water tank.
As soon as we got out of Vermont, all the mountains went away. I want to know what Quebec did with all the mountains. Deportation? (Well, not all; I commented on this and Brooks pointed out a fairly solitary one on the horizon, with a cluster of dimmer, more distant ones beyond it.)
It's somewhat strange to my noticeably in this case provincial attitudes to realize that the interstate highway we took into Quebec turned promptly into one of those meandering highways with twenty to forty kph drops in speed limit at each town.
Great moments in reading comprehension: recognizing that so-and-so followed up by '& fils' was referring to so-and-so and son.
Does the Aubergin Inn seem likely to serve eggplant to you, too?
Other great moments in reading silos: a name that I think was Polish. This satisfies me for some obscure reason.
Still other great moments in reading comprehension and stuff: deciphering a sign that said 'mais sucre' (non-ASCII not copied) as 'sweet corn' on cognates.
Spending some time trying to work out how bad the exchange rate would have to be to make the gas prices break even, with only very shaky metric conversions on volume to go by.
Moments of stunning revelation: realizing that the "O" in the signing and in the directions to the hotel was for "west". (Oeste in Spanish; I don't recall the French. It might be the same, for all I know.)
The reason the mileage in the instructions was confusing was, of course, that it was kilometrage.
The more I hear people speaking French around me, the more my random bits of casual conversation come out in Spanish. This does not help my ability to communicate any. I'm a polyglot with a terrible filing system.
The hotel room does not seem to have broadband access after all. It does, however, have a couch. What I theorize may be the fridge is in a box, and the box inside the box is locked. There's a key on the top that seems to fit the lock, but won't do more than about a sixth of a rotation, which is insufficient to open it.
I'd get a lot more work done if I wasn't playing Tropico.
There's nothing like feeling constrained from expressing affection to really hypercharge the urge to do so.
The third sex: Dinner for three is served. "Monseiur," for Brooks. "Madame," for me. "Voila."
The waiter at the place we had dinner overheard me say 'Boston Red Sox' and exclaimed, in his rich accent, "With Pedro!" Apparently the Sox are his American League team.
We went to an exhibit of photographs called "Earth from Above." Well, I think about two thirds of one -- it's set up along a sidewalk, and goes on for quite a while, and we didn't get to the end.
One of the photographs, of fish nets in Morocco, uses the same set of colours as my mother's Moroccan paintings. I was thinking it looked like them, somewhat, and then read the caption. . . .
A lot of them looked like Mom's paintings, actually, back when she was still seriously doing the painting with a hose stuff. Fractals, macrocosms and microcosms.
(Oh, hey. I just found the stereo switch on my portable CD player. Whoa, that makes a difference.)
It's deeply weird to have a broken libido while curled up with one's lover.
Two people neither of whom is capable of making a decision should not go out searching for breakfast without drawing straws to see who's responsible for having a brain first.
Mmmm. Touch good.
Chapters has a Really Bargain Bin. In this I find a bunch of stuff, including a book originally ten dollars (Canadian) marked down by 75%, as a gift for my mother-in-law, who, even if she doesn't find it useful, will be most likely amused.
Its second floor is Really Incredibly Warm. Buuuuuh. And that's where the religion books are.
I considered getting something to drink and snack on but there wasn't anything in the bookstore's Inner Starbucks.
And it files 'Canadian politics' next to 'Nouveau-Age'. Or whatever the French was for that 'new'; I don't remember anymore.
I always go to the left side to start reading the menu; I got frustrated that this one didn't have any English on it at all. Then I read the other menu. . . .
If I saw "Club La Boom" in a book I'm not sure I'd believe in it.
Eight hundred and fifty words and stalled out on not knowing enough about poker to do the next bit.
My Caesar salad has bacon in it. This isn't weird enough. The weird bit was having the salad served in a large tortilla chip, folded into a bowl about a hand high. (That's horse hands, not spans.)
The little MP3/CD player that comes with OSX is really fucking cool. I mean, really. It does the whole play CD things, but the important thing is that if I jigger with the settings a little, it blanks my screen and starts to play visuals, manipulations of colour and light based roughly on transformations of what I presume is the sound waves (and once I think it did two waves, what I'm guessing are the different tracks of the stereo). I watched this for about two hours while worrying about where Brooks was.
Gods, I hate wigging out.
This damn bottled lemonade is _sour_. Stomach-unsettlingly so.
Is it called a European city because everyone smokes, or because there are sex clubs on the main drag?
