Day 38-39 - In transit, via Halifax

Thursday 26 August (jeudi 26 août) 2004, 11am ET

Back in Montreal - or rather, Dorval Airport. The worst part about transfer flights is fatigue, two sets of security checks, etc... I had to unpack part of my baggage this time, as I have a radio, CD player and other stuff in there that fails their security check unless it's isolated. Quebec Airport's a bit out of town and costs $27 for a taxi as there is no shuttle - next time I'll have to see if I can get to Sainte-Foy on public transport and get a taxi from there. Daniel was amused by my attempts, using 'dictionnaire Français', to communicate with a woman (non-English-speaking) sitting next to me. I couldn't understand a word she said (except when she grabbed my dictionary and started speaking 'dictionary English', as she called it) but she could understand me and seemed quite amused by the whole thing.

Friday 27 August 2004, AT (GMT-3h, Perth-11h)

Halifax is an interesting place - one of the oldest cities in Canada, it contains a lot of old buildings and green spaces and a beautiful waterfront area with some islands, but is ridiculously small for a city of 300,000 (it reminds me a bit of both Launceston and Hobart) and can only be explained by the apparent contradiction of "slow and chaotic". Once you get off the multitude of freeways coming in and going out of Halifax, the traffic is very slow - there are traffic jams regularly in the two-lane main street in the city, and I've even seen drivers stop in the middle of an intersection for up to 30 seconds to negotiate it. Service is very slow here, but friendly. One odd observation is people here seem to have a much stronger Canadian accent than I'm used to - the 'a's are even flatter than Vancouver's, the 'ay's are shriller, and the 'ou' in 'about' is meticulously pronounced.

Not much really to say other than that. I'm going by bus to Saint John, New Brunswick, today and staying in a nice B&B there for a couple of days. It'll probably be a while (Tuesday maybe?) before I can update this again.