Then my parents showed up today, and -- amidst the random books and DVDs and forwarded notices and eBayed vintage belt and fabric linings that I just had to buy from Stateside sources -- there was a plastic-wrapped Vanity Fair. Which turned out to actually be an advertisement on the verso of my one last un-forwarded magazine, Bon Appetit. And really, I was shocked by the depths of my disappointment about this. Apparently I had been very much looking forward to this magazine, or at least Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. Maybe even enough to take them up on the $15 / year subscription offer.

... which is only available in the US, because it's $38 plus GST Canadian. Maybe enough, anyway, to subscribe at my parents' address in the states, and then have them forward it up to me irregularly? Or, more likely, just wait until we start accumulating catalogues at this address, so I have reading material suitable for occasionally spilling my dinner on.

In other news, Pete bought a new (well, his first) laptop with his research funds, which arrived today. Unbeknownst to him, it has a fingerprint scanner, which... well, of all the things to adapt from the vaguely forward-thinking computers featured in dystopian action movies set in the near future, wouldn't have been my first choice. If Dell had made the built in webcam a combination camera / retinal scanner, then I'd be impressed. Most shockingly of all, we now have three legal, legitimately-obtained copies of Windows operating in the Jejune household. And three out of four ain't bad.

No, seriously. It's fortunate that moving to a city without a car coincides with my not having a job and not knowing very many people, because the additional exercise perfectly balances out the extra time that I've had to bake. During the past two weeks, I've made:

• Creamy Lemon Blueberry Bars, which I loved. Have shot up to the top of my list, at least during blueberry season.
• Triple-Layer Pistachio Petit Four cake. I tend to overlook nut- and fruit-based desserts in favor of more firmly chocolate- and, well, sugar-based flavors, but these cakes smelled simply amazing while cooking. My only quibble is that the chocolate ganache overpowered some of the more delicate flavors in the inside; I'll probably make it without next time.
• Chocolate Chip and Banana Ice Cream Sandwiches, albeit with maple ice cream instead of banana because the former is ubiquitous, and the latter not so much.

... and right now, I have a covered Kitchen Aid mixer bowl full of chocolate chip cookie dough chilling, because after reading this New York Times article modifying a recipe I've already made a million times, I just had to see if there was an improvement. The problem with this recipe, though, is that it involves refrigerating the dough for 24-36 hours. Which is a great idea, unless you're at home, sitting in front of your computer while chipping away at your dissertation, and your pre-lunch thoughts just keep turning towards the bowl full of cookie dough just waiting for you in the fridge. There, waiting patiently. For you. Full of sugary, doughy, chocolatey, tasty goodness.

I think that a bike ride, or brisk walk, might be in order this afternoon.

I'd heard good things about Montreal's bike-ability, and on my very first morning in the city noticed a substantial flow of bicycle commuters weaving in and out of the rush hour traffic along our side street. Not just skinny guys in Crédit Agricole and Cofidis racing kits, but men and women in varying degrees of business and casual wear on various types of bikes, cruising serenely by honking cars.

My first bike expedition out, however, was considerably more white-knuckled. Thing is, for a city of its size, Montreal has very, very few dedicated bike paths, and only a handful of roads with bike lanes or even shoulders. So, you're almost always riding with the flow of traffic. The flow of fast, crazy, impatient, traffic. "This isn't so bad!" I first thought to myself as I cruised down my street, following the woman in her mid-40s, dressed in capri pants and a striped shirt, biking ahead of me. "This is totally do-able! Look at me, taking in the urban landscape like a native!" The woman ahead of me went around a car waiting to turn left at the same time that a passing Yaris accelerated to do the same. She slammed on her brakes and started yelling at the driver who cut her off, following him down the street to the next stoplight. "Hey! Hey! Va te faire foutr'!" she shouted, banging on the passenger-side door of the car with her fist until the light turned green. And so it began.

Later, the traffic report on the CBC discreetly referred to an in-town road closure due to an "incident" with a cyclist, who was doored by someone in a parked car, then run over and dragged by a vehicle going the opposite direction. Moreover, what bike lanes there are are overflowing with not only cyclists, but a volatile, vile admixture of cyclists, small children, oblivious pedestrian tourists, mopeds, motorized wheelchairs, rollerbladers, skateboarders, illegally-parked delivery vans, and strollers, and criss-crossed by rapidly-turning cars not checking for oncoming cyclists behind them and city buses (which legally have the right-of-way in traffic).

