my trip to Toronto or...reflections on what is a home

after 8 hours of a display of a rather mediocre american film making and the same amount of time of being slapped around by various body parts and carts of the passing stewardesses and stewards, i pass through the security, manage to pull off super-sized suitcase (only injuring one person in the process!) and finally...the doors open. i am out. after two years of wondering the world, with detours mostly in various countries in the middle east, and travelling almost exclusively between the 6 and the 16 arrondissements (i.e. home and office) in paris, i am back to home. or am i?

i cannot deny (and no offense to all of you my dear fellow ex-torontonians) that after being gone for that long, my impressions of the city changed quite remarkably. In most cases, it was a question of perception, in some, like the mushroom harbourfront boom, a case of a real city change. I will just highlight a few thoughts and impressions that were particularly striking to me...

Impression 1 (looking around me on the plane): why is what appears to be hmmm....a 10 year old girl three times my size? why does that not qualify for child abuse? I tell myself to think more politically correct and not stare. i am still shocked and as i am sitting there, tying to crank up to volume of my ipod to outplay the neighbouring kid whose video game consistently makes quite a noise when he kills someone or something (about every 10 seconds), it hits me that any hopes i had for a cheap shopping heaven are wildly misguided. yes, after verification, i am can honestly report: my size does not really exist in most stores (ok, with the exception of Gap Kids but then i didn't find anything that went with work suits). this is of course not to mention the style...i still wish i took the picture of someone wearing a super nice dress with these ridiculous looking galoches...I think they are called the crocks?

Impression 2 (sitting in a cute italian resto): what is wrong with this waiter and why does he keep coming every few minutes with all the questions about the food? is he trying to sleep with my friend or with me? why are the glasses of wine the size of three in france? the service so quick? the prices so cheap? i do the calculation again, and it is still dirt cheap compare to france. i think i could not even have a bottle of water for the price of two glasses of rather drinkable italian wine. ok, its not french wine, but it is drinkable still. at most other places, waiters kept asking me if i want red or white and seemed terribly confused by my insistance to know anything beyond the colour description (mental note to self: they think you are a snob). conclusion: no, the waiter is not trying to score, at least not that way, he just wants a tip. in france, we don't really tip, and in part because of this and in part because they just don't give a crap whether you meal suits you or not (after all, why would you order something you don't like?), the service is rather consistently non-existent. so, my suggestion: if you want some decent french food with a bad french accent and great service, do yourself a favour and eat at Le Select Bistro at Wellington and Spadina (thank you Neil).

Impression 3 (sitting in the US border office at Niagara falls): no, i didn't steal anything at duty free, i was just there with a friend who promised a quick procedure to renew a visa. mental note to self: a quick procedure to renew a visa does not exist. i should have known it from my rather trying experience trying to get a working visa in france. after having spent 3 hours in the hallway of this lovely office equipped with Fox news, i finally realised that my presence was really really not going to help my friend. this observation stroke me as i heard the following announcement on Fox: 'a middle eastern man is on the run on the main street of chicago, police is on the hunt...' i will not say anything of all the middle eastern men sitting in the same waiting room but my passport with stamps from just about every middle eastern country did cause additional questioning of my all-too-patient friend. Advice: if you need to renew a US visa, do not bring me with, it will substantially lengthen the procedure. and then you will have to take me out in order to compensate for the long wait. You see, its a lose-lose situation for you.

Impression 4 (trying to buy books on foreign policy of the middle east): please don't call me a geek, that is not nice. Astonished that some Indigo stores exclusively carry books on gardening, golf and cooking. If you don't cook, garden or play golf, sorry, tough luck. well, in the case of cooking i understand, and hope someone else does it for you. but gardening?! we don't garden in paris, that's what the public parks are for. no, those are not for taking a piss although some french men do not really follow that logic. so, yes, no gardening, in part because we have no houses, so unless you want to plant your favourites roses in the park where they could be subject to 'pissing' risk, i wouldn't recommend it. lesson: indigo at bloor and bay is the only decent bookstore where there is actually a foreign policy section. i learned that the biggest foreign policy issue in canada is the little bit of troops in afghanistan. and what gets front page of what is perhaps the most respectable paper, the Globe, is not 20 billion weapon sales to Saudi Arabia, but a local shooting at some club. After that, I had to buy the IHT every day.


aside from these rather specific episodes, there are other more general thoughts running through my head, with which i will not bore you...at least not any further. the vast nature of this country is just so incomprehensible to paris urbanites that are used to fight for every centimeter of closet space. the cosmopolitanism is really a model of incredible success and things like mosques and churches being located next door are a completely unique phenomena, which i assure you, do not replicate themselves in europe. the 'american dream' jobs (yes, i know you will not believe me) are much easier to get, even if you don't belong to a specific privileged circle of former lords. this should explain my successes in europe btw, my grandfather had some high class relatives i think...

and just when i finally started to get used to the suspiciously friendly people, the shining CN tower (copied from the eiffel tower), the banal music from the 80s in supermarkets, the 3 people size food portions, it was time to say goodbye. despite all the things that made me feel like a total doofus at times, there are things i knew i would miss before even leaving. my friends. the language. the queen streetcar eastbound. the american style coffee. the veggie restos. the lack of pretence at anything larger. not the american border patrol. not the onion rings on the menu. not the Gap kids.

all this melodrama made me think about the places i have called 'home'. back to paris, not unlike the feeling i have after coming back from my work travels, i was happy to be back home. it is i suppose strange to call a place where most people treat you as a tourist 'home', but paris has become, despite or because of my efforts.

i suppose one can only realise what is home when the place you thought was home is discovered to be no longer, or at least not in the same way. i haven't yet decided whether i am lucky to call two great cities home or whether i am just a 'globalised' human being with no preferences. everything is on the indifference curve...and now ladies and gentlemen, i invite you to revise your macroeconomics...or was is micro already?!