Tagged travel (Lifestream)

Madrid marked the end of our trip to Spain. Our plane home flew out of there and so we decided to spend the evening before exploring what we could of the city. We boarded a train from Seville and arrived at our hotel around 4pm that day.

I would argue Madrid is the Toronto of Spain from the point of view of visiting Canadians because, like Toronto, it's the largest city in the country as well as its economic hub and also the city that everyone loves to hate.

I've said this before but I'll say it again - everyone loves Barcelona. No one loves Madrid. Madrid, by all popular accounts, is mediocre at best.

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I'm 47 years old, and most of the people I work with are much younger than I am - often in their 20's and 30's. Cultural references that I think are universal sometimes turn out to be pretty specific to my age group in ways that surprise me.

Take something like Bugs Bunny. Most people, young and old, have of course heard of Bugs Bunny but it turns out that not a lot of young people grew up watching it. I have, and it is because of this cartoon that I happen to vaguely know some of the music to The Barber of Seville.

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The COVID-19 pandemic put a cramp in my travel habits, as it did with everyone. The last overseas trip that Evelyn and I went on was to Poland in 2016 for a wedding and the last one that we actually planned was to Greece in 2015 (and, my God, it's hard for me to accept that Greece 9 years ago). We've been to a handful of relatively local destinations in the interim (Vancouver, New York, PEI) but nothing particularly foreign.

And while I do remain part of an increasingly small minority of people who still thinks about the pandemic in the present tense, I also wanted to finally visit someplace a bit more exotic.

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Evelyn and I took a 10 day trip to Spain in September 2024.

Chicago, summer 2018. Not Greece, but I'll take it.

Taken in summer 2015. Wish I were there, in both space and time.

Borden-Carleton, Prince Edward island

Victoria by the Sea, Prince Edward Island

Lonely

Aha, so THAT'S what a crab pinch feels like

I think might be my favorite picture from New York

It's like this beer was made for me

My favorite picture from Chicago.

As you walk down a typical street in Manhattan the first thing you notice is just how straight it is. Roads in Manhattan have actual vanishing points, like railroad tracks. You walk slowly towards this point that you will never reach, and the cross streets come up one at a time, at perfectly spaced intervals and at perfectly right angles. First you look left, and then you look right, and you're taken aback at how perfectly straight those roads are as well, and how they also seem to go on forever in the distance.

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Evelyn and I went to Poland this past May, with her dad, uncle and cousins. Her second cousin was getting married and we were invited to the wedding.

I have to admit, I didn't know what I was going to get out of this trip. Poland was never really on my list of places to visit. The Lonely Planet guide, a book whose job is to make you excited about the place you're visiting, said that Poland "wore its charms lightly". What was that supposed to mean?

I mean...one of the main draws of Kraków is...a decommissioned salt mine? A salt mine?

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We visited Poland for a wedding. A literal Polish wedding.

Visiting Greece presented some interesting linguistic challenges.

I live in Montreal, which means I have at least some knowledge of the French language. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, fluent in said language. Frankly, I'm not even very good. My French, basically, is terrible.

But while my French may be terrible, it is at least there. I'm generally able to ask for directions, order a meal from a menu, read the road signs, and even to some extent carry on a conversation, if I keep my words short and avoid slang. When someone says a word in French, I'll stand a chance of being able to match it up with a series of letters on paper, even if the word is unfamiliar.

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Evelyn and I decided, more or less on a whim, to travel to Greece this year. We went for ten days.

This was the first time we'd ever been overseas without knowing anyone at the other end. The one time we were in Europe together, in Lyon, we stayed at a friend's apartment.

Our itinerary consisted of Athens, followed by Santorini, Rhodes, Delphi and then Athens again. This is quite a bit of moving about and I feel like we saw a lot while simultaneously seeing very little. Greece is the kind of place where you can spit in a random direction and hit an ancient ruin. This is only a slight exaggeration. We are, after all, talking about the cradle of Western civilization. You can't hope to see more than a tiny fraction of all there is to see in only 10 days.

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We visited Greece for ten days. Beautiful place.

We visited our friend Sid who lives in Lyon. Saw some cool stuff.

I visited San Francisco for a JavaOne conference.

50 photos

I visited my sister, who used to live in the Middle East, in 2005. I also took the oppourtunity to visit a bit of England while I was at it.

I took a three week tour of to France in 2003