Those Canadians–that hockey thing is serious. It’s on their $5 bill. And the Quebecois–wow, they really do speak French.

These and other stereotypes (if speaking French really counts as a stereotype) were confirmed on my first visit to fair Canada. As with Mexico, except without quite so much delight, I wondered why it had taken me more than 30 years to visit a country that is so close.

Unfortunately, I kind of blew the food front, because I was woefully unprepared for the trip. All I knew about eating in Montreal was that they make something called poutine, which is fies covered in gravy and some white cheese and maybe some other stuff. I spent most of the three days of the trip casting about for a good map, or a good bookstore at which to buy a map, but of course I couldn’t find the bookstore because I didn’t have a phone book or a map.

Also, I have this problem with decision-making in which I must evaluate every single option and then choose. Which is an unfortunate OCD tendency in a consumer culture like ours (my favorite shopping experience ever: socialist-utopia discount grocery Aldi, in which there is only one kind of everything).

So this compulsion applies to both thrift stores and new cities. I can’t make up my mind about dinner because there might be an even better restaurant on the next block. And by the next block I’m so addled with hunger that I can’t make any decision at all. And once I’m eating, I can’t shake the feeling that maybe there was a better place just two blocks away.

So I tried to keep this tendency in check with Fran, whom I’ve never really traveled with. Because her girlfriend is pregnant (see, everyone on the east coast…), I was accompanying her to Montreal to get her work visa stamped, in some exercise of bureaucratic hoop-jumping. I guess I was meant to be the chaperone–keep Fran’s natural British boozing habits under conrol. So because I hadn’t helped hatch the plot for the trip, I felt like maybe I shouldn’t be the bossy food-obsessed travel companion I usually am (though I did order fizzy water everywhere we went). And I couldn’t really be my know-it-all self, because I hadn’t so much as Googled “Montreal + food -poutine” before I got in the car.

We ate one good meal (Chez l’Epicier, where we had to order the appetizer named “a tribute to the duck,” with no further explanation), one funny meal (Olive Gormando, I think–a charming waiter warned us that the menu was all in French, then returned to explain earnestly that ‘cheesies deluxe’ were a wholesome sort of cheese-corn snack…which really meant organic Cheetos, as it turned out), and one extremely odd but inexpensive meal (Anubis “fusion cafe”: my main was boneless quail in mango sauce, with a side of spaetzle and some boiled cauliflower, all cooked by a Vietnamese guy).

This last place was kind of like the bizarro Kebab Cafe–a crew of regulars slurped wine and sang traditional Quebecois drinking songs (I’m guessing), and the chef came out of his tiny kitchen to make sure everything was fine. Which it kind of was. It was cheap, at least.

All this made me extra-glad to be walking up Steinway yesterday, dawdling in front of all the familiar stores, and then seeing Ali sitting outside the ol’ KC, smoking a shisha and shooting the breeze with someone who turned out to be the ex-bartender at the Bohemian Hall. I sat and drank some tea, assured Ali I hadn’t done anything scandalous in Mexico, and soaked up the sweet feeling of familiar territory, where the choices are many, but easily made.