Quebeckerin' Goodbye

Our final train ride to Quebec City, and we're seated next to some teenaged québécoises ladies. The swapping between English and French is more distracting than anything else: "Tu sais que I already bought it?"

I pay for my coffee with Canadian dimes, and the train attendantrix yells at me, “You think I like change?” She smiles and threatens to give me salt with my coffee, but we compromise on her giving me two heavy creams instead of the coffee whitener I wanted. She's a feeder.

I end up making my way through a third of City of Night, and somehow I’m committing myself to a one-man festival featuring Disillusioned Gays Finding Themselves Through Meaningless Sex in Urbania.

We hop off the train and after a sweaty walk that left a racing stripe across my chest, we check into Chateau Laurier. Our room is a boiler room from the Titanic, but we have a visual line of sight to the jumbotron of the concerts across the street. We again have not eaten anything that day again, so Yelp leads us towards a bistro called Le Hobbit. Based purely on the name itself, I was sold, but I was somewhat disappointed that it wasn’t a cozy nook in a grassy hill served by furry people about yay high. We’re told by the maître d’ that there is a forty-five minute wait for plebes with no reservations, and when we assent, she scoffs.

The time is spent well, and I pick up half a dozen French novels from the used bookstore for eight bucks. By the time my birch beer is swigged and we swag our way up the street, we’re seated at Chez Hobbit. For a decent price, we split duck leg confit and boudin noir.

As the shadows get longer in Vieux-Quebec, we wander down the cobbles towards La Korrigane. It’s empty when we enter, and I excitedly claim us a corner lookout, but we find that the locals are on the patio. Candlelit and tired, I have an excellent cream ale, something that gives a strong tea kick at the end, nothing of cream froth. I’m sad later that I missed out on Coeur du Pirate while we were in the lower town, but what can you do with insufficient information and opportunity costs. Little french-speakin' blond sprite spirit with a piano, and I am sold.



We head back like homosexual salmon against the throngs of concert folk going home, and we’re picking out potential mates. I don’t understand it, but there’s definitely a big part of me that wants the dark-haired orphans of the world. Points if they have cockney accents. Think chimney sweeps with stable income.

Poutine pops into my head at this appropriately late hour, and with a negligible amount of advocacy, we’re in Chez Alston, getting ready to feast on the emblematic dish of Quebec. Chris somehow manages to almost pick a fight with a large Tabarnackin’ bro, but we exit unharmed, vinegar and curdy gravy fries in hand.

Erik has the one fry he restricted himself to, but because no food must go to waste, he saves us from a dozen more. Who says chivalry is gone from this age and world?

Our second day in Quebec City starts off meeting a 400-year-old woman named Guillemette who guides us on a tour of Vieux-Quebec. UNESCO heritage site! We’re told how 40,000 cannonballs once destroyed 90% of the city, and about the French victories that involved rain, snow, and very little fighting. Lunch is with a little crazy pig, and I get quiche’d up before we wander the touristy outgrowths tumoring the old village square. Tire d'érable happens, though there are no pickles or coffee on hand.

We find the well-hidden hot tub on the roof before having a picnic worthy of Downton Abbey in the cemetery beside St. Michael’s. Tins of foie gras, pesto mustard, salted mackerel, pickled anchovies, olives, smoked meat, all on baguette. We toss a Montreal bagel to the punk barely has enough English to ask for something to eat before taking an epic nap at the hotel. Night wanders us towards different bars and in the deserted streets of Vieux-Quebec again. We clink cherry beer’d glasses to our last night in Canada at Sacrilege, which of course has a sweet patio out back.

Erik heads off to Grand Rapids early in the morning while Chris and I walk down to the water so I can pick up everything in maple flavor that I’m unclear I ever wanted. The little vendor lady outright lies to me when we have a brief conversation in French about whether beurre d’érable can be taken onto airplanes. Maple butter is what I was explicitly told to get in Quebec, and by the old gods, I was committed to picking up a family-sized tin of it. “But isn't it considered a liquid?” “It’ll be fine,” she murmured as she pocketed my loonies.

Chris and I split a enormous (and undoubtedly healthy) pie of curried lamb, a second basket of the best little strawberries I've ever had, and another two beers from Dieu du Ciel. The taxi driver is somehow okay with us paying him in a mix of currencies, lint, and prayer. The maple butter also magically survives two Canadian security checks, both because I decided to keep my birch beer bottle as a kombucha fizzer and it is an adequate distraction for both bag checkers. "This is not the maple butter you’re looking for."

