Events

Damn you Bonnie Tyler!

Every time I hear the words “Total Eclipse,” I can’t help but suddenly get the damn song, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” into my head. The past week the news has been reporting a total lunar eclipse that was to occur on the 20th of February, and every time the news anchor, with his manicured nails and perfectly coifed hair said the words, “total eclipse,” that sappy song with its overwrought singing and creepy video with the Mary Kay Letourneau like story and the scary children of the corn with their glowing eyes came flooding into my head. Even repeated listens to Rihanna's Umbrella couldn’t get the damn "Total Eclipse of the Heart" song out of my head.

Despite my hatred of the words, I decided to head out to the local dog-walking park and watch the moon turn blood red as it passed through the shadow of the earth.

After admiring the orange-red moon, I started walking back through the crunchy snow. I looked back and saw the moon framed between the branches of a small tree. It was very pretty, and reminded me of another, much better song...

I'll see you again when the stars fall from the sky
And the moon has turned red over One Tree Hill
One Tree Hill, U2

I am a Canadian. I was born and raised in the Toronto suburbs, went to school in London, Canada (yes, there is a London in Canada), lived in Canada’s capital of Ottawa and currently live in mid-town Toronto in a deluxe apartment in the sky (I’ve moved on up!)

Yet I know that my blog might lead one to think that perhaps I am not much of a Canadian. I complained about the snow and cold when I was in Quebec City. I have many more blog entries from the United States than any other country.

The biggest exclusion, though, is so shocking that I’m surprised the secret police of Canada haven’t come and taken away my passport.

I’ve written about a lot of sports in my blog. Baseball has had its due. I’ve written about seeing both American and Japanese games, and even wrote an entry from Canada about watching the MLB All-Star Game on TV.

I covered my experience watching a soccer game in Toronto with the inclusion of the Toronto FC in the North American professional soccer league MLS. I talked about seeing a Sumo tournament in Japan. I discussed rugby and basketball, and even had one entry that covered the a mash-up of sports, including the cycling of Tour de France, the off-road craziness of the Dakar Rally and Formula One auto racing.

The sport that has probably gotten the most attention is American football, mostly the NFL. This over exposed blog coverage is due mostly to a realization I came to while watching Superbowl 38 in Costa Rica that, along with that Superbowl, I had watched the past 4 Superbowls in 4 different countries. That, I figured, was worth a blog entry, plus the creation of “past” entries to places that I had watched the big game (Denver, Toronto and Puerto Montt, Chile) Thus it was that my “Superbowls Around the World” series of blog entries was created, which continued the next year with an entry from Stone Town, Zanzibar, Tanzania, which if it wasn’t exactly about watching the Superbowl, at least it was about trying to watch the Superbowl.

This February the third was Superbowl 42 (XLII, for any Romans in the crowd), where the underdog New York Giants beat the previously undefeated New England Patriots in a shocking upset. I was a little disappointed, mainly because when I’m a really old guy, I want to be able to say stuff like, “bah, you kids think the 2029 Tokyo Bills are a good team? You should have seen the ’07 Patriots. Undefeated! Tom Brady, he could throw 5 touchdowns a game and still have the energy impregnate a supermodel at half-time.”

I watched this game in Toronto, at a friend of a friend’s place. Watching the game in Canada, along with the past two entries in the series both from the USA (New York and Seattle to be exact), pretty much smashes any illusion that this is a series of blog entries worth continuing, so with this we see the end of the series.

Editors Note in February of 2009: I have since decided it is a series worth continuing, and you can see all the Big Game Superbowls Around the World blog entries

So, to close out the “Superbowls Around the World” series, I will say that my favourite entry was the one that spurred the series to start, watching Superbowl 38 at the Nashville South bar in San Jose, Costa Rica. The party was so intense and cool, it was featured in a local paper with headline “Los Gringos Estupidos,” which I have on good authority from those who know Spanish means “Avid American Football Fans.”

