Familiar People

We parked in London for the weekend, and Friday I walked around downtown. I had to mail my receipts to the expenses department to get my money back, so I wrote down addresses of 2 post offices. I tried to find the first one, but the address was for a mall, and I couldn’t find it in the mall. It’s a lot more stressful when you are looking for a place where you haven’t been before, instead of just wandering around going in random directions like I usually do. After I mailed the envelope, I was free to wander around again, found a 3-floor library and read a bit of a book that the title caught my eye – ‘personal development for smart people’. haha. Found a cool farmer’s market and chilled there for a while. Was visited by Crystal on Saturday and my parents and simon, my youngest brother, on Sunday. And because they came to visit me, I was expected to tour them around and show them stuff, even though I had only been to London half a day longer than them. They had cars though, which are a lot faster than walking.

Traveled to buffalo, and then did contract testing on Tuesday, 350 miles of it to central Pennsylvania. They didn’t pay for joint bar pictures, so I helped out where I could with making the reports and hole-punching paper, but for the most part had free time. Wednesday was travelling back to Canada, which some was during the night and I’m not really sure when we arrived. Some of Thursday and all of Friday was testing around Niagara region and up to Hamilton, where we stopped for the weekend. We saw some deer crossing the tracks in front of us on Friday, as well as some other local wildlife…

Found out there was a CFL game, Hamilton vs Montreal on Friday night, so Anthony and I went and bought tickets. He’s from montreal, so he was cheering for them, only one in our section. We managed to make it through the game in one piece J.

I went home to waterloo saturday morning, and spent the rest of the weekend with family, which was very nice. Got a tour of the new Institute for Quantum Computing building on campus - it's pretty cool! Went to my church, Hawkesville, on Sunday morning and reconnected with the people there. It’s really nice going back to a church where everyone knows you and has been following how I’m doing (Thanks Hawkesville! Glad to see you all!).  It was kindof a weird feeling though, coming back to normal/things that I used to know. The train still isn't routine, there are new things/places/people all the time. It feels very different from other co-op terms, and doesn't feel like I’ve really started work yet, that I’m still on vacation or the inbetween co-op and school phase. It kindof felt like I was coming back after a trip, and that I would get up on Monday and go to a regular 9-5 job and back to normal life. But instead I'm going back to Hamilton tonight, and monday morning I'll be on the road...i mean rails.. again. 

Another weird feeling I had was the drive from Hamilton to Waterloo. Roads are really cluttered, there’s signs and lightposts and telephone poles and wires and houses and driveways and culverts and clear-cut areas. You get a bit of a view sometimes, but there’s often something in the way, or it’s only a partial view. On the train it’s pretty much just nature, coming right up beside the train. If you stick your head out the window then all you see is uninterrupted forest and scenery, any clearings are natural ponds or rivers. I like travelling by train better J

Familiar territory

We travelled through familiar territory this week, starting in Montreal we stopped in smith falls, Toronto, London, Windsor, and are currently in London for the weekend. We also tested the track that goes through a 2.6km tunnel from Windsor to Detroit, which was pretty cool!

 Had quite a few early starts (Monday and Tuesday were rolling at 5am). I’ve seen more sunrises this term so far than I have my entire life. It’s pretty cool to watch the day get brighter and brighter and finally see the sun for the first time, it really feels like a new day, a new beginning. I’d still prefer to sleep in though. One good thing about starting early is that we also finish early, so I’ve had more time to explore this week. In Toronto we were in the middle of a pretty huge train yard and too far away from anything cool, so not much happened. But I was able to go for a run in London, and go for a long walk in Windsor. We finished at 1ish, so I found on google maps where we were, but then the internet quit, and it was taking a long time to work again. I had a vague picture in my head of where we were and where the river was, and I didn’t want to waste any more time, so I headed out in that general direction. If there is a river between two major cities, and even better between two countries, there’s a pretty good chance for a cool bridge to connect the two. And there was indeed a bridge, a fantastic 560m span suspension bridge.

