Northeast Passage Part Seven

After concluding our cruise, we planned on staying at the W Hotel overnight in Montreal, but Mary found a much better deal with the Hyatt Regency which I didn't understand but I'm sure saved us hundreds of dollars or got us free breakfast or something. The Hyatt is located right downtown, on top of a large shopping mall, which we didn't actually realize till we arrived. This turned out to work out all right as we needed to find an ATM and the mall was connected via underground passage with the nearby Museum of Contemporary Arts.

After checking in, or trying to, as we were quite early, we left the luggage with the porter and decided to go sightsee. This mainly meant wandering around the mall till the museum opened. Nice enough mall, I guess, if you like those kinds of things. I don't, so I was kind of bored. Canadian commercial goods look pretty much like commercial goods in the States - who'd a thunk it?

The food court was interesting though. We found the concept of poutine, a Montreal or possibly Québécois specialty, to be one of the more gastronomically challenged dishes we think we've ever encountered. I'm all for comfort food, but even I, lover of all deep fried snacks the world over, think that somewhere we have to draw the line. For the uninitiated (this is where the weak stomached should skip ahead to the next paragraph), poutine is a dish consisting of French fries covered with cheese curds which is then slathered with brown gravy. We saw this dish offered at several places in the food court, including a national burger chain. Makes your arteries harden up just thinking about it, doesn't it?

Another dish we'd not seen before, which we think must be a local or Canadian development was hot turkey sandwiches consisting of two slices of bread with the meat inside, covered with brown gravy and then a pile of green peas on top of that. This is one reason I love wandering about to see what the locals eat. When people of other cultures point fingers at Americans and their affection for Cheetos, I can point right back at stuff like poutine.

The Museum of Contemporary Art (known as the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal by those of a French persuasion), when we finally got in, was quite good, with several exhibits we enjoyed (Vik Muniz' Reflex in particular) and one that was a shining example of why people like me should never be permitted to be contemporary art critics. I think that most people would consider dousing an installation with napalm, torching it, dancing around it in glee, and then salting the earth afterwards a little harsh as criticism. And I was strongly tempted to do just that to the one exhibit we decided was not quite to our liking, taking into account our admittedly bourgeois sensibilities. In this case, I think Mary agreed with me and might even have supplied the matches.

After a small noontime repast in the museum café, which was quite tasty (leading to a long conversation about whether we've ever had a bad meal in a museum café - we decided the answer was "no") we decided to get all checked in to the hotel and then walk down and investigate the Old Town area, which we'd skipped out on the day before. Again, lots of souvenir stands. Again, lots of art galleries. Old Town Montreal was perhaps not as densely populated with galleries as Quebec City, but there was still quite a respectable quantity. There are also many, many cafes and bistros; as a matter of fact it's probably the most prevalent business in Old Montreal. We stopped to rest and indulge in a frosty cold one before walking back to the hotel and relaxing for the evening.

Overall our impressions of Montreal did not quite meet our expectations. Before going we'd heard quite a bit about what a nice city it was. And the inhabitants (at least the 20% or so who weren't standing outside smoking), seemed pleasant enough. The city, however, was not our cup of tea. The architecture is a real mishmash. There are lots of empty lots scattered all though the built up area of the city that kind of detract from the ambiance. The time of year we were there (late Autumn) is, I'm sure, not when Montreal can strut its stuff. I guess we were looking for something that was a little more evocative of La Belle France and got instead a slightly frenchified version of Milwaukee. We'd like to try it again and see if maybe it was just bad timing, a lack of planning on what to see, or a slight case of rumbly tummy we got from the three plates of poutine we ate.

We decided, for a change of pace, and to avoid the airports, and because it was fall, to take Amtrak's Adirondack train from Montreal to New York. It takes a bit longer than flying, though with the delays common in New York these days, maybe not that much longer - nine hours total.

We discovered accidentally that the way to handle getting on the train in Montreal is to find a red cap or whatever train porters are called nowadays, and tip him to take your luggage. This allowed us to skip the quite long line at the entrance to the train platform and go down an escalator on the side. So we boarded while the rest of the passengers were still waiting up on top. Another benefit is that the porter directed us to sit on the left side of the train if we wanted the best views of Lake Champlain on the way down or on the right side if we wanted to watch the Hudson River. We chose the left and were glad we did.

The trip was very pleasant and relaxing. The seats were comfortable and it was nice to be able to get up and walk around whenever we felt like it. The scenery was everything we hoped - quite a bit of leafy color and the contrast with the blue of the lake was stunning.

Immigration is done right on the train - you don't even have to leave your seats while they check the passports - well, unless you're an unemployed Kuwaiti engineer like the fellow seated next to us, in which case they do a little extra screening in the café car, which I'm pretty sure didn't involve electrodes or watching professional wrestling or whatever interrogation techniques are popular this year. But even that seemed to take only a couple of minutes.

Food on board was a bit below blah: packaged sandwiches and microwaved burgers. Beer was available, which I may have sampled a couple or four times. Mary thought that the next time we do one of the longer trips on Amtrak, we might consider getting a picnic lunch from a deli before leaving. Anyhow, we did a bit of reading, a bit of scenery watching, and a bit of writing, which was easy because every seat had a nice electric outlet for the laptop.

