Canada

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."

It’s a mostly clear day, the blue sky creating a false sense that the day is a good one, until you walk outside. The sun may be shining, but the temperature is -10 Celsius, with a bone-chilling wind cuts right through your skin and chills your insides. I tug on the zipper of my jacket and hunker down, trying to cover as much of my neck and chin as possible.

Just two days ago the weather was warmer, 2 degrees above freezing, causing the 30 centimeters of snow on the ground to start to melt, which mixed with road salt and dirt to create a dull gray slush on all the sidewalks. Just two days ago, the citizens of Toronto were hopping gingerly over giant puddles of slush and water, trying not to get their pants legs wet.

Today, with the temperature dropping down below freezing, the slush has frozen into a uneven and slipper carpet on the sidewalks. The citizens shuffle along slowly on the icy surface, trying not to slip and fall onto the hard ice.

I drop my head and walk against the headwind, returning a movie to Blockbuster before heading into the local pub for brunch. After finishing up my lunch, I put back on my heavy coat, gloves and hat and leave the warmth of the pub to face again the blistering wind.

I return home and endeavor to spend the rest of the day inside watching TV. At 5 o’clock the PBS station from Buffalo is showing an episode of Pilot Guides (called Globe Trekker in the USA) where the host is travelling Trinidad & Tobago, Grenada and Dominica. I see the blue ocean, beautiful beaches, colonial towns and people wearing shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops.

I think of my time down in Trinidad and Tobago earlier this year, and my father, who is currently down in Florida, and wonder why all of us Canadians don’t spend our winters somewhere sunnier and warm than chilly Canada.

It’s the start of the New Year, and of course that implies that we have just ended the previous year. As with many out there, I have taken this time as an opportunity to reflect on 2007. Along with the usual fretting over the fact that another year has passed without getting engaged to Jessica Alba, Jessica Simpson or Jessica Biel (or, really, any Jessica), I take this time as the year ends to see how I fared with travel this year. A lot of this is driven by the fact that many of the reward programs I take part in, like Marriott Rewards, Continental OnePass and Air Canada Aeroplan have qualification periods that run in parallel to the actual year. Luckily for me, I have qualified for elite status in all three of those programs this year, which means 2008 will hopefully mean more comfortable airline seats and bigger hotel rooms.

I have also, for the third year, calculated how much I flew and how much carbon I threw up into the atmosphere. This year I flew an exceptionally large amount, even for me, with 81 flights totaling up to 80,785 actual miles flown. This is the most I have flown any year, fuelled mostly by the cross-country trips from Toronto to Seattle early in the year, and my recent weeks flying north-south between Toronto and Houston. According to the carbon calculator I used, all that travel added up to somewhere around 27 tonnes of carbon put into the atmosphere. Yikes! And so I was off to purchase a number of carbon offsets to assuage my guilt about so recklessly destroying the planet.

Good news for the planet, though, is that I didn’t actual fly anywhere for a Christmas vacation this year as I have the past few year, instead electing to stick to the ground and take the train up to Quebec City. While it’s diesel engines do spew carbon into the atmosphere, the amount is less than flying, and the carbon isn’t flung into the high atmosphere, instead it’s spewed out at ground level to choke the local fauna as the train cuts through the Quebec forests.

My train, operated by Via Rail Canada, left downtown Toronto’s Union Station at 11:30 AM on December the 30th, travelling pokily along and making a number of stops as it headed east and north towards Montreal, arriving at 5:02 PM. After a 50 minute stop-over (enough time to grab a burger from McDonald’s, another few tonnes of carbon thrown into the atmosphere), I was back on the train heading towards Quebec City, arriving at the impressive and imposing Gare du Palais in Quebec City at 8:56 pm.

The total trip took 8:33 minutes to cover the approximately 800 kilometers between Toronto and Quebec City, averaging 100 kilometers per hour. That’s not very fast, providing a similar speed to driving and certainly much slower than flying, which takes 1 hour and 25 minutes.

I choose the train, though, instead of driving or flying though, because I was on vacation and in no real hurry to get anywhere. Instead, I wanted a nice relaxing trip, allowing me to look at the scenery, read a book (it was a Michael Crichton thing about talking monkeys) and relax.

That might soon change. Yesterday in Ottawa, the premiers of the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest, announced a plan to do a feasibility study of putting a high-speed train between Quebec City and Windsor, Ontario, which we would find “whizzing along the tracks at upwards of 300 km/h – double the speed of VIA Rail's current trains – [taking] two hours and 18 minutes to travel between Montreal and Toronto, down from four hours.”

While this is an idea that has been tossed around a number of time over the past 20 years, the two Premiers (the leaders of the provincial governments, for those not familiar with the Canadian political structure) have a number of reasons to study the idea now. In addition to the desire of voters to see Canada meet carbon reduction targets, Quebec and Ontario are both large manufacturing economies. The price of oil has been skyrocketing, causing the cost of manufacturing to rise, while the Canadian dollar strengthening against the US dollar and the softness in the US economy meaning that our exports to USA are becoming more expensive just as Americans are tightening their spending. A $20 billion dollar project to build high speed rail would mean jobs, especially for a company like Bombardier, maker of high speed train engines and cars.

I’ve in the past covered how cool it would be to have a high-speed train in the high population Ontario-Quebec corridor that runs from Windsor, Ontario (just across the river from Detroit) to Quebec City and includes major population centers like Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa.

Nothing more clearly brought this to my attention than two different trips I made this summer.

The first, taken 5 times between May and July, was between Toronto and Detroit. The distance between these two cities is a straight 370 kilometers along. Via Rail runs trains down to Windsor, Ontario, but the trip takes almost 4 hours and the departures are too late in the morning to get me to Detroit on Monday mornings in time for work. Instead, I ended up flying Air Canada into Windsor, and taking a combination of taxis and buses between the Windsor airport and my workplace in downtown Detroit.

In August, I headed over to Europe. Obviously I had to fly across the Atlantic (no trains to take there), but once I landed in Europe, I spent two weeks travelling almost exclusively by high speed rail, travelling between London, Brussels, Cologne, Amsterdam and Frankfurt on the fast and comfortable high speed Euro-trains. On the trip between Cologne and Amsterdam, I was even lucky enough to sit in the front cabin, where I could easily see out the front window and watch as we sped between Germany and the Netherlands.

Now, the interesting thing is that if you do the math, the train isn’t really that much faster Europe. From London to Frankfurt is a total of around 800 kilometers, which the trains cover in 6 hours and 32 minutes, or around 130 kilometers an hour. Despite having ICE trains that can travel up to 300 km/h, for the most part the trains can’t travel that fast for much of the length of the trip. Things are getting faster though. The Cologne to Frankfurt part is all high speed track, and the train is often travelling in excess of 250 km/h, and the UK is building their infrastructure to get the Eurostar moving faster.

What is very impressive about the Europe trains, though, is the fact that they run so frequently. Looking at taking a train from Toronto to Windsor, the earliest I could get out was 7:50, arriving in Windsor at 11:30. The first flight out of Toronto airport leaves 7:15 and arrives at 8:22, meaning I have to leave my house around 5:30 to get to the airport and clear security. Leaving my house at 5:30 am to catch a 6:00 AM train would be possible. A 6:00 AM train would arrive in Windsor at 9:45 AM, and I could be across the river quickly and at the office by 10:30. That would be a completely doable proposition.

While the trains in Europe may not be as quick as they possibly could, they run often and they are comfortable, and that’s something that Canada needs to do in the Windsor-Quebec corridor to make train travel something that’s more than just a mode of travel for tourists who want scenery and relaxation.

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.