Got asked if I had issues with engineer-talk. I pointed out that I collected them. They asked me to explain, and I explained: everyone I have dated since I was sixteen has been either an engineer, an engineering student, or a student at MIT. This perturbed them immensely. It also satisfied at least some of my feeling-tangled-up-in-being-closeted issues. (Hm. I should ask
erispope about whether or not we should sort out whether or not our relationship counts as dating, since we've recently established it to be a secondary relationship by some means of counting. In which case I'd have to add chem majors, though I don't recall if she was doing biochemical engineering stuff.)New Tarot deck. Mmmmmmmmmmmpretty.
Obscure Canadian Celtic rock bands are more or less exactly as obscure in Montreal as they are everywhere else I've looked.
Found a teddy bear for Suzi's mother. Lovely thing with very soft fur. Put it in Brooks's suitcase; we'll see how long it takes him to notice.
Called Kevin to talk for a while, because I missed him. Got the mobile to work. The damn thing's actually useful for something; who'dathunkit?
New game of Tropico: I set this one to seventy years rather than fifty, so of course I achieved almost all the goals I had in mind for this scenario, which were fairly difficult for my skill level, within about thirty.
Sasha is a good bit taller than he was. And he has the sort of vampire teeth I had at that age.
It's a nice city to walk in, but my leg fell off again. My kingdom for a functional goddamn hip.
Jo and Emmet were as amused by the tamagotchi nature of my mobile as I was. (I should see if I can get a photo of that.)
Really nice vanilla ice cream. . . .
Time to noticing: about six hours, maybe seven. But in fairness, he wasn't in for most of it. Probably fairer to call it the second entry.
I don't think the corn is any taller on the way home than it was on the way up.
"Rendez-Vous Erotica" is an interesting name for a building in a small farming town. Yay different cultures.
Okay, the mountains don't stop right at the Quebec border; there are a few on that side. I checked on the way home.
A heron. A gods-be heron. (Or at least some wading bird that flies with its head sitting on its shoudlers.) Flying in the most incredible slow-motion across the road. Wow. Coolness.
Only took five hours to get home, not the six-plus-border-crossing that Shane told us about. I don't know where that came from.
There's probably more that happened, but I don't remember it now, so I'm going to post it. Maybe I'll have addenda.
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
So of course I immediately remember a thing I forgot.
(He claims powers of teleportation to get the window. I think that explains why he didn't notice us come in.)
From:
Re: So of course I immediately remember a thing I forgot.
Telly.
If anyone finds my brain, I'd like it returned.
From:
Re: So of course I immediately remember a thing I forgot.
<whine>But I'm using it...</whine>
Panic not good. Lots of hugs for the roomiesan. You do know you can come find me if you need people, right? I know I'm not that convenient, but even so...
From:
Re: So of course I immediately remember a thing I forgot.
I'm doing all right on the freakout front at the moment; Brooks and I had some weird stuff before this trip, and I think we more or less fixed that and dealt with the weird stuff that came up during the trip.
Hugs are very good though. :) Mmmmm, hugs.
I'm glad you had people taking care of you when you got back, yourself.
From:
And another one.
She guessed that my neck muscles are habitually too tense, which is one of those things that I Knew Already.
But when the muscle relaxant hits. . . .
From:
no subject
I initially took this to indicate that the /collector/ had leopard spots.
Does the Aubergin Inn seem likely to serve eggplant to you, too?
It didn't, until I looked up aubergines to confirm that they aren't eggplants and discovered that they, in fact, are.
The third sex: Dinner for three is served. "Monseiur," for Brooks. "Madame," for me. "Voila."
A symbol /and/ a form of address!
This damn bottled lemonade is _sour_. Stomach-unsettlingly so.
Now I desperately want lemonade. Damn it.
Is it called a European city because everyone smokes, or because there are sex clubs on the main drag?
I feel strongly that this sentence needs to be immortalized somewhere.
I should ask
Aha! I /knew/ I would take effect on you eventually!
Found a teddy bear for Suzi's mother. Lovely thing with very soft fur. Put it in Brooks's suitcase; we'll see how long it takes him to notice.
I didn't know you were on good enough terms with her for gift-giving; congratulations. (Unless it's not the already-on-good-terms sort of gift-giving, in which case good hunting.)
From:
no subject
I thought that might successfully troll a response out of you. ;)
I feel strongly that this sentence needs to be immortalized somewhere.
The other theory is it has something to do with not speaking English.
I didn't know you were on good enough terms with her for gift-giving; congratulations. (Unless it's not the already-on-good-terms sort of gift-giving, in which case good hunting.)
I was told to go looking for same in my spare time. I don't know if it will be reported to the mother in question that I was the one who brought down the quarry. I'm sort of feeling odd on the subject.