We’re now an hour from SFO, and I’m looking forward to sleeping in my own bed with Dinga, and spooning some maple butter onto some co-op bread.

Toronto & Montréal: Mist maidens and angry god-lamb

Our quest to conquer Canada started bumpy when it took us an hour to escape the Toronto airport. Alchemizing our American gold into Canadian loonies, racing from floor to floor, we would have barely made it onto the finish mat for Amazing Race. Speaking true-true, we were bleary-eyed and I don’t even remember what we had eaten that day besides katsu’d Tomakazu porker.

Toronto feels to me like New York: humid warmth, garbage bags spilling into alleys, shwarma late night. At 2:30 am, we each have a quarter of a pizza and then flop down onto Holiday Inn beds to wake up again for platters of breakfast at Daybreak Diner. With real maple syrup! Somehow our hotel is in the gay area of town, and we pass so many rainbow flags and ambiguously gay duos and trios. We’re even down the street from a bar called “Zippers,” and on Friday nights, it is “Where the Bears (and otters, wolves, and boys) Run Free!”

A big bus picks us up from a little bus in the morning and we’re at the back with a little Latina terrorist who alternates between achingly cute and screamingly lacking in volume control. We’re disgorged at Niagara Falls and commanded to throw our faces for an hour at a buffet that overlooks the waterworks. Post-gorge, we are handed neon blue ponchos before filing onto one of the Maids of the Mist.

Somehow the New Yorker cartoon that won me this free trip to Canada failed to adequately portray how packed these ships are as they take you to the all-encompassing embrace of Horseshoe Falls. Even Monsieur FriFri donned a protective layer of hot plastic as we’re all hosed down. I can’t even see as I aim my camera sight unseen at the water.

We dry off quickly despite the humidity and we’re given some time to poke around a questionable gift store situated above some Class 6 rapids swirling into a whirlpool. Next destination was Niagara-by-the-falls, a sleepy tourist explosion of a town that sells pastries, souvenirs, bad beer, and adorable stuffed animals. We finally end up at an awful winery that has won somehow three hundred golden prizes (and a hall to display them in), but at least their wine plus the long day of seeing-all-the-things is roofie enough to knock us out for the journey back to Toronto proper.

Dinner is at the Dumpling Queen, which I assume turns from Taiwanese family-run joint into a gay bar catering to a specific clientele after dark, and then we peer into Zippers, mulling the fun of a nearly empty gay bar while the abyss of a drag queen peers right back at us with a grin. We ultimately hit the sack early to make the train to Montreal at 6:40 am. There will be more and better beers in our Canadian future.

Montréal

I’ve wanted to do a long train ride for a while now, so bucket list takes another hit. The responsible thing to do would have been to catch up on sleep, but I wanted to finish an emo movie, write a bit, and instagram all the blurry Impressionist paintings outside. It never got old to lean against the window, the countryside and farmland flashing by as our train blitzes towards the City of Saints.

As soon as our bags hit the hotel floor, we’re hauling ass towards the Basilique Notre-Dame. A fiver gains you admission, though it is free if you attend services. Everything is lit up by spotlight, candlelight, or tourist cameras. I take my obligatory picture of the baubles upon Catholic baubles at the front, but my favorite was the side chapel with the God-Lamb ready to do battle. It’s clear that He is sick of your whining after all that He has done for you.

We’re ready to eat a small Canadian child after the church, so we crash land into Stash Café, a Polish joint that has old church pews as seats that fit 3/4ths of your arse. Red demi-lanterns lit up the table as the server brought us pierogis, pickled herring, stuffed cabbage, all washed down with the first decent beers we’d had in Canada.



As post-script, I later regret not finding out about the brewery Dieu du Ciel until we were already out of town, not that I didn’t manage to successfully have five of their brewed wares by bottle proxy later. Best coffee imperial stout I’ve ever had. Péché mortel!

Our early wakeup is starting to ride us now, but we rally by sinking into the hotel pool and sauna contraption. Post-dinner, we inhale some shish taouk, the Montreal take on Lebanese kebab, as we make our way towards the Jacques Cartier Bridge. It was perfect timing for the International Fireworks Festival that night, and my homeland of Hong Kong was flaunting its pyrotechnic chops down by the amusement park across the water.

We camp out on the bridge’s early span and watch as giant fireballs set off car alarms and make children scream. I make everyone nervous by sticking my phone out past the bars, but all went well, and on our way back, we didn’t even dropkick any children.

