Primo post ufficale dal Canada

The first post of 'An Italian in Canada' will be a short visual summary of just a few things that we learned to like here in Montreal. It's winter, so one has to accept it and take the best out of it. For us, this means mostly going ice skating on the very large frozen pond at La Fontaine park, five minutes from our apartment. Here you can see a small part of the pond, right after it snowed, with people skating on the clear paths. Notice the mom skating with her child in the carrier!
Right after it snows, people go out and have fun in the parks. I think I'd love to be a child in Montreal.
Squirrels are fine with the snow as well. However, they are so much thinner than the squirrels in Berkeley!

When it's not terribly cold, we walk around the city. One of our favorite destinations is Mile End, a Jewish area with three main highlights: two bagel factories, open 24 h per day, 7 days/week, and 'Cheskie', one of the best pastry places in town. I will give more details about Cheskie in a later post, when I have some pictures to go with the explanation.

The bagel factories have huge wood ovens where they constantly bake the bagels, after boiling them in water with honey according to the Montreal recipe. It's hard to choose between the two rivals, 'St. Viateur' and 'Fairmount'. They both make amazingly good bagels and tasting them hot right out of the oven is a pleasure, especially after a long walk in the cold. Here is a comparison of their sesame bagels:
(left Fairmount's bagel, right St. Viateur's).
St. Viateur is a bit cheaper and has a smaller selection of flavors. We tend to like the St.Viateur's warm sesame bagels the best, but the Fairmount's 'bleuet' (blueberry) and 'tout garni' (all dressed) are probably our favorite. I will take a picture of these places one of these days.

Another amazing place in Montreal is 'Adonis', a Middle Eastern grocery store that we discovered thanks to a friend of ours. I've been on this planet for more than 30 years, but I had no idea about what Middle Eastern food really is, before going to this store.

For example, here are two shots of their fresh cheese counter. These are some of the harder cheese. The feta section is not pictured, it occupies about the same space on the counter.
That big braided cheese is an unbelievably dense and salty cheese, with herbs in the dough. We still have to figure out how to eat it exactly. For now we have soaked it in water to eliminate some of the salt and then used it on pizza or inside our kofta sandwiches.
These are some of the soft cheeses. The labneh, especially the half goat labneh, is really good and we started using it either with cucumber and mint or just plain during our middle-eastern dinners.

The olive selection is as diverse as the cheese counter (no pic, sorry); the Lebanese and the Sicilian olives are particularly good, and they cost ~$4/lb!

Their meat counter is also amazing. We've been buying ground and whole Quebecois lamb, much better than New-Zealandese lamb, for a very reasonable price. Not to speak about their delicious hallal chickens for ~$6 each, or their merguez, a lamb/beef sausage, spiced with cinnamon and hot spices.

Another amazing discovery for us was the variety of Middle Eastern breads: pita, the one we all know, is really just their most common bread, which they sell for almost nothing ($0.99 for 6 pitas). Then they have long sheets of ~1 cm thick bread from Afghanistan, some discs that are ~1 mm thick and ~1 m wide, soft loaves.. We're trying them all little by little.

The honey and molassas aisle is amazing as well. Did you ever have grape or fig molassas? Or honey from rose flowers? We tried the grape molassas, and I liked it quite a bit. It tastes very grapy indeed. The same is true for their juice section (apricot and pomegranate are the less extravagant. We recently got sour cherry and guava juice). And their halva section sports tubs in all sizes coming from many different countries. So far however our favorite is still the halva we bought a few months ago somewhere else in Montreal, the Jean-Talon market, which will be the subject of a separate post.

If these items still haven't convinced you about the richness of Middle Eastern food, here is what will: their baklava section.When you get to this counter, you understand why Islamic heaven is represented with streams of honey. Piles and piles of at least 20 different types of baklavas, or baklava-like sweets, are showcased attractively.
And the truth is, they are all really, really good. They are surprisingly different, some of them more buttery, some crumbly, some have filaments of sugary crunchy dough around them, some taste more like rose, others have a lemon hint, they can be filled with almonds, pistachios, walnuts, hazelnuts... Hard to stop pointing at them when we buy them.

So, this is really one of the things that for now make Montreal worth living in: its mulitcultural aspect and the amazing bagels, croissants, breads and donoughts that can be found at each corner. I'll talk about Portoguese and French bakeries in another post. Hopefully we can avoid eating too many of them while we wait for the winter to be over.

Let me finish this post with a comparison of two pictures of parcs close to our apartment: Parc de La Fontaine in January:
And Parc St Louis in November:
Walking through the latter park while going to work used to make me feel so happy, when the trees still had beautiful yellow, green and red leaves! I can't complain, though. I don't mind the snow, and really, it's been a mild winter. Also, I saw beautiful sceneries that I would have never imagined, such as the air filled with ice crystals, all shiny, when it's close to -20C. I can enjoy them provided my eyelashes aren't frozen shut, which sometimes happens because of the humidity freezing between them.