All these entries on sports, and yet I have only made passing references (mostly in entries on Texas and California, of all places) to the most Canadian of sports – ICE HOCKEY. The strange thing is, that of all the sporting events I’ve ever witnessed, hockey is probably the one I’ve seen the most. I’ve only ever seen one NFL football game in person, and in almost every city I have seen a live baseball game in I’ve seen at least one NHL hockey game. I’ve attended NHL games in St. Louis, San Jose, Atlanta, Buffalo, Ottawa, Montreal, and numerous games at home in Toronto. I even got to touch the Stanley Cup while it was on display in Denver, Colorado.

Perhaps it is because I, like most every other Canadian, grew up watching hockey and have seen so many games live that I haven’t written about it until now. While probably a good proportion of the world’s population has never seen an ice hockey game live (or perhaps even seen an ice rink), it doesn’t feel like a very unique experience. But no more, I figure it is time to Courier-Du-Bois-up and write about attending a hockey game, and what better place to write about it than in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

The Montreal Canadiens are the most decorated team in NHL history, having won 24 Stanley Cup titles, more than any other team. According to someone who is either a statistician or just someone who has a lot of time on his hands to figure stuff out and post on Wikipedia, “On a percentage basis, as of 2006 this made them historically the third most successful major professional sports team in North America, having won 25% of all NHL/NHA Stanley Cup championships. Only the Boston Celtics of the NBA (26.2%) and the New York Yankees of Major League Baseball (25.2%) have higher success rates.” Montreal loves their Canadiens, and the motto of the team is “The City is Hockey.”

While many in Toronto might think of their Toronto Maples Leafs as the most venerable of hockey teams, the Canadiens are the oldest club in the NHL (debuting in 1909, eight years before the NHL itself was formed) and was the most recent Canadian team to win a Stanley Cup (winning in 1993). Toronto’s NHL team, on the other hand, haven’t won since 1967, which was before even I was born, which means it was REALLY LONG AGO. Plus, the Canadiens are owned by the guy who is a bitter battle to try to buy Liverpool FC, whereas the Toronto Maple Leafs are owned by a bunch of teachers. Which is cooler, a team owned by a dude who gets into bitter take-over battles using junk bonds, or a team owned by people who teach grade six math and social studies?

So, for your reading pleasure, a discussion of Canada’s game – Hockey in three periods.

First Period

Ice Hockey is a game played by two teams on an ice surface called a hockey rink. The players wear skates that allow them to glide across the ice surface. There are 6 players on each team, 3 forwards, 2 defensemen and 1 goalie. At each end of the rink there is a net, which the goalie protects. The players all have hockey sticks, which they use to move a small black disk called a puck around the ice surface, in an attempt to score by putting the puck in the other team’s net. Players are allowed to bank the puck off the side of the ice rink (called the boards) and play can happen behind the nets. Players are allowed to hit each other with their bodies, called “checking,” though hitting another player with your hockey stick is not allowed.

The game is played in three periods, each period lasting 20 minutes with a break between each period. At the end of the 60 minutes, the team with the highest score is the winner. A coworker of mine from India tells a story about seeing his first hockey game in North America. He was confused when all the fans left at the end of the 3rd period, assuming that the game was played in four quarters. After 20 minutes of sitting around in an empty hockey rink, he figured out that the game was over, and left.

Where and when the game of ice hockey was invented is hard to determine. Similar games played with curved sticks date back thousands of years, though these games were played on fields. The game of hurling from Ireland and shinty from Scotland were no doubt brought by immigrants to Canada, and it was probably inevitable that in the winter these games would move to the ample frozen ice surfaces. In addition, similar games were played in northern European nations like the Netherlands in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, though without the skates.

While the Society for International Hockey Research couldn’t determine the explicit origins of the game, they did identify the first recorded, indoor and organized ice hockey match, which took place on March 3, 1875 at the Victoria Ice Rink in Montreal, Canada. The Victoria Ice Rink no longer exists, torn down and replaced with a parking garage.

Some 132 ¾ years later, the Habs (a nickname for the team based on shortening another nickname for the team, The Habitants) play not far away from the site of that first game, at The/Le Centre Bell Centre (It’s Quebec, so you have to be bilingual, you know).

