Toronto :: Canada
The paradox of keeping religion out of Christmas.
Places: Blue Mountain, Toronto Intl, Mount Tremblant & Montreal.
Coolest thing I did: Took a punt on going into the strike zone that is Mount Tremblant this year and had the best time boarding ever.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Poutine is only considered the real thing if it uses chicken gravy. Beef gravy is considered a pernicious Anglo-Saxon addition.
Oh, how the Canadians like to make fun of their brethren down south, with their lack of insight into the world, their poor public services and their downright silly litigate-everything-in-sight mentality. One thing, however, that they can't claim to do differently is how tightly they have embraced political correctness in the face of common sense. People quite happily wish you a "Happy Holidays" and products such as "Holiday Trees" and "Seasons Decorations" line the shelves at Wal-mart. I understand not wanting to offend people with different religions but I doubt very much anyone is offended by the observance of what is a Christian tradition. No matter how much you try to separate the profitable gift giving part from those pesky religious overtones that tradition still stands. Pure silliness.
Due to being overseas at Christmas and the fact that the Canadians I know would all be home with their parents the decision was made amongst the Working Holiday ex-pattery that I know here that we should hire a condo in the snow and have ourselves a Christmas lunch. This was a fine idea so the venue was chosen as a small ski resort a couple of hours north of Toronto at a place called Blue Mountain (unlike Sydney, they only have one Blue Mountain). After an unexpected night on the cheap red wine with the Japanese neighbor downstairs the night before I got on the early morning Greyhound and out we went.
While the mountain itself does not actually live up to the title (it's more of a hill, it even has parking at the 'summit') it does have lots and lots of ski runs available and I can see myself taking another trip up there to do some actual boarding. This time however, we dropped our bags off and proceeded to down some hamburgers and plant ourselves at the pub to entertain the other patrons. Not much snow sports got done except for rides on something called a magic carpet, which is really a small sheet of plastic with handles. Oh, and all the boys worked tirelessly on turning someone else's half finished snow man into a snow woman. There were disagreements on how busty to make her and the amount of padding on the booty but the results were a little too good in the end. Once this was done we moved on from Gin and Tonics to shots. Keep in mind this is about 5pm on Christmas Eve.
In a pattern that would repeat itself for the next week we found ourselves in a ski resort nightclub populated by people roughly half our age. I don't know what it is about these places and underage kids, but I'm taking it it's a trade off between filling the club with people willing to pay money and legality. What happened next is a bit hazy but I'm sure it was a good time as I woke up rather early to the sounds of a turkey being prepared and was still drunk enough to cook everyone breakfast. I think the general chipperness around the place pointed to everyone else being in a similar state of mind.
There was a hard crash somewhere around noon and the food preparation suffered a little. While I didn't think things turned out too bad the general consensus turned out to be that everything prepared was a bit crap and no one really had the stomach for solids by the time we ate. A sign of a good night before if ever I've seen one. I returned on the only Christmas Day bus to Toronto, ate my baked beans on toast because I was too forgetful to remember I had no food in the house and went to bed early for my 6am start on boxing day.
I've had some rough trips on my travels, as this diary is testament to at times, but Boxing Day this year is up there with the worst. I arrived at Toronto airport at about 7am for my 9:40am flight only to have to line up for a couple of hours to reach the checkin desk. By the time I get there I'm informed my flight has been canned for mechanical reasons and my flight is now leaving at 5:30pm. The $20 voucher the compensated me with did little to offset the boredom of Pearson International airport, buying me nothing more than a slice of pizza and two beers. Man, that must be the dullest airport in the world. So I check in at 5pm and go through security to find out the flight has been pushed back until 7:30pm. This made it a physical impossibility of me getting up to Mount Tremblant as the last bus left Montreal at 8pm. At this point I found myself a random employee of Westjet, the airline at fault and hold them hostage until my demands were met. Oh she tried to fob me off and give me 1-800 numbers but I was having none of it. In the end I got myself $100 refund and a charted bus up to Tremblant whenever they managed to get me to Montreal. On arrival (the plane was further delayed so I ended up getting to Montreal at about 10pm) I found out that so many people were late the charter company had managed to get $150 per head from Westjet for a 2.5 hour bus ride. Pretty good work. I ended up convincing the girl working at the hostel to wait up for me an climbed into bed at about 1am, in my clothes and not bothering with sheets.
I had been told there was industrial action going on between the resort workers and Intrawest that own most of Canada's ski resorts so I was more than prepared to not get up to the mountain the whole 4 days and reduced service and runs. This turned out, however, to not be much of an inconvenience at all. There is only one mountain with lifts on it an a gondola goes all the way up to the summit from the base, meaning they can keep most of the mountain open with a skeleton crew. Add to this the fact that sticking to blue and green runs (that's about the level I can handle) it takes close to 40 mins to get from the summit to the gondola station in the village below. While the lines at the bottom were longer than they should have been this was partially offset by the droves of people who were scared off by the strike and went elsewhere to ski. It was a real gamble coming up but it paid off in spades.
