We’re a couple of days in New York City, visiting friends and visiting the city. We saw an installation by former Talking Heads singer David Byrne, in which he attached a organ to a building. Playing the organ causes all kinds of whistles, clicks, bangs and rumbles.

Just being in that building, an old ferry terminal, was already nice. All these sounds added to the experience and made it even better.

Let’s start with a joke:

A man in Chicago calls his son in New York the day before Christmas and says, “I hate to ruin Christmas this year, but I have to tell you that your mother and I are divorcing; forty-five years of misery is enough.”

“Pop, what are you talking about?” the son screams. “We can’t stand the sight of each other any longer,” the father says. “We’re sick of each other, and I’m sick of talking about this, so you call your sister in Atlanta and tell her.”

Frantic, the son calls his sister, who explodes on the phone. “Like hell they’re getting divorced,” she shouts, “I’ll take care of this.”

She calls Chicago immediately, and screams at her father, “You are NOT getting divorced. Don’t do a single thing until I get there. I’m calling my brother back and we’ll both be there tomorrow. Until then, don’t do a thing, DO YOU HEAR ME?” and hangs up.

The old man hangs up his phone and turns to his wife. “Okay,” he says, “they’re coming for Christmas and paying their own way.” Via.

It sounded vaguely familiar.

The funeral was Saturday and it went well except for the hot air balloon that we tried to launch as a ritual but that nearly went up in flames, ripped open and finally ended being buried with my mother’s coffin instead of flying. I read a poem, and didn’t choke nor stutter. I almost started to cry when I made eye-contact with my best friend in the audience, but I changed my aim and it went away. It’s not that I’m afraid to cry in public, but I don’t like to do it in plain view. I also cry at funerals of people I don’t know, I even cry when there are funerals in movies. In short, I don’t like funerals.

There were a lot of people, considering my mother’s age and quite a few family members that I hadn’t seen in decades and probably never will see again. Not much to say that the usual “So you live in Canada now?” phrase. Many people asked me when I’ll come back and I honestly can’t say. I don’t envision attending the funerals of my brother and sisters and their spouses and offspring but maybe I’ll change my mind when that time will come. But the frequency of my visits will definitely go down. And the death of my mother will make me more Canadian, since there is one link less that ties me to the Netherlands. I will make less trips to Europe and spend the time and money on other trips. Hopefully I can explore the rest of Canada a bit. But I’m also a bit afraid of doing that; I might like it and secretly wish I had moved to Vancouver or Calgary instead of Montréal.

While in the Netherlands I can’t stop comparing: this is better, that is better, that is worse and OMG! this is really awful. I should compile the definite list someday. Seeing signs on the street like in the photo above doesn’t make this country more appealing. This was just after I wandered through a 99% Muslim neighbourhood where every apartment had their own satellite dish to watch Turkish or Moroccan television. In Québec there are currently discussions about integration of minorities, but that sight proved for me that in the Netherlands that integration clearly has failed. Or am I just watching the Netherlands through really dark sunglasses so everything looks dark and gloom? I honestly don’t know. What does suck is that my bike, borrowed from a friend, was stolen yesterday, probably because it had a very bad lock, but maybe also because I parked it in the wrong place. But Alison’s bike, also loaned to somebody, was also stolen in Montréal recently, so I can’t really claim Rotterdam is worse in that respect. The weather is far worse however, it rained every day last week and now it is dry but extremely cold. Only minus 1 degrees Celsius but it feels colder than -10 in Montréal because it is very humid and it is always windy here.

I’ll stop now, sorry for all the complaining. It is about time I do something constructive again. A few more days and I’ll fly home again, as a free man. I miss the dogs and Alison, and I want to see if I’m still able to ski.

Christmas comes early this year. After I came back from a day in Rotterdam to Nijmegen, where my mother and sister live she handed me my inheritance. All of the art my mother owned was described in a long notarized list and my brothers and sisters decided that it was better to give me my part now, because shipping would be too complicated. I thought the timing was a bit awkward, the night before the funeral, but I had no say in this. So now I have a suitcase filled with a couple of drawings and a water colour, an old Arab book illustration, an African sculpture, a tiny mexican sculpture (probably fake,) the snuff box of my father, a ring that belonged to my mother’s father and a collier made of rock crystal beads destined for Alison.

I hope it will fit all in my suitcase, because I also bought a couple of bottles red grapefruit sirup and lots of dropjes, since I have to stock up.

The soon to be demolished railway station of Rotterdam is temporarily renamed from “CENTRAAL STATION”. The current shuffle of neon sign letters means “shedding a tear” in Dutch.