My friend Brad, who is a huge Montreal Canadiens fan and myself headed up to Montreal, and after getting some tickets from an independent ticket agent (aka scalper), headed into the Bell Centre to watch the game between the Montreal Canadiens and the Philadelphia Flyers. Both teams play in the NHL’s Eastern Conference, and the Montreal Canadiens were one place above Philadelphia in the standings, so the game promised to be an important one for the playoff race.

We took our seats, and purchased a couple of draft beers ($9.41 for a tiny glass of beer. Yikes!). The national anthems of the USA and Canada were played, and then the players took the ice. The puck was dropped by the referee, and the game was on.

The first period was a tight fought match, with both teams putting ten shots on net but neither scoring any goals.

Second Period

Victoria Skating Rink, which held that first recorded indoor hockey game, was also the site of the first Stanley Cup Playoffs in 1894. Lord Frederick Stanley was appointed as the Governor General of Canada in 1888 by Queen Victoria. During his time in Canada, he became involved in the game of ice hockey, and in 1892 wrote a letter to the Ottawa Hockey Club, suggesting that “it would be a good thing if there were a challenge cup which should be held from year to year by the champion hockey team in the Dominion” (the Dominion, being Canada).

Lord Stanley purchased a decorative bowl, forged in Sheffield, England, and had the words "Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup" engraved on one side of the outside rim, and "From Stanley of Preston" on the other side. Lord Stanley never saw any teams compete for his cup. He returned to England in July of 1893 to become the Earl of Derby, but his challenge cup idea had taken hold, and in 1894, the Montreal Hockey Club beat both the Montreal Victorias and the Ottawa Hockey Club to be the first Stanley Cup Champions.

From 1895 through to 1914 the Stanley Cup was played as a challenge cup, allowing any team to challenge the current holders of the Cup. In 1915, however, the National Hockey Association (renamed the National Hockey League in 1917) and Pacific Coast Hockey Association came to an agreement that the respective champions in each league would play each other for the Stanley Cup. This continued until 1922, when the World Hockey League joined the fray. The three league format was short lived, however, with the NHL and PCHA merging in 1924 and the WHL folding in 1925. The Victoria Cougars won the Stanley Cup in the 1924-1925 season, and became the last non-NHL team to win the Stanley Cup, beating the Montreal Canadiens three games to one.

Back in the present, the second period started, and at three minutes and 52 seconds into the second period, Montreal’s Andrei Kostitsyn put a shot on Philadelphia goalie Antero Nittymaki. Nittymaki kept the puck out of the net, but he fell to the ice. Kostitsyn took a backhand swipe at the loose puck and the went through Nittymaki’s skates and into the net.

The second period ended without any more scoring, and the Montreal Canadiens took a 1 to 0 lead into the third period.

Third Period

1925 found the Stanley Cup being competed for between the NHL champion Montreal Maroons and the WHL Victoria Cougars competing in what would be the last NHL-WHL showdown. The Maroons won the Cup, and later that year the WHL folded. From that moment on, only NHL teams have competed for the cup. In 1947, the NHL signed an agreement with the trustees of the cup to have exclusive control of the Cup, and reject any challenges from other leagues to play for the Cup.

Originally made up mostly of Canadian players with a smattering of USA players, the NHL became the premier hockey league in the world, soon opening up its doors (and wallets) to international players. Today, the NHL has players from over 20 countries in its 30 team league. The Montreal Canadiens captain, Saku Koivu was born in Finland, and has teammates from Belarus, Russia, Czech Republic, France, Switzerland and the USA in addition to Canada.

The third period started with a full beer, the last one of the night as beer sales are stopped at the start of the third period so that fans are not too drunk by the end of the game.

The third period was dominated by the Philadelphia Flyers, who put 15 shots on net, including a flurry during a short period when two of the Montreal players were sent off the ice for penalties, however the Montreal Goalie Carey Price stopped all the shots, and eventually the time wore down and the Montreal Canadiens won the game.

Brad and I left, Brad very happy that his team had won, I just happy to have seen a good game. We wandered out into the cold winter night with the rest of the crowds. Bundled up in our warmest clothes and warm with the glow of a few beers after watching a hockey, I couldn’t have felt more Canadian.