The whole experience was very civilized and a lot more fun than tromping around airports, getting strip searched, and sitting in a much smaller seat on the plane, not to mention waiting for four or six hours for a gate to open up at your destination.

Back in the Big Apple for the last four days of the trip, we stayed again in the Trump International Hotel. This time we made sure to specify that much as we liked hearing cars crushed along with their drivers at three in the morning we really would prefer a room on the side of the building where there's only a leather-lunged homeless guy reciting the Iliad at the top of his lungs. And our wishes were honored. Actually we got a two tier upgrade to a one-bedroom room suite and this was much nicer than the room we stayed in before the cruise left. Again we had a little kitchenette, though this time it was actually a separate roomette. We had a living room and a separate bedroom. The bathroom may have been slightly bigger than in the Junior Suite - hard to judge, I forgot my tape measure. There was a dining table in the living room, which made our room service meals that much more pleasant.

Over the next several days we did several touristy things I hadn't done before. We went to Bloomingdale's, ostensibly to get a couple of things for yours truly, but in truth I ended up seated in the women's shoe department with a number of other men, murmuring approvingly every time our wives and girlfriends tried on another pair, and thinking wistfully of the games on television that we were missing right now. And the cold beers. I did buy a couple of pocket squares, a bow tie and a new set of cufflinks and studs, so it wasn't all Mary, Mary, Mary. There was a Mike thrown in there too.

F.A.O. Schwartz was a mad house - to be expected on a weekend. They sell some massively cool stuff though and Mary had a hard time pulling me out of there. What can I say? I'm just a big ol' kid at heart.

We had one special treat planned while we were in New York: a cheese and wine tasting at the Artisanal Cheese Center one afternoon. It was an excellent event made even better when it turned out there was no stinting on the wine refills. The Center's director, who led the workshop, is associated with Picholine, a restaurant we'd tried on our last visit to New York, which turned out to be one of the best places we've ever eaten.

After the cheese tasting we had a little time to kill before the Broadway show we were attending that evening, so we, or I should say I, decided to do a little snacking along the way as we walked to the theatre. We made a stop at a Papaya Dog, which I think is the New York equivalent of a 'Berto. For the uninitiated, in San Diego during the 80's and 90's there was a semi-famous taco stand called Roberto's. Well, it was a success and success breeds copycats. Mostly the copycats were family and friends of the original Roberto who went off and started their own taco stands. They wanted to make sure that people confused them with the original, so they all named their taco stands some variation on the name Roberto. So soon there were Alberto's, Umberto's, Adalberto's and Jilberto's. The stands all offered the same basic selection of Mexican fast food. Eventually, all taco stands in San Diego came to be called "'Bertos" by most people. In any case, getting back to New York, I think Papaya Dog is some variant on Papaya King or Gray's Papaya, the somewhat more famous hot dog stands. We had a couple of dogs and a papaya drink. Both were surprisingly tasty.

A few blocks later, Mary saw a sign for a 99 cent pizza slice and she dared me to have one. Of course I had to meet this challenge as I am a man, and we do all kinds of stupid stuff when someone dares us to - it's who we are. It wasn't bad at all. I was all up for a bagel or falafel but at that point we ran out of time so I had to delay my street food marathon for a later time. I did have a corned beef on rye at a deli after the show, along with an interesting tidbit called deep fried mac and cheese wedges. Strictly for scientific purposes, you understand. Scientifically, I can say that they weren't bad. Not great but not bad. Corned beef was pretty good though.

You might wonder how I felt when we got back to the hotel, after this somewhat varied diet. I felt fine. I had a nice cold beer before I hit the sack just to make sure.

On this stopover in New York we decided, in light of the food fest on board the cruise ship, to limit ourselves to only one nice dinner out. We spent that at Veritas, which was as excellent as our last visit. Limiting ourselves to one fancy schmancy dinner, though, left me with a loophole I could drive a truck though, and drive I did. I convinced Mary to spend one lunch at another restaurant we'd both been interested in trying for some time now - Gramercy Tavern.

We were especially interested in Gramercy Tavern due to our secret affection for Top Chef, the reality cooking show on Bravo. One of the judges is Tom Colicchio and he was at one time the chef at our little luncheon location. He's no longer associated with the Tavern, but it was still a good excuse. In any case, we did have lunch there on a Friday afternoon and except for one misfire on Mary's entrée (the fish was totally undercooked - sushi-like even), which was quickly replaced, the whole meal "exceeded expectations," as my old performance reviews used to say. Well, I should say that was a ranking on the performance review - not like I ever got that ranking. Mine was usually more like "shows up for work more often than not." In any case, I had expected that Gramercy Tavern was probably over-hyped, much like the one-star Michelin restaurants we've tried in Italy, but it was as good as I had heard and the experience was quite enjoyable. We'll be sure to go back, if and when we find ourselves with the opportunity.

And that was pretty much it. I'll add a short description of the two Broadway shows we got to see soon. The Lion King will almost certainly be posted over on Mary's site as it is a Disney show.