Love handles, Actually

Today marks the one-month anniversary of my departure from Calgary, in search of a new adventure, a new beginning, and ultimately a new home. I am also in search of a new gym.

A month of living (quite happily, I hasten to add) on restaurant food and occasional home-cooking with various relatives, interspersed with about 4 half-baked workouts and approximately 3 vegetables, has taken its toll. As I type the big words, I can feel the love handles moving ever so slightly.

New York started out the adipose assault. With the classic American truck stops followed by all of NYC's assortment of restaurant and roadside choices, the game was over early in the first period. I knew it was trouble at our first roadside stop, when the vending machine happily ate my dollar, I punched D3, and the pizza-flavored Combos slid from their coiled prison down to the tray below.

I find the above "Real Cheese" claim highly dubious.

From that point on, with places like Stanton Social House and Bar Carrera (the latter - a wine/tapas bar - was an accident - we were starving after walking around for a hours looking for a place that had room), there was no looking back. Both spots were really cool and the food was excellent. Both were lively, filled with good music and good-looking people. Carrera was really affordable as well.

Paris, as anyone knows, is made for eating. Although it helps to have a local show you around as they do have a number of places that cater to tourists and are not necessarily the best quality.

Where the city catches you is in the small patisseries and boulangeries on every corner (mentioned in an earlier post). One of the deadliest was literally right next door to my apartment, where I was defenceless against the Viennoiserie aux Amandes (or in English, "crack"). An almond-paste-filled Danish, essentially. And having one of these, sometimes two, per day is simultaneously totally recommended and totally not recommended.

Metro stations advertising full-on, 4-day exhibitions devoted to chocolate

And here in Amsterdam, cheese and bread and cheese are staples of the diet. With occasional extra cheese.

Of course, virtually every meal is accompanied by wine in Paris (cheap and very good quality bottles can be had for 4-8 Euros), and beer in Holland (A glass of Amstel Bock, a new favorite, can be had for 2.50 Euros). I suspect this is not helping either.

The good news? I joined a gym yesterday here in Amsterdam just three minutes from home - Your Fitness Centre

The better news? Here at my local Coffee & Company, three feet away, behind the glass, I see My Chocolate Brownie.

Got the runs

...in that I needed to.

Saturday was another really good one - this time directly to the Eiffel Tower. Running west on the pedestrian path alongside the Seine, first past Notre Dame cathedral again, the tower itself only appears in glimpses between buildings occasionally - until it appears consistently as a great motivator to keep running.

37 minutes is how long it took from the apartment in Le Marais, accompanied by the soundtrack of "I'm Running" by Misstress Barbara and Sam Roberts, "Sky and Sand" by Paul Kalkbrenner, "Weighty Ghost" by Wintersleep, and "Notion" by Kings of Leon... pretty good company I must say.

It's quite something to run under and around the tower - although we've seen it thousands of times in pictures, it still has a pretty goosebump-inspiring effect.

Today's run was altogether different - same soundtrack, different locale - as I am at La Platriere, a Chambre d'Hote (Bed and Breakfast) in the Auvergne region of France.

A nice place to be writing from

It is about two and a half hours south of Paris via train. The train ride itself is a great way to go - from the modern and yet classic Gare de Lyon, it takes you a pretty high speed through picturesque towns like Nevers (and of course, on the way back, Nevers again...).

The main doorway at La Platriere

The morning was incredible - La Platriere is on a slightly elevated parcel of land, and the valley below was a mix of clouds, just-changing-colour trees and early-morning sunlight. At 8:30am, with the temperature about 14 and humid, I hit the wet street (it rained overnight) and then veered left soon after onto a tractor path.

The view from the "Crow's Nest" bedroom

It's all farmland here, with buildings and huge lots from around the 1700's in some cases. Thinking back even further, I imagined it's largely unchanged from medieval times. As I ran through basically a tunnel of oak trees, I could totally picture turning a corner and being stopped at sword-point by an angry knight on horseback, who, upon recognizing the coat of arms emblazoned on my chest, would say "What doth thou runneth from, Monsieur Nike?"

Blame it on runner's high.

In any event, this is a very nice place to unwind after the hectic pace of NYC and Paris. It is run by a British couple named Andy and Jackie, and they do a great job with home-cooked meals (Beef Bourgignon last night) and a very clean, relaxing set of rooms. I even managed to lie diagonally on a huge bed for the first time since leaving home, just because I could.