I can't say enough good about Mount Tremblant itself. We had either clear blue skies or foggy mornings followed by clear blue skies in the afternoon and fresh snow three out of the four nights I was there and the conditions couldn't have been much better. The physical beauty of the area is a completely different kind to that in Banff, relying on snow covered pines and frozen lakes in place of jagged peaks as far as the eye can see. You get to some of the turns that overlook the valley below and can't help but stop to take photos. I've also been told it's usually closer to -20 than the -5 it was most days so even the weather wasn't too bad (though no the last day it dropped considerably, registering a -25 ambient temperature at the summit) and you didn't need to cover your face to protect against frostbite.
I think the fresh snow and lack of crowds also helped my snowboarding no end. I made more progress on these 4 days than I probably did in the previous 15 days of learning. While I'm still no expert I found myself in that zen moment when you stop thinking about what you are doing and the body takes over. Instead of looking at my feet or a metre in front I was looking well into the distance and even planning my route down the mountain in larger terms of where to position myself at the next turn or steep incline. I also found less and less points I had to feather down the mountain rather than linking sharp turns to slow myself down. It was a brilliant experience as it's probably the only physical activity I've attempted to learn from scratch in years. It also fed my confidence enough to listen to music all the way down, which only adds to the ability to let your mind wander away from trying to control what you are doing with your conscious mind. I miss it already.
The Tremblant village actually refers to the original village, which is where I stayed as opposed to Mount Tremblant, which is a replica Alpine village used to hold the hotels, boutiques and restaurants that bring Intrawest it's money. Oh, and of course the bars. Once again the order of the day was either the very young or the very old and I doubt greatly the effectiveness of ID checking going on up there. Still, the real village was very quiet and even if you missed the bus into the resort someone always seemed to be around to give you a lift. From riding in the back of a pick up truck (which was bloody freezing) to getting a lift home at 1am from the staff of the local sushi restaurant, some of the trips home were better than the actual nights out.
The reaction to the strike reminds me of Camus' The Plague. Everyone seemed to believe they were by far the most inconvenienced by the whole thing and required some kind of retribution from both the strikers and Intrawest. Demands for discounts and special treatment abounded and I'm quite glad most of the 200 management staff who were actually working told most of them to use their common sense. You can either have someone groom an extra run at night so you can go skiing or have that person make your bed. I saw very little sucking up, but that may have also been the two weeks of 14 hour days the staff were all working. I doubt there was much energy left for toleration of fools. I'm not too surprised that the users of the mountain were mostly anti-striker. I heard all sorts of foolish justifications on why they should accept they weren't getting a pay rise and go back to work. I was far more sympathetic to the strikers demands, which may have cut into Intrawest's profits but on balance pushed the wage for the workers somewhere closer to sensible than it was before. A $13CAD an hour average pay rate, much of which is for skilled work smells a bit like exploitation to me. But then again, not many people who can afford to go to Tremblant skiing (myself included) know what it's like to work for peanuts. Seeing as Intrawest make a fortune paying the non-union labour at places like Whistler-Blackcomb even less I think they can afford to give a little here.
So I went back down to Montreal for New Years Eve due to a lack of initial accommodation in either Tremblant or Montreal. I was told it was the party capital of Canada at the end of every year and from what I'd seen on past trips I had no reason to doubt it. I decided to give the idea of paying a single huge cover charge ($70+) for a single club and go crawling around the city to see what I could find to do. As it was bloody freezing outside I chose to put my bags in a locker at the bus station overnight and catch a movie until things started livening up a bit.
Syriana is a very, very complex movie. I walked out of there more confused than impressed, but after a couple of days to think about it I can see the brilliance in the story. Highly recommended.
I started off in a couple of pubs along the Crescent and soon enough hooked up with a random bunch of drunk Americans up from Boston. This would later prove to be my undoing. In a rapidly moving night we shifted to the St-Laurent part of town via some outdoor fireworks and at least two separate visits to fast food restaurants. The St-Laurent area is far more trendy but this did mean cover charges, even after midnight but everyone was a bit too drunk to care by then. Along the way the yanks were doing their best to pick up random women and by the end of the night we were in a rather seedy looking pub with nothing much going for it except the fact that it was still serving alcohol. A small subset of the group remained doing shots of Vodka when last drinks were called (I was obviously oblivious to the fact I had to be on a plane at 7am) and one of the girls suggested we go to a house party of a mate of hers who lived in the area for more drinks. This seemed like a fine idea until we hit the cold outside and one of my new mates tried to get a bit of a kiss from this girl but inadvertently vomited all over her. Pure class. Needless to say that put the breaks on the whole party idea and I found myself with probably the only sensible yank left eating smoked meat sandwiches until 4am.
It was a long, cold and rather sobering period between 4am and getting into my bed in Toronto at 9am. A sign informed me that the temperature was hovering at around -23 and despite wearing long underwear and all the clothes I could get out of my bag and put on the hour wait for a cab at the bus station was pretty miserable. If you are standing still your snot freezes and any exposed skin hurts like it's being whipped. With hindsight a 7am flight was rather foolish this time around. I managed to be in a pretty foul mood by the time I got back to Toronto and proceeded to spend all of New Years Day in bed. I look back at the night and I had a great time but it would have been made perfect by having somewhere to crawl home to at 4am.
So now I'm in the home stretch for Toronto. Everything going to plan I should be finishing up working here at the end of January and I should be heading to New York the day after. I'm just waiting for my passport to come back with an Irish visa and them I'm away.