The night wraps up in the Gay Village, where strands of pink baubles dangle over all the twinks reenacting Lady Gaga dance routines. The possible bars are just so plentiful that we drift through the gayborhood for a long time, pausing just to wonder why gay bars with “eagle” in the name are always Daddy dens. In this case, L’aigle noir was ready to suck Chris into its furry sweaty clutches.

Pink baubles above Gay Village

I suppose we all can’t expect that an Irish neighborhood in San Francisco to suddenly become a sufficient mecca for gays from all across the States. As a light sprinkle starts at the end of a fire dancer performance and for lack of smartphone guidance, we walk into Sky Pub Club, which turns out to have a sweet drag show in progress.

“Is there anyone here who speaks only English still? Fuck you!” said the cheerful drag MC, and we are immediately enraptured by her twirling and lipsyncing sisters. Katy Perry and Rihanna scroll by before a Cabaret montage steals the show. We stumble into the misty 2 am night in search of Erik’s perfect old man cocktail before bed.

We have a lazy morning before the next train voyage to Quebec City, so it’s off to Al-Baghdadi Pastry, a Middle Eastern bakery for some kanefeh variations and cardamom-drenched coffee. My eyes are sucking up every allergen it can at this point, and I’m just leading us around the city blindly.

Standing in your gallery with your tea-sigil in hand.

It's 6:45 am and I'm blogging from Toronto as our train chugs its way along toward Montreal, the City of saints and a hundred bell towers. Erik and Chris are snoring away, but I'm too awake from the remnants of my pancake/omelette leftovers and rather be typing away. The theme song for this post will be "Keep Your Shoes On" by the Scissor Sisters. No recaps on Canada yet, but this catches me up with everything up until we headed into America's hat courtesy of the New Yorker!

Six of us almost escaped from a magic show. We started bound to each other with cotton ropes, frantically did origami, unlocked briefcases, ordered mystical animal parts only to be foiled when we picked the wrong wires to cut on a magic bomb that sent us all to Limbo. I love these Real Escape games because they give a glimpse of what friends would do in crisis situations. Do people just buckle down and remain calm or do they just get flustered/lose their shit?

Splashing about after our tour of the immigration museum

I took my summer legal interns to Angel Island, and we all came out of it slightly lobstery from the sun, after having eaten entirely too many circus animal cookies and seen a sufficient amount of epic Chinese poetry scrawl. There's been a lot of beach time lately, but it really never gets old to wade into the Pacific and feel the cold sand surge past you. Pride Saturday meant that we woke with the livestock at 5:45 am to plunge into the slippery kelp fields of the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve.

One epic impromptu banana pancake breakfast courtesy of Chris later, we end up sprawled for naptime in the Dogpatch, waking only to haul ourselves to the outer Richmond for Shanghai Dumpling King. Erik got to play soccer mom all weekend, fetching water, doing quick little loads of laundry.



And then it was time to go back to the beach. We tried Fort Funston since I had fond memories of sandy valleys leading to the water, but Thornton Beach ended up being the winner for seclusion. The four of us scooted down compacted sand, traced our way through iceplant vales, and popped out on the beach right by a little cove just off the water.



I set to work making a Zen rock garden that radiated out from our blankets, and the sun plunged every furrow into deep shadow. We made tea with Erik's sigil, which prompted informal pantless yoga. A takeaway point from this adventure is that for Burning Man, I am definitely taking along some kind of thin blanket that is nonetheless swishy. I did pick up a keffiyeh from an army surplus store last weekend, but that hipster cloth is just a tad too small.

Draw me like one of your French girls.

As the day drew to a close and the ocean looked aflame, Chris and I donned our raiments, blue/gray pastel and military camouflage respectively. The summer breeze was enough to swirl fabric around us enough to give a ritual importance, and I came across my driftwood staff o' power. Tristan and I looked like two hobbits on a beachside frolic, at least until I became a minor diety of joy.

Pride Sunday itself was a ton of fun, and it was great to have friends and Lincoln join the ORAM contingent as we made our way down Market right behind the director for God Loves Uganda. After dispersal, we rallied with some Pho 2000 and then closed off the weekend overlooking the City at Bernal Hill.

Sad to have Tristan head off for good this time, but I'm sure we'll see him again sooner than a year. At least while he was here and we went rockclambering, I nailed my first V6 bouldering problem. I apparently need harder New Year's resolutions. It was an overgrade for sure, but I'll take what I can get.

Back to looking out the window at eastern Canada rushing by the train!