Funny - I got the same look from most waiters in Paris

The Crow's Nest bedroom

New York - U2

Jumping back about 9 days, the following is a post about New York... it was the first stop (after a night in Montreal) on the leaving-town calendar. More Parisian posts to follow shortly...

The drive to NYC from MTL is roughly 6-7 hours, depending on traffic and the weight of the driver's right foot. We (my oldest friend Jason) and I left from downtown at about 7:45am.

Whoohoo! La Prairie here we come!

It's a very nice drive through upper New York State, and the trees were just starting to change (a week later and that same drive is a real kaleidoscope). You end up driving through (or rather, past) all sorts of small towns, including the lovely hamlet of Coxsackie, NY; no doubt a sister town to Balzac, AB.

The arrival in NYC was great - the whole city unfolding as you make your way down FDR drive. Our hotel was a Best Western just on the edge of Chinatown, on the corner of Bowery and Grand. Great spot - and fairly affordable for Manhattan rates.

Fast forwarding just slightly as I need to run... the U2 show!

The pre-concert started, appropriately enough, at an Irish pub. And with some Irish handcuffs (mine being Guiness and Jamieson) under our belt, we were on our way.

The show was at Giants Stadium in New Jersey with 82,000 fans. It was a very good show, but having seen the band 3 times previously, I would say not their best. Bono's voice is, sad to say, betraying his age - noticeably nasal and a little more brittle. And they played a lot off their latest No Line on The Horizon cd - a weaker one to be sure.

Still, with 82,000 New Yorkers in a great mood and in full voice, with weather in the low 20's, it was a great event. And there was a great vibe especially during a few songs - I tried numerous times to provide you a video link of With or Without You, but Youtube takes down any unauthorized material and the file size is too big for Blogger.. so these photos will have to suffice.

We were 30 rows away... the pictures don't really do it justice, but the spectacle and production was as much of the highlight as the music (fortunately or unfortunately).

For a more professional review, check out the New York Times version here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/arts/music/25u2.html?_r=2&src=twt&twt=nytimes

Signing off now... chat again soon.

"I don't know where I'm going, but I sure know where I've been"

Mark Twain - author? Martin Luther King - civil rights champion? Confucius - philosopher? Actually, it's David Coverdale - Whitesnake.

And while it may seem odd to kick off a travel blog with a quote from an 80's hair band, it does sum up my mindset at the moment as I head off to a new adventure.

I'm writing this on a pleasantly rainy day in my hometown of Montreal, just before heading off to Paris tonight and just after 3 days in New York City. The ticket tonight is one-way - less a statement of never returning and more a statement of just letting things happen for a while, after years of resisting some invisible (and some slightly visible) forces that were not working in my favor in my adopted hometown of Calgary.

For 99% of friends, family, and strangers reading this, my blog will be a mixture of education and entertainment, while being as non-self-indulgent as a personal blog can be.

And for a few souls out there reading this, I hope it will even be somewhat inspirational, in that you may realize that it's never too late to hit the "reset" button on your life and to make changes, big or small. I know I benefitted greatly from a few random sources as well - Bryce Corbett's "A Town Like Paris" and Tim Ferriss' "The Four-Hour Work Week" in particular, among others... so it is possible to get inspiration from anywhere, at anytime. To get moving, I sold the house, the car, put a few things in storage (hung onto the golf clubs), had some garage sales and gave the rest to goodwill.

The itinerary is this, so far: Montreal - New York - Paris - Amsterdam. Beyond that, it's anyone's guess - although Buenos Aires is on the radar. The idea initially is to make a go of it in Europe, where I have extended family and where I can indulge my passions of writing, languages, and living more freely.

I won't get too journal-y here - suffice to say that after some significant challenges in work, relationships, and health, I decided that Calgary was not for me, despite some amazing friends and places (Griffith Woods Park, Steeps Tea House and Brava Bistro foremost among the places part). It's a very nice place to live, but not necessarily to LIVE.

So while it may appear to some that I've lost my sanity in doing this, in many ways it's actually an attempt to reclaim it. To paraphrase the Dos Equis guy: I've decided to live vicariously through myself.

I'm playing catch-up with the blog over the next few days, as I fill people in on the New York and Montreal visits, so there will be almost daily posts and photos for a while. The next post, about NYC, will actually come from my week-long apartment in Paris.

Check back often, and leave comments or send personal messages as often as you'd like. I hope you enjoy it and I'd love to hear from you.

And if you click the ads on the bottom of this page about 5000 times or so, I may be able to afford an espresso or a stroopwafel.

Merci/bedankt.