I wanted to walk across it, but wasn’t sure if there was a pedestrian path or not. So I asked an old lady who was walking her dog nearby, and she said it was just for cars/trucks. She also gave me a history of the bridge, that it was owned by one man, and this man was trying to prevent a second bridge being built to handle all the traffic. Apparently 25% of all trade between Canada and the US cross this bridge. I kept walking beside the river, it was a very nice area with lots of gardens and sculptures,

Including a cool structural one, a cantilevered platform with the ends supported by counterbalancing weights. There was one that made sad though, a triceratops trapped in a cage with barely enough room to turn around L, let alone run freely like it should

While I was walking along a boat was going through the river. I stopped to take a picture, and someone a little ways down was also taking pictures, and informed me that the boat was built in 1901 and was still going strong, and that he had been waiting for 3 years for that boat to come by Windsor so he could see it.

I also was finally able to do one of my favorite things to do when visiting cities. Pick a tall building, go to the elevator, press the top button, and see if you can get a good view.

Hotels work the best, as apartment buildings and office buildings usually have restricted access to the elevators. Some hotels don’t have any windows along the hallways though. When that happens I usually go to the stairs to see if other floors will work, but once I did that and to get back into the hotel you needed to swipe a card, and I had to go down a couple floors before I could get back to the elevators.

I found a map downtown that said there was a woodcarving museum which sounded pretty cool, so I walked all the way to where it was supposed to be only to find that it had been converted into a bookstore…darn.

We are currently parked in London, and I’m getting visits from Crystal today and my parents tomorrow. It will be nice to see people I know again J

Ottawa

Since I was already in montreal last weekend, I decided to go and visit Ottawa instead. I lived in Ottawa for 8 months while working for the department of national defence, and really liked the city, and wanted to go and visit again. I also went to visit Sadie, a friend from grebel. I don’t have many pictures cause I used to live there, so there weren’t many new things.

Last time I was in montreal  I called a taxi to come pick us up at the train (I got chosen cause I knew French), and I just told them to come to the address of the train yard. We walked to where the entrance was, and saw the taxi pull up. We all started waving, but it didn’t see us, and turned the other way. That way was a dead end though, so we waited 5ish minutes until he got back. He drove up to us and asked us who called the taxi in. I said I did, and he looked at me and said “A**hole!” apparently train yards are a pretty big place, and I didn’t specify exactly where we were, so he was driving all over the place looking for us. He was nice afterwards though. So this time when I called a taxi, I made sure to specify that I was near the diesel shop, and good thing I did cause the same cab driver came to pick me up! He said he felt bad about what he called me last time and was sorry about it, and we had a good conversation during the ride to the greyhound station.

I realized how much I had changed – I left the train to call a taxi, and had not even thought of the next step. I had a small sheet of paper with some addresses I had written down the night before, and a hostel booked, but that was it. My plan was to go to the greyhound terminal and take it from there. And I was travelling from a city I barely knew over 2 hours away to another one, completely on my own. A couple years ago I would have had everything completely planned out.

The bus dropped us off at the University of Ottawa, so I wandered around for a while pretending I was a student, going into random buildings. I found the same structure that’s right by E2/Physics that show all the different ways to connect steel structures together. I was keeping an eye out for a large classroom where I could hopefully sit at the back and learn something, and eventually found one that was just starting. So I went in and sat at the back with the football jocks (they were checking out football websites and facebook on their laptops). Turned out I was attending a french lecture on economics, and learned a bit about money and how without rarity there would be no economy and about supply/demand. I was getting a bit warm and had started to take off my jacket, but realized I had a waterloo shirt underneath, and I didn’t want to blow my cover. After that I went to visit my old office and say hi to the people there. It was very nice to see them and catch up a bit. Went to a Power to Change service at U of Ottawa in the evening, and met a guy from Listowel. He said I was the only guy he had met who knew where Listowel was. (Microsoft Word doesn’t think Listowel is a word, and it’s recommending I change it to Dishtowel. Haha). Saturday evening went with Sadie to hang out with some friends she had met on evening, and had Arabic tea and chatted about being missionary kids (I lived in Burkina Faso for 3 years)

Saturday and Sunday were a lot of biking along trails that I had explored during my last summer term in Ottawa. Ottawa really has a great biking trail network – you can legit go for over 50km barely going on any roads, mostly through forests and along the canal/river and through a farm, all inside a city. It’s fantastic. While biking on the quebec side I found a random street that had had a bunch of sand dumped on it and there were three beach volleyball courts set up with music going. It was some kind of tournament, and they were pretty good. But so random! It was just a normal street, and they were playing beach volleyball on it! 

