There are a few things in life that get me swearing like a truck driver from Rimouski, pondering the finer things in life. And ever since I relocated to Toronto, I miss certain comfort foods from my past more then I thought I would. Bagels. Poutine. Blanche de Chambly. Very carbohydrate intensive indulgences – and my waistline certainly reflects these indulgences.

It’s not my fault. I lived in Montreal for most of my life, and certain deliciously cheap indulgences were abundant. Street meat in Toronto scares me when I’m sober, and reminds me not to eat meat from a sink-free source. Continue reading →

It’s pretty hard to write a travel blog, like I’ve said, when you’re not currently travelling and have no tangible plans to hit the road.

But… I did hit the road recently. It was a pretty quick process – in about a 4 week period, I quit my job of almost 7 years, packed up everything I own (aside from the random crap we abandoned on the floor of the old apartment, but that’s not relevant here), found a new job in a new city in a new industry, and left Montreal behind for the slick streets of Toronto. And I never thought I would up and leave – everyone had me pegged as a Montreal-lifer. Indeed, I was coming pretty close to it: I priced condos, looked into mortgage options. Continue reading →

It has magically come to my attention that I haven’t been posting much lately. It’s not easy to maintain a travel blog when you’re office-bound – not as easy, at least. The adventures are no longer fresh in your memory, distorted by time, space, jet lag. The longer it’s been since I’ve traveled, the harder it is to write, especially since there are no grand adventures in the works in the near future. In fact, Chiquita isn’t even sitting on my desk these days; she’s preparing for her adventure to Bangladesh, but she’s leaving me behind. Continue reading →

I’ve taken the plunge – sort of. A little over two years ago, I fell in love. Obsession set in. (Incidentally, about two years ago I actually did fall in love with a person, but he’s not the subject of this post or this blog.)

Madly, head over heals in love. I am immersed by the thought of doing this over and over again. When I close my eyes and escape to my quiet, happy place, I keep coming back here. Continue reading →

I have not really had the opportunity to write much this week. Unfortunately, this is not due to me running off on some fantastic adventure. I have been spending a lot of extra time tending to a dying pet. She takes up an extra hour or so of my time every morning, and another hour or so of my time in the evening, on top of the hour or so a day I try to spend playing with the pets. We’ve developed a routine: I try to give her anti-inflammatories and glucosamine for her arthritis twice a day. I end up wearing most of her medication. I also slowly feed her soft foods, since the arthritis has affected her ability to hold food the way she used to. The end is near, and my main goal right now is to give her the best quality of life at this stage of the game. It’s a question of a few days – maybe a week or two. Continue reading →

I suppose I’m expected to make some sort of post that explains to everyone out there in Internet land who on earth I am, and why on earth you should care enough to read this blog. I’m 27, I’m from Montreal, I have a moderately serious travel addiction that is held in check by boring obligations such as pets, a job, and lack of funds. I uprooted my life on a semi-whim in 2010 and moved to Toronto, which involved a career change. It’s been an eye-opening experience.

What else? Je parle français, but I’ve decided this will be a mostly English-language blog because I don’t write as well in French. I graduated from Concordia University in 2006 with a joint specialization in communications and journalism, but so far that degree has proved mostly useless. I am halfway through a graduate certificate in environmental science from McGill University, but that’s sitting on the back burner for now cause I’ve simply lost interest. I want to learn how to brew beer in the next few months, and I also want to get a SCUBA diving license. I was diagnosed as an adult as having ADD, but having already taken the scenic route through university and made it through, I decided not to do anything about it. It just allows me to get distracted by things like sewer grates in Rome and Duff Beer in stores. Seriously.

Duff beer here for me...

I’ve traveled to the following countries: Canada, US, Ireland, Greece, Italy, The Vatican, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Iceland. And I pooped in the washroom in the airport in Japan, but I never actually went into Japan, so I don’t know if it counts or not, but I think it does. I don’t have a bucket list of places I ‘must’ see, but there are few places that come to mind that I wouldn’t be interested in going to. The immediate short list includes France, the Czech Republic, Iceland, Belize, Costa Rica, Peru, Russia, China, Indonesia, and Morocco. Who knows where I’ll actually end up though?