I’m sitting here in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, next to my mother. She’s trying to fight off another pneumonia. Yesterday she indicated that she didn’t want to be transported from the nursing home to a hospital. They are administering morphine in increasingly higher doses. She doesn’t talk anymore, just sleeps while breathing heavily. I hope she has nice dreams.

No, I didn’t go to the Netherlands for an emergency visit. This visit was planned a long time ago and I saw her two days ago, when she was still lively and alert. Things go fast sometimes. Coincidence? I don’t know.

I should be in the Netherlands today, but I’m not. I had a ticket for a flight to Europe last night, but I didn’t use it.

During the past 6 years, I always bought return tickets from the Netherlands to Montréal. In the beginning because I just went for several weeks to several months to visit Alison. And when I finally immigrated to Canada, 4 years ago exactly, I didn’t buy a single ticket. The reason is that a single ticket is actually more expensive than a return ticket. To give you an example, I can fly next week from Amsterdam to Montréal and back two weeks later for EUR 403. If I book a single ticket however, the cheapest flight will cost me EUR 1049. That’s more than twice the price for half of the product. Explain that to me. It’s like if you go to the grocery store and 1 loaf of bread is more expensive than two loaves of bread. It’s absurd and some economic watchdog should take measures to correct this, but that’s a whole different rant.

So I always, during the past years, bought return tickets. Usually with British Airways and those tickets were valid for a year and you had to pay a certain
fee (100 USD) if you wanted to change the return date. But, I discovered a loophole. Those tickets are valid for a year, but you can’t actually book your return a year ahead. The computer only “knows” about dates 10 months in the future. So I had my travel agent call BA and ask if I could change my return date for free because I couldn’t book it yet. That was very convenient, an open ticket for a low price. Later they closed that loophole and I could only change the date to a date after those initial 10 months but then I just paid the fee. Which I did a couple of times, when my mother was severely ill and I decided on short notice to visit her.

Last December, after such a surprise visit, all flights back to Montréal were fully booked and the remaining seats very expensive. So, suggested by my sister, I booked my flight from a city in Germany that is actually closer to my mother’s home that the airport of Amsterdam. There was room on that plane, I could just be on time here for Christmas evening and the price, although high was not unreasonable. As a return date I put 11 September 2007, because that was the last date the computer would let me, and easy to remember. I actually feared I would have to go back much earlier, because my mother’s health situation at the time was very precarious. (She seems to be doing much better now, thanks for asking.)

So a couple of weeks ago I foresaw that I couldn’t make it on 11 September because I was just too busy with all those projects here, that needed to be finished. So I called Air France to change the return date on my ticket and fell from one surprise into another. The first person told me I couldn’t change my ticket at all. I looked at the ticket and there it was clearly marked that I could change the date for a fee of EUR 150 (yes, those penalties did increase over the past years). Yes sir, but I see here that your ticket is only valid for 9 months. What? They now sell tickets for 9 months. And they don’t advertise that in any way when you book it. She then transferred me to another person who said that OK, even though I couldn’t officially change my ticket they would make an exception. My heart rated lowered instantly. Because the new ticket was more expensive I only had to pay a surcharge. A surcharge of 3400 EUR. Yes, you read that correctly, thirty! four! hundred! fucking Euros. That’s almost 5000 Canadian (or American) dollars. My hearth rate went up a couple of notches and I started laughing uncontrollably. “Vous faites un blague madame, n’est pas?”, but no, she wasn’t the type of person that made jokes, probably never had. The only thing I could do was hang up and stare at my computer screen in disbelief.

Just to put the absurdity of that amount in perspective: A return ticket Montréal-Dusseldorf with Air France on December 4th to December 24th would cost me EUR 3,245.64. Of course that would be a Business class ticket, since a normal economy ticket would only cost EUR 717. That is with Air France, I could have a direct flight with KLM to Amsterdam on the same dates for only EUR 578…

And these prices are for flights from Canada to Europe and those flights are always more expensive than if you fly from Europe to Canada. Don’t ask me why, I have no idea.

So now you know why there was an empty seat on flight AF 347 last night.

I had to restrain myself from going to the the airport yesterday, checking in an old suitcase, and then just leave the airport and let them have to remove the suitcase from the cargo bay after they found out I wasn’t showing up. That would have caused a nice delay. But with all the no-fly lists these days I figured out that was probably not a smart thing to do. Even though I actually was in the neighbourhood of the airport at the time.

Just hearing my name (that nobody can pronounce here, neither English nor French speakers) over the intercom would have been worth it.