Also came across a full concert, stage and seating and beer tent and everything, that was taking place under a bridge. I found a new route too, I was at a spot where I usually turned around, but saw a railway bridge in the distance crossing the river. Since I had to cross anyways, I decided to go and see if I could cross there. There wasn’t an actual trail leading to it, but it looked abandoned (lots of weeds and grass), so I decided to go across anyways. The first half had the track, and beside it 3 boards about 10 inches wide, and then a drop into the river. No guard rail or anything. It was actually pretty sketchy to bike across, made harder by a decent cross breeze, but I made it.

 I also randomly met a friend from class, stephanie, who was doing a co-op term in Ottawa. Talk about unlikely – I could have legitimately been in any city in North America, on any street at any time, and I meet someone I know. Wonder who else I will meet on this trip…

My Job Duties

This is a joint bar:

They hold the rails together. There is a camera under the car that takes pictures of them from both sides (that’s why there’s 2 pictures) as we are moving. My job is to look at the pictures and say if there is a defect or not. For joint bars, defects are either missing bolts or cracks. The vibrations of trains constantly going over the joints loosens the bolts and they fall out. The majority of rails (it depends on the class, or speed limit) only require 2 bolts on each side. So this one:

is still in compliance. This one:

technically has 2 bolts on both sides, but the one is missing a nut, and will fall out soon due to the vibrations. So we flag it, and the track supervisor can do what they want with it. This one:

is not in compliance, as it only has one bolt on the one side.

This is a crack:

And it is very bad, and requires an immediate fix. You’ll notice a small red arrow above the crack – the system has crack detection, and will flag anything it thinks is a crack. The problem is, there are a lot of things that apparently look like cracks. Things like grass:

small drops of grease:

or nothing at all:

Sometimes it takes a picture of something else entirely:

The thing is, this system takes pictures of ALL the joints. Every. Single. One. Rails are typically 39 feet long, resulting in 270 joint bars every mile. We’ve tested over 100 miles in a day before (I’ve been told up to 250). And when travelling at 40 mhp, which is pretty common, this results in passing 3 joints every second. When flipping though the pictures, it takes about 0.9 seconds for each picture to load. So by the time we even see one picture, we have to look at 2 more. And for each picture you have to look for red arrows, determine if it is a crack or not (sometimes requires zooming in for closer inspection), count the number of bolts, and look closely to see if each one is loose or not.

Thankfully, there is this awesome thing called Continuous Welded Rail (CWR), in which the rails are welded instead of using joint bars, and you can sometimes go for 3 or 4 miles without seeing a single joint bar. Thank goodness for that. Even still, we are looking at thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of joint bars every day. There are 2 of us co-op students, so we take shifts. When I’m not working, I hole-punch and prepare reports that are constantly being printed out, I go grab a snack, sit and listen to the supervisors talk, or go stand inbetween the two cars and watch the scenery go by.

There is another job performed by the co-op students, the Deployable Gauge Restraint Measuring System, but it is currently under repairs, and we’ll be getting it back in a couple weeks. That job apparently consists of looking for switches or other obstacles in the track and pressing a button. Just as riveting as this job. So when we get that car then we’ll be working most of the time, and not much time for looking at the scenery L

We started this week in binghampton, and headed south to Sunbury, Pensylvania. We then retraced our tracks back to binghampton all the way to Montreal, were we parked for the weekend. This past week was full of ‘hurry up and wait’, where we would be scheduled to start at 7:00am, we’d get up and be ready to go only to find that they had cancelled our crew and rescheduled for 12 or something else. There was a track block, where a repair crew shuts down the track to do repairs, on one of the lines we were going to go on Thursday. And we should have been able to get by it before they shut the track down, but that would involve getting a crew on time and no delays during the day. And when we called Wednesday afternoon they were already talking about having us start later. So we said screw it and decided to start at 1:00am, get through the track block with almost no delays, and do Friday’s testing as well. It worked wonderfully, the crew arrived on time, we had almost no delays, and made it to montreal by 3:00pm. And we also get a long weekend out of it! As I have already visited montreal, I have decided to go visit my old stomping grounds in Ottawa, having lived there for 8 months for other co-op terms, and also visit 2 friends who are there on co-op, Sadie and Jenn.
I also saw my first big wildlife (birds don't count) - there were 2 small bear cubs we saw on the tracks ahead of us. They quickly scampered off into the forest though. 

Later!

