Misc. Montreal notes

[redbird]

• I have finally tried poutine, having told rysmiel and papersky that they had omitted introducing me to it on previous trips. It was, perhaps inevitably, on the menu as "Poutine a la Vladimir" [1] and was warm and comforting. I doubt it will ever be My Favorite Thing, nor yet displace roast duck congee on my list of comfort foods, but I liked it. So, I think, did fivemack, to whom it was also new.


• By the time I got to the airport yesterday, my feet were cold and damp inside my boots; I changed boots, and socks, after checking in for the flight and before clearing Customs, and now need to figure out whether the boots are non-waterproof and need chemical assistance, or whether I just didn't lace them properly. It had gotten up to just above freezing, so instead of quiet respectable snow, or icy surfaces to be wary on, we had large amounts of slush at every intersection, stuff that gets into one's boots in a way that ice or even fresh fluffy snow doesn't. This is why, while -15 is no kind of fun, -3 is easier to deal with than +1.


• Idly reading a Metro ad that included the word "jamais," used in a fairly common construction that comes into English as "more than ever," I idly thought "Jamais est jamas" [2], hit the homophone "Hamas" (the organization), stopped dead, took a moment to pull my brain back together, and realized that I'd run into a linguistic crash involving three languages, in none of which I am fluent and one of which I don't speak beyond a very few casual words.


• While I had a little trouble sleeping with the Christmas tree lights on the first night, having neglected to ask how to turn them off, once I did find that out, it was convenient to have a bit of light to find my way to bed by.

There's probably more, and thus I'll probably post again later, but this is part of an effort not to spam everyone's friends lists.

[1] That joke doesn't work in English (and isn't, imho, very funny in French); transliteration of Cyrillic depends on the destination language, and the president of Russia's name, in French, is homographic with the food.
[2] Those are the French and one of the Spanish words for "never"