Posts

Showing posts from March, 2011

North American Trains

I have really tried hard to avoid writing about this. If I look at the draft articles I have written for this blog and kept in draft, no less than three in the last eight months, touch on the subject I am going to breech today. I wanted to avoid the subject, as I tell two of the guys I regular commute with, because I really wanted to believe in the train system and support it. I did not want to whine about it. Today, unfortunately, I just can't hold back and I will be hitting publish on this article - an amalgam of the drafts. Let me sum it up very simply....trains in North America are terrible. Unreliable and aging they trudge along their lines achingly. Some recent examples from the last ten days...yes only in the last ten days: A week or so ago I went to Toronto. Rather than drive or fly, I thought I'd try the VIA Rail train that runs between Montreal and Toronto. I arrived at the station thirty minutes prior to boarding, as recommended. At the designated time o

BBs from Chile

At 2:30 pm this afternoon I cracked open the plastic container that contained some plump blueberries I had bought a few hours before at the local supermarket. My mouth was watering thinking of the tasty sweet blue fruit that I was planning on combining with some strawberries, granola and some vanilla yogurt. It was going to be great. As I started rinsing these BBs I started getting annoyed. Many of them - too many! - were mouldy and soft. I was literally throwing money away and I was annoyed with these fruit and with their seller. How could they sell me such garbage? Such low quality produce? After about one minute of these thoughts, as I started rinsing off the strawberries, I realized that the annoyance should be directed at a different target - myself. How foolish of me, really, to expect fresh, high quality BBs in Canada during the winter season. How could I expect fruits that were picked who knows how long ago, some 8000 kilometres away, to be fresh when they reached t