I guess I need to write about Lacrosse next. The game, invented by native North Americans and adopted by European colonizers, the game is the official sport of Canada and Toronto has a professional lacrosse team. Yes, that should be next. As Bono once said, "the world needs more Canada."

As many of you are probably aware, in August of this year, Beijing is hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics. It has certained caused a boom of construction there. When I was over in Beijing in 2005, there was a lot of new buildings, subways, highways, etc. being built to manage the hoards of atheletes, administrators and tourists that will be decending on the city.

The Chinese government is going all out to present a great face to the world, which includes getting the locals ready and excited about the event as well. For taxi drivers and tourist guides, that means learning English. For the rest of the folks, that means seeing a lot of Yao Ming. Yao Ming is a very tall Chinese man, and plays basketball for the Chinese national team, and also over in the United States in the NBA for the Houston Rockets. In Beijing, I saw a ton of flat surfaces (bus shelters and building walls) covered with Yao's likeliness.

Seeing Yao all over Beijing wasn't unexpected at all. What was unexpected, though, was seeing the number of Chinese people in Houston how had travelled from somewhere (some as far away as China itself) to see Yao play. I went to a game on January 15th, when Houston played the Philadelphia 76ers. The 76ers aren't very good, so there weren't a lot of people at the game. However, of those that were there, probably 70% were Chinese. They had Chinese signs, which I couldn't read, but I'm sure said stuff like "Go Yao Go!", "Yao, Beat the 76ers!" or "Hey ESPN China, Put Me On TV" because those are the kinds of things people write on signs at sporting events.

I was pretty bored by the game, frankly. I'm not a big basketball fan, and other than a couple games I saw in St. Louis for the start of the NCAA (USA College basket) March Madness tournament, usually find myself only doing on thing at basketball games. Watching the cheerleaders!

Er... I mean Dance Squad. They, like the basketball players, are professional atheletes, you know.

You can't really see them very well there. I should have brought my camera along I guess, instead of counting on my cell phone to get the good picture. But trust me, the dance squad women were very pretty.

On July 3, 1608, Samuel de Champlain was looking to set up the first permanent settlement in the new world for France. Coming to a narrow spot in the river that had served both as an Iroquois settlement called Stadacona and fort founded and later abandoned by Jaques Cartier, Champlain decided on this spot to locate his city. Naming it after the local native work Kebec, meaning “where the river narrows,” Quebec City became the most important city in New France.

Nearly 400 years later, Quebec City is geared up to celebrate its 400th birthday. That celebration started on December 31st, 2007, with a multimedia musical show leading up to the countdown to midnight and the ringing in of 2008.

Having just started up my project in Houston a couple of months ago, I wasn’t sure if I was going to get an opportunity to get away during the Christmas break, and as such I hadn’t arranged a trip. As he got close to Christmas, it was clear that I would be able to sneak a couple of weeks in vacation in. However, by that time, everything was sold out or outrageously priced. Add to that the recent nagging guilt I’ve been feeling about travelling all around the world but ignoring the amazing sites in my own country, and I decided that I needed to spend some time in Canada.

I debated sticking around my home in Toronto, or heading up to Ottawa or Montreal, but all are places that I have been lots of times before, and wanted to do something different. Quebec City provided a good opportunity both because I hadn’t been there since I was 10 years old and also because I could get there on the train. So I booked tickets on Via Rail, made some hotel reservations and headed off to Canada’s most “European” feeling city.

Champlain founded his city around the small town square which today goes by the name of Place Royale. The square gave name to the area that sits between the St. Lawrence river and the foot of the cliff that towers over it. The area contains a number of small streets and alleys with old buildings that today house a number of restaurants and boutique shops along cobblestone streets.

Up atop the cliff is the area of town called Old Quebec. The entire area is surrounded by thick fortified walls, and the highest point is dominated by the gothic looking Chateau Frontenac Hotel, one of the many luxury hotels built by the Canadian Pacific Railway company to encourage travellers to take their trains across Canada.

