Now I’m _really_ back. Echoing my May itinerary, I did a full North American tour in a week, swapping my bag of sweaty tank tops and sandals for leather pants and a wool sweater and heading up north to Montreal. Peter had savvily arranged everything, including our Thanksgiving picnic on the train, which of course included two bottles of wine along with the turkey-and-cranberry-sauce sammies.

He’d also booked a groovy B&B run by the archetypal hip mom, looking suave in her own leather pants and hanging out with her son’s cute girlfriends–even offering them at breakfast the little vodka left over from their mellow partying the night before (if my French comprehension skills are still worth anything). The walls were bedecked with very cool but faintly gruesome paintings and drawings of beheaded ostriches and the like.

All we did was walk and eat, which I hadn’t had much chance to do when I went for a couple of days in the spring. First night, we stopped in awe in front of a window piled high with briskets and stringy sausages; through the condensation in the window, we could see a fluorescent glow and Formica tables. Turned out we had been almost magnetically drawn to Schwartz’s, a legendary deli specializing in “smoked meat,” which combines all the moist, tangy goodness of corned beef with the rich, melty pinkness of pastrami. The waiter asked if we wanted some-special-term or lean. “Not lean!” I gasped. Even though everything else we ate on the trip was great, I kind of wish we’d eaten there a few more times. As a tourist and dining experience, it’s a million times better than Katz’s, here on the LES, which serves sandwiches so monstrous you can’t possibly finish them and is always mobbed with pushy people. Schwartz’s might get that way too sometimes, but we managed to hit it on a quiet evening.

The next day, and the next, we just visited markets and fanned out from there. Jean-Talon is the winner, even though it was winter and half the stuff wasn’t out. We walked into Fruterie Sami (“I want to take a closer look at that giant pile of green beans,” said Peter) and I thought I’d dropped acid _and_ gone to heaven: the most monstrous heaps of vegetables everywhere, and where veggies weren’t packed against the walls, there were mirrors, so all the colors and shapes refracted like I was in a great produce kaleidoscope. Very, very Andreas Gursky. Plus, there were lots of Koranic exhortations on the walls, up above the mirrors, so if ever I were going to have a religious experience and convert, it would’ve been there.

After that, we wandered around in circles trying to find the fabled $2 merguez sandwiches, and only found some not-as-famous $3 ones, but they were supremely delicious. The Moroccan shopowner impressed me with his backless, slip-on tennis shoes–he kicked off one to step up on a chair to reach an elaborate Ramadan lantern on a high shelf. Maybe I was giddy from the sweet mint tea, but it seemed fantastic to me that the culture of the Moroccan slipper had not been lost in his move to Montreal–just updated and made a little sturdier.

That evening, we again stumbled across a major Montreal culinary landmark, one of the famous bagel vendors. As we went inside, some musta-been-stoned guy with his mouth full exhorted: “Try the chocolate ones! They’re hot now! They’re amaaaaaaazing!” How could I say no? Contrary Peter sampled the standard sesame bagel, which was also tasty and encrusted with far more sesame seeds than I ever thought possible. Again, portion size was much more reasonable, not the giant NYC style. While we ate and warmed up (oh yeah, Montreal is really cold, did I mention?), we watched the guys work one of the most massive pieces of dough I’ve ever seen, about as big as a Great Dane. I can’t imagine the Hobart big enough to mix that sucker.

On our last night, we took a breather in our minimalist-chic room decorated with a disturbing painting of a shlumpy man with a beak holding perhaps his penis, and flipped through all the scraps of paper with resto recommendations that Peter had collected before the trip, making sure we didn’t miss anything. It was a toss-up between Vietnamese and a nice bistro we’d tried to hit the night before, but had got to too late for a reason I will explain shortly.

We settled on the bistro, and were glad we did. Somewhere between the appetizers and the main course, I realized that French food was actually a lot more exotic to us than Vietnamese. I mean, it’s been ages since I’ve had to ask what something was on a menu. The French sure have a way with animal fat–from the rabbit rillettes to the duck confit, it was all fucking fantastic. We had a classy waitress who even turned up the heat next to our window-side table, and brought us a free loaf of bread for our train picnic the next day. Perhaps she was extra kind to us because she’d noticed Peter quietly rocking in his seat like an autistic child as he ate his 80th bite of crispy duck skin and tender duck gizzard. When we were done, we were covered in grease and dizzily happy.

As an added bit of hospitality to all-devouring visitors from the south, Montreal also trotted out a band that seemed to play just for us, at a funky populist bar with chess boards, tofu sandwiches and, as everywhere, cute waitresses. We’d been sitting around, me drinking cider and Peter suggesting which chess pieces I should move (he played himself into a stalemate). Then the band finally took to the stage. “Never have I seen such a niche band, and had it be _my_ niche,” said Peter after they finished their first song.

The Vegetablists, as they so happened to be called, were brandishing ukeleles, a xylophone, black ski masks and an assortment of produce. Indeed, all of their songs were about vegetables, and audience participation consisted of passing a carrot around for people to munch (it was also used as percussion, when the guitarist chewed it rhythmically with his mouth open near the mike). During the song “Dragon Bowl,” a tribute to that vegan delight, everyone couldn’t help but sing along with the compelling refrain of “You need garlic.” As if _that_ weren’t enough, they even gave a shout-out to dental hygiene in one song (“brush ’em like craaa-zy”). For that, I’ll definitely overlook the fact that they might actually have been vegetarians.

But because we’d stuck around for these produce-lovin’ punks, we missed the bistro and ended up back in our room at the B&B, finishing off our leftover sandwiches from the train. In different circumstances, this might have seemed like a travel failure (I’m thinking of some of our miserable meals in Cuba in 1996, for instance). But there in Montreal, a gracious city despite the cold, it felt like the perfect end to the day.