Una specie di riassunto

Hello everybody! I'm happy the blog hasn't completely died in these past few months. My intense activity of job applications and finishing up with my projects is still going on at its peak. However, I have at this point a strong desire of writing about something other than chemistry for once.
The title of this post is rather ambitious: 'an attempt of a summary', which obviously won't include all the *** no adjective here *** events of my recent life, but at least will give a few snapshots of the good parts of it.. because in the end, that's what's worth trying to remember, right?

So here we are. The first thing really worth writing about is my trip to Mexico. Mexico is an amazing place and I'm thinking to write a post specifically about it. However, this is a summary-post, so I'll just pinpoint a few things.
Mexico city: crowded, full of life.
(this dance was performed in the main square - El Zocalo -. The square and all the huge surrounding area was filled with people).

European-looking architecture mixed with skyscrapers.

Wonderful food at every corner.
(here are some typical stands: tortas=mexican sandwiches, and aguas frescas are the best fruit juices ever. I tried to resist the temptation at the beginning, then started to try them after a while - I didn't die, so I guess there weren't too many bacteria in the ice that they used. :) )

Best archeological museum in the world.
(Melynda and I spent an afternoon in this museum, and were overwhelmed with awe at each room)

Filled with spirituality
(this was in the Cathedral)

Close to Teotihuacan, the most amazing place ever. This is a view of the pyramid of the Moon from the top of the pyramid of the Sun.
And these are the people climbing on top of the pyramid of the Sun.
It was rather tiring, but getting on the top was an unbelievable experience, which made me feel strangely powerful and close to the Sun. :)

Tulum: AAAHHHH.. I so much want to go back and be there now! The place is the most amazing place I've been in my whole life. We had a 'cabana' on the beach, which meant that I could enjoy this any time of the day and of the night:
In fact, I could fulfill my dream of swimming in the ocean at midnight, and of seeing the sunrise on the ocean.
Both experiences - the stars in the sky and the white foam as the only thing visible around you, at night, and the sun slowly lighting the whole sky on fire, in the morning - were the most unforgettable experiences of the trip, for me.

The other amazing thing of Tulum are the ruins, which we saw at night. Another unbelievable experience: everything was dark and silent, except for the waves hitting against the rocks, and we were immersed in this city of the past, lit with changing colors.
It was truly another experience for the soul.

Two more things were amazing of Tulum: snorkeling at the reef, where we were able to swim with a sea turtle, an amazingly elegant creature, and see wonderfully colored fish, which I had seen only in aquariums before; and swimming in the 'cenotes', natural caves formed by the rain in the carsic terrain of the Yucatan. The water is rather cold, and the landscape is surreal: a castle of stalactites and stalagmites under the water.
(this was part of the complex 'Dos Ojos', highly recommended)

More in the Yucatan: Chichen-Itza. Impressive. Although, a little too touristic. I couldn't feel the same atmosphere as in Teotihuacan, for the huge amount of tourists and vendors that were all around.
However, the big pyramid was amazing. Clapping against the center of each wall create a really strange echo, which I never heard anywhere else, sort of like a bird.

The last memories from the trip are the wonderful people I was with:
My dearest friends Jorge and Luisa, who hosted us in the Yucatan (in Merida)
And of course, my wonderful friend Melynda (here in the 'blue house' in Mexico City).

There are a lot more places I visited in these past few months, for a shorter time (day trips, or weekends), which I would have liked to post about. So again, just one picture per trip:

Point Reyes
Point Reyes is a _huge_ park very close to Berkeley. I really recommend anybody in the area to go there. I've been there only once and really want to go back. This was the ocean view path, in the south side of the park. You can walk miles, close to the ocean. The view is breath taking. And there are small lakes, where one can go swim or canoe, and small waterfalls on the beach, too.

Visit at my friends Simona and Robert, in Trinidad.
Trinidad is in North California, very close to National Redwood Park. Simona and Robert have an amazing house, with a view on the ocean that's just unimaginable. Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture of it. It's even more beautiful than this, which is the view that you have from the light house at Trinidad:
And this is a picture of the redwoods, on my first hike with Simona:
It's hard to capture the atmosphere of this amazing park in a picture.
Last picture for this summary:
I had never seen these beautiful animals before, in 'real life'!

Ok, this is it for now. I still have to show a picture of myself with my newest and shortest haircut. I'll do it as soon as I have a good occasion to take a picture. :)
Also, I'll try to upload all the pictures of the trips on my web album, so there will be a lot more to see. Last but not least, I will try to publish at least some of my recent culinary creations and explorations.. looking forward to finding some time to blog again. :)