Just east of the walled city is the Champs-de-Bataille park, also known as the Plains of Abraham. During the seven year’s war between Britain and France, it was on these plains (a farm owned by Abraham Martin, thus the name) that British troops under General James Wolfe defeated the French general Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and took the city. This was the start of the fall of New France. The French Colonies within North America had extended from east-to-west from Newfoundland in the Atlantic ocean to the Rocky Mountains and from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. At the end of the Seven Year’s War, most all of this land was ceded to Britain. There is a notable exception to this, the small Atlantic islands St. Pierre and Miquelon that are still controlled by France today, though most North Americans are unaware of the existence of this small French colony just off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

To the north of the Plains of Abraham is the Grand Allee, a beautiful street with old buildings that have been mostly converted into restaurants, bars and the occasional museum. I wandered along it for a few moments, but quickly headed back to my hotel.

I have a confession to make here. I am a Canadian, it is true. But I come from Toronto, one of the southern most cities in Canada, and due to both it’s southern latitude and the moderating effect of Lake Ontario, Toronto doesn’t really get very cold or very snowy at all. In fact, in 1999 Toronto became the butt of many jokes within Canada for having to call in the Army to clear the streets after a snow storm. As a Torontonian, I am mostly used to a few inches of gray, wet slush on the ground and temperatures around the freezing mark.

Quebec City, being farther north, gets snow, and it gets cold. Most of the time I was in the city, the temperature didn’t get above -20 Celsius, and dipped down much colder at night. My fragile Torontonian body could barely take the cold that, I am sure, Quebeckers were laughing and thumbing their noses at.

I did manage, however, to pull myself out of doors, bundled up in all my warmest clothes, to watch the big multimedia celebration at Place D’Youville on New Years Eve. As much as I wanted to enjoy the festivities, though, it was a bit of a dud. They had wedged the stage in a corner of Place D’Youville against the walled city, which meant that most people (including myself) didn’t have a view of the stage, so I ended up watching the festivities on the big screen. Then it turns out the timing was off on the show, and by the time the show climaxed with a countdown from 10 to the New Year, it was already 12:03 am on January 1st, 2008.

Note that they are counting down in French, starting at six

Oh well, what is time but a human construct anyway, so why not celebrate the New Year countdown whenever it’s convenient? At least the fireworks afterwards were nice. And it does look like there are going to be some pretty big parties this year in Quebec City to celebrate their 400th year, including their famous Winter Carnival, the craziness that is the Red Bull Crashed Ice contest, and some big parties set up for July to mark the actual founding of the city.

And if you are thinking of going, the good news is that in July the weather will be a lot warmer than it is in January.

Northern California. Truly a land of milk and honey sandwiched between the blue Pacific Ocean and the majestic mountain ranges of the Sierra Nevadas, with beautiful scenery and gorgeous weather, assuming, of course, you don’t mind the stop-and-stop-some-more traffic, totally unaffordable housing prices and killer earthquakes. I have loved Northern California since my first trip here back in 2002, when I was working south of Oakland in the sunny Livermore Valley to the east of San Francisco Bay.

I was back in Northern California again for a training course, south of San Francisco in Mountain View, sandwiched between Palo Alto, home to the prestigious Stanford University, and San Jose, California, unofficial capital of the Silicon Valley, the name given to the concentration of high tech companies that inhabit the cites and towns in the southern San Francisco Bay area.

At the end of my three day course, I pulled up my tent pegs and moved north to San Francisco for a weekend of R&R. Mostly the first R (assuming that’s the one that means Rest), as I am recovering from a cold and during the week had to get up at 5:00 am local time every day to take 3 hours of conference calls from the east coast of the USA before my classes started. I mostly slept and napped for a couple days in San Francisco, with a few quick trips out to the fantastic seafood restaurants that flourish in the city by the bay.

Picture taken in 2002 because I forgot my camera, but you get the general idea

Mostly, though, my mind was on sports. More specifically, it was on professional sports.