Hurry up and Wait

Before I explain more about the title, I need to explain more what the TEC (track evaluation car) train does. There are laser sensors at the bottom of the train which record the location and profile of each rail, and this data is displayed real-time on a computer screen on the train. 

The different channels are (in descending order):

• Rate of change of elevation over 31 ft
• Rate of change of elevation over 55 feet
• Superelevation (one rail being higher than the other, used on curves so the train’s center of gravity remains over the tracks)
• Curvature
• Gauge (distance between the rails)
• Alignment of left rail
• Alignment of right rail
• Surface roughness of left rail
• Surface roughness of right rail
• Automatic Location Detector (ALD) (detects switches, road crossings, bridges, etc)

This data is used to detect defects. There are about 23 ways a track can be ‘bad’, also known as a defect. These range from wide/narrow gauge, too fast of increase in superelevation, too steep of track, etc. Defects can be priority, which means there’s something wrong with the track and it could get worse, or urgent, which means the track is bad and needs to be fixed immediately. The limits for urgent and priority change depending on what class the track is (class 1 to 6), which specifies the design speed and weight of trains allowed. For example, for a class 2 track, if the gauge (which is a standard 57 7/8 ”) is 1” wider than normal, then it is flagged as a priority defect. If it is more than 1 ¼”, then it is an urgent defect. A computer analyzes the data as it receives it, and automatically detects if there are any priority or urgent defects, and flags them. Urgent defects are checked by a human to see if they are actually there, or are just a glitch in the data or something on the track.

The manager and/or supervisor of  track maintenance of the section we're on ride at the back of the train, and based on the urgent defects detected either issues slow orders or track out of service. Slow orders are a limit of  either 25 or 10 mph, down from usually 40, and stay there until they are fixed. There are usually a bunch of crews following us to fix any easy urgents detected to minimize these slows and out of service.

Track sections want to get all their trains through as efficiently and quickly as possible. Train crews (the engineer and conductor) are only allowed a certain number of hours they can work, usually 10 in a row. So naturally they are scheduled to get as close as possible to this 10 hours, to be more efficient. Putting a whole bunch of slow orders on a track not only increases the time required for trains to go through, but can also push the time required to go a certain distance over 10 hours, requiring a change of train crew. We’ve had track sections that only have one urgent every 10 miles, and others that have urgents every mile. If the regular track speed is 40, and there’s a limit of 10 mph every mile, that’s not enough room to constantly speed up and slow down for trains, so the time to do that distance is pretty much quadrupled.

And this is where the title, hurry up and wait, comes in. Because of this, no one likes it when we come through to test their track, as run times go up a lot and delays increase. So when it comes to scheduling train crews, we’re pretty low on the list. I’ve been told that on a priority scale of 1-5, with 1 being highest priority, we’re about 10. So we’ll be schedule to leave at 7am, and we’ll wake up, get all our equipment up and running, and then hope a crew shows up and we can move. Sometimes they don’t. We don’t work an hourly schedule, we work per distance – we have to reach a certain destination each day. So if the train crew is 2 hours late, then we finish 2 hours later. And during the day, we’re often pushed off to a siding to wait for another train to go through.

Tuesday was fine, we had a shorter day and were done at a good time. Wednesday we had a lot of delays, including one where we were sitting for 3 hours waiting for another train to pass by, and ended up finishing at 11:00pm.. Thursday we were supposed to leave at 7am, so we got up and had everything ready to go, only to find out we weren’t going to get a crew until 12. Even more delays during the day, finished at 10:00. Friday got up to leave at 9:00, found out we weren’t going to start until 2:00pm. So we started doing other things, but then a train crew shows up. After finding out they were indeed here to drive us, they commented that sometimes the left hand doesn’t even know there is a right hand. Even more delays during the day, and finished producing reports at about 11:00 again.

So we are currently in Binghampton, NY, which apparently doesn’t have much, not even worth it to get hotels. It's about half the size of Waterloo. I’ll probably get out some Sunday, but likely not much exploring going on this weekend. We’re going to head back up to montreal next week, and then head west. Apparently we’re going to be going through waterloo at some point! If anyone sees a 4-car train, with “Track Evaluation” written on the last one, I’ll be on it!