“Last call for Mr. …. Rash-n-ders on flight Air France 347.
Mr. Rash-n-ders, please head to gate B34 immediately or your luggage will be offloaded.”

We’re having a lot of Dutch visitors lately. Last week my sister Aagje and brother-in-law Steven came by to have supper with me, before they continued their “Eastern North America in 3 weeks”-tour. We sat in the garden, listened to the crickets and my sister told me that they had visited Montréal’s highlights by luxury coach that day but both the driver and the tour guide got lost in the “no left turns” Montréal traffic situation. If your map says to turn left and the traffic signs forbid it, navigating our city can be quite hard. The next day they were heading for Ottawa (half a day) and Toronto and so forth. I couldn’t travel that way, it would be too superficial, but they like it. They’ve seen a lot of the world this way over the past ten years.

And yesterday Linde arrived. She’ll stay a bit longer in Montréal, about 4 months. She’s going to be an exchange student at McGill University, and is the daughter of one of my readers. Through a comments on loglog she ended up in our guestroom. (So if you want to be our guest, you know what to do next.) Linde won’t stay for 4 months in our guestroom, she’s looking for a room to rent. Today, her first day in Montréal, she went out and already saw several rooms. She even said yes to one of them. But now she has buyer’s remorse and is in doubt if she shouldn’t look at a couple more rooms in shared apartments.

It’s difficult for Dutch people to do these things: in the Netherlands finding a room (or a house for that matter) is really hard, so if you find something you immediately take it. Here you can be a bit more picky.

The dogs like her, and she’s an excellent guest. Alison suggested, over the phone, that we should adopt her.

The real reason for my presence in Toronto is that Alison has a team building meeting with all the members of her team. And the partners were expressly requested to come as well, and dogs and children also. I left Poupoune and Pepe at home though, since they’re not allowed in the train and I didn’t want to drive that far after a busy week at work.

The meeting was held in one of Alison’s colleagues’ cottage in the Muskokas, a two hour drive north of Toronto. We rented a car and upon arrival we found that everybody brought their toddlers, so there were enough small creatures. And they all swam, canoed, kayaked, barbecued, tanned, and chatted. So now I can put faces to names when Alison mentions her colleagues. Halfway I started to order the huge amount of toys that belonged to the son of our hosts. All cars and bulldozers (O, I wish I had those Tonka trucks when I was a kid) in a row, all the spades together. And the balls, the buckets, the fishes, the rings et cetera, et cetera. In the end I made a huge and very unstable tower of a few toys that were hard to categorize. It stood upright for a couple of minutes, until a breath of wind cased it to tumble down… People enquired if I suffered from OCD, and that made me laugh. They should see the mess in my office.

The first time I arrived in Montréal was by train from Toronto. And now, almost 6 years later I took the train to Toronto. I hadn’t been there in the past six years and since Alison was already staying there in the Royal York hotel, it was not that expensive. Through Alison I also got a free upgrade to VIA 1, so I travelled first class, with free wine and a meal. Nice. It’s so nice to be able to stare out the window and watch the landscape going by. When I drive I can never do that, since I’m never a passenger, and always have to watch the road. Maybe it’s time that Alison gets a drivers license.

(O, and on the way back I forgot my laptop again. But two days later, when the Lost & Found office opened on Monday, I had it back again. I’m so lucky. And stupid to keep testing the honesty of Canadians…)

Our nice tranquil lake, with boats nor cottages, surrounded by pristine forests, dotted with majestic boulders, with its beautiful sandy beaches, its coconut palms…

Okay, I’m carried away a bit. But our very nice secret lake, an hour from Montréal but almost never frequented by any other living creature than deer, moose and otter… Oops, there I go again. Anyway, that lake is going to be spoiled. A developer lay its filthy hands on it and now he’s going to build cottages around it.

We went there today and found big signs with “Domaine Privé” and “Défense de circuler”. We ignored them for now, since it’s construction holiday and also to investigate. The lake is just as pristine as ever, but there was doom in the air. The doom of big trucks, by and builders coming in, to build monstrous houses. (For some reason people who can afford a second home in the Laurentians have no taste.) Followed by loggers on a mission to create lake views for the owners by logging all the trees between the lake and said houses.

It’s only weeks before they put big steel fences around it and declare it a real No-go area.

So I’m going to spill the secret and give you all detailed instructions how to get there. Rent a car and enjoy this really nice lake while you still can get in, albeit by ignoring some signs. If somebody tells you to go away tell them you come here for years and nobody ever told you to go away. They probably tell you that things have changed but I bet you can stay for the day if you tell them you came all the way from Montréal.