It’s natural to think about sports when in the San Francisco Bay Area. With the 10th, 14th and 44th largest cities in the USA (San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland, respectively) within an hours drive of each other and a total population of 7.2 million people in the area, there’s a lot of money out there for professional sporting franchises. That’s why there are a total of 7 professional, tier 1 sporting teams in the area. The Bay Area has two professional American football teams with the Oakland Raiders and San Francisco 49ers, two major league baseball teams with the Giants and the A’s, The Golden State Warriors of the NBA in Oakland, the San Jose Sharks of the National Hockey League and the soon to be reinstated Earthquakes of Major League Soccer. In addition, the cities have teams in the USL Soccer League, two professional Lacrosse teams, an Arena football team and a minor league baseball team. None of that even counts the numerous collegiate programs with University of California at Berkley and Stanford leading the way.

The other reason my mind was on sports is with the arrival of autumn, a number of sports are starting up their seasons. The NFL American football league started their season a couple of weeks ago, NHL hockey is about to get underway soon and the NBA basketball season will soon be in full swing. Those sports that have been running through the summer, like Major League Baseball, MLS Soccer and the Canadian Football League are gearing up for their season ending playoffs soon. Autumn really is the best time for spectators of professional sports.

More than just watching sports, though, autumn is the time to think about betting on professional sports. I’m not talking about calling up the local bookie and putting money down on games, but rather the traditional “office pool,” where friends, co-workers and occasional sworn enemies sit down over a plate of chicken wings and a pitcher of beer and make selections for a season long opportunity to gloat to your friends how much you know about sports. (Or, conversely, spend the season as the goat in last place taking all the ribbing).

During my time in California, I completed an NFL draft, where I selected 16 players from across the league in hopes that the 16 I choose get more points than the 16 players the 10 other friends of mine chose. Of course, given that I was in California, I didn’t have a plate of wings in front of me, but rather a computer, as the draft was run online via Yahoo Fantasy Sports, one of the many websites that have sprung up to feed the estimated $6 billion dollars that is bet in office pools in the USA alone every year. In between my picks in the football pool, I was online researching my upcoming hockey pool. After the pool, it was off to the bar to catch a few of the last baseball games of the season as teams try and make the playoffs.

It’s been a tough few years for professional sports, though. The NFL is currently under a lot of fire, with star player Michael Vick recently arrested on charges of running a dog-fighting ring, former star O.J. Simpson arrested for a break-and-enter at a Las Vegas hotel, players like Pacman Jones and Tank Johnson being suspended for off-field thuggish behavior, and star coach Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots being fined for stealing opponents sideline signals. It’s hardly the image of heroic on-field deeds and role-model behavior that most sports try and portray.

One of the joys of my travels has been the opportunity to see sporting events live at the places they take place. From watching the Chicago Cubs in historic Wrigley Field to catching a Sumo Wrestling match in Japan, watching sports has connected me to the places I have been. It’s a connection that I share with the locals, who in many places feverishly and devoutly follow their local teams every move. I know what it is like to be in Busch stadium in October, wearing a red t-shirt and praying for the St. Louis Cardinals to take the lead, because I have been there. I’d hardly call myself a St. Louis Cardinals fan, but I was that day. While I may not understand the sport any better (I certainly can’t talk intelligently about Sumo or Cricket), I have felt the power of watching it with people who do.

The other connection that watching sports has with travel is thanks to the multiplication of TV channels that came with the introduction of cable and satellite television. With so much time to fill, sports that otherwise would be unknown to the world are beamed into our living rooms 24 hours a day. I find myself watching kite surfing or rock climbing shows, not so much because I have an interest in the sport, but because they end up being half travelogue. These are sports that take place in beautiful and natural settings in far flung locations, and watching a group of Swiss youth tackle the mountains of Malaysia ends up piquing my interest in a trip to the Malay Peninsula.

Two of the sports I have started following, though I’ve never seen live, are Formula One racing and the Dakar Rally. Partially it is because I grew up with my parents being involved in car racing, so the appeal of cars going really fast was bred into me at an early age. The other reason, though, is that they hold their races in far-flung, exotic locations. Formula One just finished up the Belgium Grand-Prix after swings through Italy, Turkey and Hungary, and then they are off to Japan and China before ending the year in Brazil. The Dakar Rally runs from Lisbon, Portugal to Dakar, Senegal, though the Atlas Mountains and Sahara Desert.