Montreal

If you wanted to see what montreal was like, you could just google images ‘things to see in montreal’, and probably find much better pictures than the ones I took. So to make it worth your while to read this, I’ll say more what I did/experienced. My way of exploring a city probably isn’t very normal, I’ll do about 10 minutes of research, compromised pretty much of googling ‘top 10 things in montreal’ and choosing a couple that sound cool, seeing where they are on google maps, and choosing 2 or 3 that are close to each other for that day and keeping in mind the others for another day. For me exploring a city isn’t just about the ‘places to be’, or main attractions, but also what’s inbetween, the parks, small shops, restaurants with patios, pedestrian streets. And I certainly don’t have a set plan or route, my instructions for the day are just a sticky-note sized general directions (I don’t have a smart phone). This leads to getting lost a lot, but that’s fine. It’s not really lost though, as J.R. Tolkien said, “not all who wander are lost”. If I see something cool, I’ll go check it out. And then I see something else, so I go to that. And something else. And before you know it, I have no clue where I am anymore or how to get to where I was originally going, although I usually know the general direction.  This will make more sense if I actually tell you what I did, so without further ado, here’s what I did in montreal

Friday:

 Did a quick google search, made a plan for saturday, walked around, checked out the huge orange across the road.  Problem was that I was right by car central, 3 lanes of one-way traffic, then 4-lane highway in each direction, and another 3 lanes of one-way traffic. Not much for the walking interest. went for supper at a restaurant. The other co-op student went home (he lives in montreal), and the two supervisors were in a hotel downtown, so it was just me. It’s weird eating out by yourself, especially after ordering and waiting for your food. but plenty of opportunity for people watching – the father-son duo 2 tables down, dad in dress pants, collared shirt and nice shoes, son in faded and ripped jeans, flip flops, a normal t-shirt and checking his blackberry all the time, the middle-aged lady at the table beside me with heavy makeup complaining about the service, the family a couple tables down with a very energetic and outgoing mom making her two daughters laugh, the cute elderly couple with the man who holds his wife’s arm when he’s talking to her, and her looking at me every once in a while with a kind smile like I’m her grandson, the waitress’s surprised smile when I order a root beer, as the only logical explanation for a young 20-something unshaven male to eat out by himself is to drown his sorrows in beer. You are a bit more noticeable though, and people glance your way more often. Updated the blog that evening.

Saturday:

Took a taxi to biodome/Olympic stadium, walked through a rainforest, aquarium, south pole with penguins, and a northern Ontario section. Chuckled a bit in the northern Ontario, as I had spent a week there just 2 weeks ago, and was now separated by a barrier and paying to see it. Walked south, found a random fair/street garage sale. Arrived at Mount Royal, big park in front, some people throwing a Frisbee around, was walking towards them to ask if I could join, but they left. Another field on the other side of some trees, looked like high-school football game. Watched for a bit, one team was dominating. There was some sort of military plane circling overhead dropping what seemed to be skydivers. Walked back to the park to see if anyone was throwing a disc around, one guy playing with a soccer ball. Played with him for a bit, turned out he was waiting for some friends, and some other guys in the park joined, and we had about an hour of 6 on 6 soccer. I ended up playing in bare feet and pants, cause that’s all I had. After that finished, climbed up the mountain, found a chalet-thing at the top with a sweet view.

Walked around, found a sign for a cross, so went to that. Found a trail off to the side, went along that for a while, ended up at a parking lot. Wanted to go to the cemetery that I had seen on google maps previously, had no clue where I was. Asked an ice cream vendor, they said it was on the other side of the mountain. Darn. Walked back up the trail, walked past the cross, and all the way back to the chalet-thing (about 4km). found a map (hallelujah!) that told me where to go. Headed out towards the cross again, but turned down a different way. Found a cool park, and an area that the map said was a sculpture garden. Walked through the cemetery for a bit, but access to the larger half was closed.

Walked down to cemetery entrance into pretty rich residential area. Getting dark, feet and legs and knees and body hurt, and no restaurant in sight. Eventually found someone walking a dog, asked him, said nearest one was probably another 15min walk away. Lovely. Eventually made it, passing even more nice mansions. Had supper, asked them to call a taxi at the end. Made it home.