How to get there

First locate the lake on this Google Maps map. Follow the included driving instructions from highway 15 North to the parking area in Saint-Adolphe-d’Howard.

From there:

• Park your car at the parking area on the Chemin de Val de Loire. It’s a rather big parking, for around 20 cars (so all readers of loglog can go at once; plan car-pooling in the comments), at the North side of the street, on the map above at the letter D (of “De-Loire”), just right of Lac Morgan.
• Get out of the car, pack your things (sunscreen!) and enter the area by going through the big gate at the east side of the parking lot.
• Turn left (NW) and follow the wide path. At a crossing there is a small cabin for cross-country skiers (there are not many of those around) and an orange plastic barrier.
• Ignore the signs, walk around the barrier and continue on the narrowing path. Enjoy the nice ferns at both sides of the trail.
• Cross a almost destroyed bridge (I bet one of those fat builders tried to cross) over a small stream.
• You now approach an open area, with on your left a pumping station for the municipal water supply of Saint-Adolphe-d’Howard since our lake is their main reservoir. To the right you see the newly constructed road that leads to the new cottages, surrounded by big boulders.
• Continue straight ahead, ignore another sign and follow the slightly sloping gravel road.
• We’re almost there now. After a slight bend you’re at the highest point of the road and the magnificent “Lac de la Cabane” is right in front of you.
• Follow the road 100 metres and there is the beach. Soon it will be a private beach, no longer accessible by us mere mortals, without hundreds of thousands of disposable dollars.
• If you follow the path that starts at the other side of the beach you can go to a nice private rock.
• A few hundred metres from the beach there is a large boulder, slightly hidden under the foliage.
• Just before it is a small path passing on the left side of the boulder, and leading to a magnificent flat boulder that is an excellent starting point for a nice refreshing swim in the crystal clear (the whole village is drinking it) water. Clothes are entirely optional. A pillow or mattress might come handy however, since the rock is quite rough on your bum/back.
• Enjoy your stay, don’t get sunburned, and please leave only your footprints.

Lakes should be public and not private. They’re part of the land that our ancestors stole from the natives. Well, maybe not my ancestors exactly, but you get my point.

If you don’t get my point you can always go to the developer’s site and buy one of the lots and have your dream house built. Be quick, they’re going fast. If you do, please invite me over once in a while. In return I can do some maintenance, I’m quite good at that. Then at least I can lay my eyes on “our” lake once in a while.

If you have access to other lakes please do not hesitate to email me.

Red-spotted Newt (Notophthalmus viridescens)

We both thought this was a salamander, that crossed our hiking trail in the Adirondacks, but after some research (thank you Google images) I found out it was actually a newt. I had never heard of newts, which is not so strange since names of animals in English usually don’t resemble the ones in Dutch. I often have no idea what to call the little and big creatures we encounter during our hikes. or so I looked for more information.

Newts are small, usually bright-coloured semi-aquatic salamanders of North America, Europe and Asia, distinguished from other salamanders by the lack of rib or costal grooves along the sides of the body.

So it was salamander after all. By googling the Linnaean name I found out the Dutch name is “Canadese watersalamander” which you can probably figure out without a translation. So this newt was in the wrong country. As many people are right now, but I digres.

Newts have the ability to regenerate limbs, eyes, spinal cords, hearts, intestines, and upper and lower jaws. The cells at the site of the injury have the ability to de-differentiate, reproduce rapidly, and differentiate again to create a new limb or organ. One theory is that the de-differentiated cells are related to tumour cells since chemicals which produce tumours in other animals will produce additional limbs in newts.

That would be so practical, especially for woodworkers. If you’ve seen Sicko you know why.

Many newts produce toxins in their skin secretions as a defence mechanism against predators. Taricha newts of western North America are particularly toxic; the Rough-skinned Newt (Taricha granulosa) of the Pacific Northwest produces more than enough tetrodotoxin to kill an adult human foolish enough to swallow a newt.

Mmm, a good thing Poupoune is not here, but is staying with the dog sitter.

This was the first time we went backpacking since a loooong time. We had the lean-to (a hut that is open on one side) for ourselves, even though it was the night before the 4th of July, American Independance Day.
We were afraid that all the nice spots would have been taken by Americans but we didn’t see a living soul (apart from the Newt) for two days.
Which was nice. Away from the busy job, the overdose of family the last couple of days and generally from it all. Relax a bit, even when that means hauling a heavy pack over hills. We should do this more often.

But with all Alison’s travel she’s glad to be at home once in a while. And we have to plan these things well in advance so we can reserve a spot at the dog lady.

Excuses, excuses, excuses…