Neither event is without controversy though. As global warming and climate change grow as key issues in the public’s minds, the environmental costs of moving the large amounts of equipment required to support these events, in additional to the carbon thrown off by the vehicles themselves, become of greater concern. In addition, the Dakar Rally, racing through the towns and villages of some of the poorest countries in the world, exposes the local population to some danger, and in 2006 a 10 year old boy was killed when trying to cross the path of the race, the fourth documented case of a local being killed, though it is assumed that more have died during the race and have gone unreported.

The “international” sport that I watch that is under the most fire is the Tour de France. The Tour was riding high back in 2004 when I first started watching, with Lance Armstrong on his way to winning what would be his sixth of the seven consecutive races he would win. I started watching mostly for the travelogue aspects of seeing the French country-side, and in 2005, after my first trip to France, it was an opportunity to relive that trip.

Then, in 2006, the day after American Floyd Landis won the Tour, it was released that his blood sample showed increased levels of testosterone, and he was stripped of the tour win. 2007 has been even more disastrous for the tour, with 1996 winner Bjarne Riis admitting to using the banned substance EPO throughout his career, including during his win, and fellow 1996 rider Erik Zabel admitting using EPO as well when he won the Green Jersey (the points leader). Within the tour itself, riders Alexandre Vinokourov and Cristian Moreni were caught doping, and their respective teams dropped out of the race. Then the race leader Michael Rasmussen was fired for lying about where he was training.

The French media decided to kick the tour while it was down - Liberation, the national newspaper, announced "La Mort du Tour" - The Death of the Tour - on its front page and said the race had been “emptied of all sporting interest”, and France Soir ran an obituary notice announcing the Tour's death at "the age of 104, after a long illness".

All this talk of dope brings us back to San Francisco, and America’s pastime, Baseball. As I stated earlier, two Major League Baseball teams are in the San Francisco Bay area, including the San Francisco Giants. The Giants most famous player is Barry Bonds. Barry Bonds just this year surpassed Hank Aaron as the all time leader in home runs, and currently has 762 home runs. Barry’s chase for the record has been mired in controversy, and many people in the media and the general public have been very negative towards Mr. Bonds.

Back in 1974, when Hank Aaron was close to surpassing Babe Ruth’s all-time home run mark of 714, there was a lot of controversy as well. The controversy in 1974 though, was the question of whether an African-American should break the home run record, and Mr. Aaron even received death threats. Barry Bond’s chase is getting a negative reaction due to the accusations of using banned substances like Human Growth Hormone and steroids. There have been accusations that the “witch-hunt” against Bonds is racial motivated, as other players like Mark McGuire or Jose Canseco who likely took banned substances didn’t have negative reactions when they were banging out the homers, but I’m inclined to think that it’s more a matter of timing and the visibility of the home run record that has brought the negative reaction down on Barry.

Barry Bonds isn’t alone in being tarred by accusations of steroid use recently, though. Most recently, Toronto Blue Jay Troy Glaus has been accused, as has Rick Ankiel, previously 2007’s baseball feel good story of the year. Ankiel was a pitcher who after flaming out, refocused himself on hitting and became a home-run slugger for the St. Louis Cardinals. It was a happy story about a boy who, despite setbacks, worked hard and got to live his dream. Then Ankiel was named in the same report that named Glaus to have received human growth hormone, and the previous feel-good story became another black mark on baseball.

The public hasn’t turned their backs on baseball yet, and hopefully they won’t. There is something really special about the relationship between baseball and America. Football and NASCAR may draw more fans and sell more merchandise, but I love going to see baseball games when I am down in the USA. There is a feeling, when sitting in a ball park on a sunny afternoon, eating a hot dog and drinking a beer, of connecting with over 100 years of American history (which is almost all of it, when you consider how young the country is). The slow pace and the smell of the grass remind me of picnics. The jovial chatter between fans is like a Sunday dinner. The national anthem playing as a slight breeze lazily wafts the Stars and Stripes out in center field call to mind a gentle kind of national pride.

Baseball is America, and it is a sport that is connected deeply to the spirit of that country. Watching a game, live and in person, is an experience is the essence Americana. As a traveller, I can think of no better way to connect with the American psyche then sitting an uncomfortable chair on a cool night and listening for the crack of the bat.