Sometimes I travel alone. Sometimes I run off with my friend David, and sometimes I travel in more organized groups. Everything depends on how much time I have to plan a trip, where I’m going, and how much I can afford. I prefer to visit North America and Europe on the fly – I can muddle through enough Spanish or Italian to squeak by in Europe, and everything is easy enough to find and get around that I need minimal help. The first time I went to Israel, I went with Birthright Israel but I found the group structure took away from the experience. It was overwhelming being with the same 45 people or so every single day, and aside from 2-3 people, most of them got on my nerves the whole time. It felt more like a high school trip then a proper adventure, with every detail of our days planned out. I went back a year later with David, but we split up most of the time we were there, and that was a lot better. I figured out the intricacies of getting the bus from Eilat to Jerusalem by myself, stayed in the sketchiest possible hostel in Tel Aviv, and nearly had my bag blown up by the army in Acre. I went to Ireland completely by myself, but that was easy. Everyone spoke English and their infrastructure is highly developed. David & I traveled all over Italy together without too much trouble, and the only Italian I can really handle is asking if I was on the right train.

I went to Asia on a whim – the whole trip was planned from start to finish in about 3 weeks. I went with GAP Adventures, who took care of the nitty gritty details like transport to and from the border, accommodations, guides, translators, breakfasts, and things like that. All I had to do was buy a plane ticket and get my Vietnamese visa in advance. It made a quickly planned trip to a region I knew less about a lot easier, and took away a lot of stress on my part since I didn’t have much time to plan. It kind of changed my life, and led to that whim to uproot my life and move to Toronto.

Oh, and I’ve got those pet rats I’ve mentioned in the past. They’re like small, intelligent caged dogs except they only live 3 years or so.

I’ve been blogging intermittently since 2002. I have a Live Journal account that goes through periods of abuse, periods of neglect, and everything in between, but it serves its purpose as a mostly first-person rambling journal. It is a random online collection of my thoughts since 2002, but it’s not really what a blog is supposed to be. Now that the hangover of New Year’s has dissipated, I can get down to the nitty gritty details. It’s time for a new blog for the new decade. I don’t know why haven’t gotten around to this yet, but it’s time… Well I’m sure I’ve got some forgotten account somewhere taking up precious server space but amounting to nothing. The quintessential question: what should I write about? One should always write about what they know. That ultimately leaves:

• Travel (or hobo backpacking, if you prefer)
• Photography
• Cuisine
• Rats (not to be confused with actually cooking rats, which I do not condone)
• Environmental issues

Which all sort of tie together, don’t they? You can’t write about travel without illustrating your stories with photos you took, or appropriately ganked with credit. You could in theory write about cuisine without photos, but I sure wouldn’t want to read those blogs. I want to see what you’re eating, and wonder why my attempt looks nothing like that. I could write about rats without posting photos, but then you wouldn’t see the fuzzbutts through my eyes and understand why I fall head over heals in love with them every day. I don’t mean rattus norvegicus, of sewer and NYC subway fame, but rattus norvegicus as a domesticated entity, such as exhibit A:

But this will not be a rat blog per say, although they might pop up periodically. And finally I pondered writing about environmental issues, as I hold them dear to my heart. But there are countless watchdog blogs out there to begin with (again, I think I have one in my name out there somewhere, possibly written in French) and that wasn’t necessarily my aim. Then it hit me. I need to write about traveling, eco-tourism, culinary arts of the world, and environmental issues. But these subjects are not mutually exclusive. So I made a Venn diagram to justify my web existence instead of stealing one. http://classtools.net/widgets/venn_1/MMEWX.htm

I guess this will be a photo blog. It will force me to do something with the 20+ gigs of photos I have sitting in my hard drive. It will give me an excuse to justify the cameras – a new dSLR is on its way right now, as is a little point & shoot number that can go under water. And heck – why not… I can mention it. I self-published this little photography number recently: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1030957.