Sunday

Looked up bixi, a bike rental system, that seemed like a good idea. Found the nearest one (about 20min walk), then biked downtown. Had lunch, visited art museum that had a cool modern art exhibit, wandered around, tried to get to old montreal/notre dame area,

noticing roads getting less and less bike-friendly and more industrial, knew I had to go right, but roads to the right were all dead ends, and the river was right there. Saw a bridge up ahead, so continued on to get closer. Got a pic, turned around, found a bike station

that had at map (hallelujah!), got back downtown. Found a cathedral and participated in a catholic mass for a while, and just hung out in there for a bit. Decided time to head back, planned out a route, cool biking through downtown, found cool fountain place and random fog machines, turned

onto Victoria heading west (I didn’t register at the time that it was west, it was just ‘that way’, but for here I’ll say it was west), and suddenly it’s one-way going against me. Go south one street, turn right to go parallel. Runs into T intersection, don’t want right as that goes back to Victoria, so go south and take next right. It’s one-way, going the wrong way. Again. Go one more street down, it’s pretty residential, and eventually it takes a left (even further away from Victoria), and then left again, so I’m going backwards. I turn around and see a small footpath going west, so I go down it. It meanders a bit and comes up to a road also going west. Follow it for a bit, but it’s a dead end. Back track, head north and then west again, dead end. Notice signs saying ‘terrian prive’ (private property), so I try and get out of it. A couple dead ends later, and I’m back at the original T intersection I was at a while ago. Screw this, I’m going north to Victoria. Decide to see what’s one street north of Victoria, it’s also one-way, but in the right direction! Wonderful. What’s not so wonderful is that there’s a pretty huge hill facing me. Make it up to the top (here’s the view looking down as I was taking a break), go for one block, and there’s another bloody hill about as big as the

other one. Make it up that one as well on the big 3-speed bixi bike, and it seems to be flat for a while. Then it goes downhill for about 5 blocks, and no stop signs. Pure bliss J. Run into another bloody T intersection, and remembering what happened last time I turn towards victoria, which has turned back to 2-way. It’s pretty dark by now, and the people are probably wondering what a guy is doing on a bixi bike so far away from any station (I’m at the very edge of their service area). Finally make it to the outermost bike station, park it. Find a subway for supper, sit outside where there’s a bunch of Philippino guys playing chess. The last game to finish was a young teenager (probably 13-15ish) playing an older guy, and after they finished the older guy was saying all the things the younger guy did wrong (the old guy probably won), that his close game wasn’t good, that his style was very English, that he should work on having a plan. After the young guy left, the old guy was saying that he was very good, and that he could win an upcoming tournament. It was interesting to note how differently the old guy described the young guy once he was gone. Walked all the way home.

Monday

Decide to explore downtown/old montreal some more, as well as a science museum that I had found. Walk/bike to downtown through Victoria, too many stop signs on the downhill part. Very annoying. Wander around what I guess was old montreal with cobble stone streets. Random fighter

airplane does 2 flybys, very noisy and didn’t know what was going on the first time. Weird. Found another cathedral (there’s a lot of them), decided to visit that one. Very impressive, also had organ music going. And it was in there, with soulful organ music and amazing art and architecture, that I found myself...

Walk/bike down the port/waterfront area, go to the museum, find out they have an imax as well. Decide one on reefs would be pretty cool, but not till 4:30. Pretty cool museum, some stuff on FRP in bridges and how moment of inertia affects deflection, stuff I had learned pretty in-depth in school. One really cool thing on brain activity, where 2 people put some sort of headband on their head that measures something, and there’s a ball inbetween them, and somehow by thinking hard it would move the ball towards the other person, and the objective was to make the ball go to the other person’s side. Had no idea how it worked, but it looked pretty cool! Another cool thing was a table with a bunch of cubes, and by positioning them and turning them it made different beats/tunes, so you could make some pretty cool music with it. Here’s a pro playing one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgy1S8qymx0 Played around with that for a while. Eventually time for the imax, amazing variety of fish and coral and color. Really cool.

So that was my time in montreal. Probably my favourite thing about the city is the architecture – there’s no cookie-cutter subdivisions. Well, there probably are, but not that I saw. All the houses are stone and very different, some even looking like castles. And in the downtown area you’ll have steel-and-glass skyscrapers right beside old stone cathedrals.

Another cool thing is their taste in soccer – the soccer jersey count for the weekend was 2 AC Milan, 1 Chelsea, 1 Bayern Munich, 1 Real Madrid, 1 Valencia, 4 France, 1 Spain, 2 Brazil, and about 15 barcelona.

The plan after Montreal is to head south into the US, and stop at Binghampton, US, for the weekend.  Bye for now!