That said, now that I've acclimatized to the insanity a bit more, I'd rather ride my bike here than I would in some sprawl-y suburb where I'm likely to be run over by somebody who can't parse the concept of "cyclist" and "roadway" in the same sentence. While there are plenty of idiot, aggressive drivers here, I've also been given plenty of space by nearly every vehicle who passes me, and I've even -- while waiting at a red light next to the curb, with a car waiting to turn right directly on my left -- had drivers look back at me and wait for me to clear the intersection, instead of risking cutting me off. Furthermore, I'm in good company. Everyone -- young, old, men, women, students, seniors, tourists, enthusiasts -- cycles here. And, when it comes to getting a feel for the city, I've learned far, far more about it during the leisurely outings I've made during the past few weeks than I ever would have just by walking, the Metro, and the bus. (Sometimes, confusing bike-path organization helps with this, too.)

Things that I have seen and places that I have been and things that I have discovered so far, thanks to my bike:

• The Old Port
• Innumerable snack-bars, yarn stores, creameries, and bike shops (where I should probably stop for a cheery bell plus spare tube and travel pump. Mmm, and some nice panniers would be good, too...)
• Lots of city parks, including ones I can't find on maps
• Some kind of Hare Krishna fun fair
• That on a warm summer's day, the air surrounding the pool in Laurier Park smells like strawberry popsicles.
• The backs of old warehouses coated with graffiti along the CPR tracks
• Lines of laundry neatly hung out to dry along the backs of houses in Villeray
• Locks and old factories along the Lachine canal
• Habitat 67
• The tower of the Olympic stadium hanging ominously over everything within a half-mile radius, like some kind of alien mothership
• Ile Notre-Dame, after an accidental crossing of the St. Lawrence
• Random parts of downtown, setting up for Just for Laughs
• Almost the top of Mont Royal. After feeling my heart and lungs trying to escape my chest cavity and draping myself limply over the handlebars, I conceded that if it is hard enough for Eddy Merckx, it is definitely too hard for me.
• Random mimes
• Some guy playing with devil sticks in Lafontaine. I know, right -- how long has it been since you've seen those?

Once I start knowing my rotes a little better, I'll even begin to bring my camera. At the moment, though, traffic and constantly being pleasantly lost are enough to keep me occupied.

In other news, I'm working my way through the more distinctively Canadian offerings at the supermarket. Verdicts:

1. Cadbury's candy bars are very sweet and all varieties taste primarily of sugar. This is definitely to my taste, but I think I'll be craving the garden variety assortment of Hershey's that can be found at any U.S. gas station soon enough.
2. Dill Pickle-flavored potato chips: pretty tasty. Not surprising when you consider that they're basically a greener variety of salt-and-vinegar.
3. Map-o-spread maple-flavored spread is... odd. Again, I'm a fan of the sugar, but it's kind of like eating toast with pancake syrup on top of it.
4. Finally, my beloved Nutella chocolatey-hazelnutty spread is everywhere, and I'm delighted to announce that it is delicious when consumed on top of gingersnap cookies. And completely, tremendously unhealthy, but that goes without saying.

The shock that I felt at hearing such clichés directed towards me -- me! -- makes me think that perhaps I need a bit more French-accented fabulousness in my daily life.

I mean, at that price, I feel morally obligated to go out and buy some curtain rods and thread right now.

Anyway, today's activity was to go down to (by all accounts thoroughly touristy) Old Montreal and wander around. But my favorite part of the afternoon was walking back from the Métro, and seeing swarms of soccer fans descending into the sidewalk and driving down St-Laurent, waving Spanish flags from all four car windows and causing the surrounding lanes of traffic to reciprocate in blasts of celebratory honks. "Maybe this is kind of what it's like to be present during the Quidditch World Cup," I said wistfully, helplessly grasping for an analogy. "If, like, one of the two teams were Canadian," Pete replied. "Or, more likely, it involved hockey," I added helpfully, and then we paused, as the complete inadequacy of our ability to talk halfway knowledgeably about any sport that's not cycling became woefully apparent.

In other news, we also stayed up until 2 am on Friday finishing the third season of Veronica Mars, and I feel like there's a little hole inside of my soul now that I'm done with the show. But I caught one of my favorite episodes of Arrested Development on TV the other day, which makes me think of another three-season show I can use to drown the pain...

Happily, this is a city that routinely stays up later than I, and Pete was able to run to the corner dépanneur and return triumphant with seven dollars plus a movie-sized box of Sweet Tarts. But still. Always be prepared for laundry-related contingencies, lest ye need to wait with a foul-smelling, cat-puke-soaked duvet cover festering in your closet until the bank opens at 10 am on Monday morning.

After spending about two weeks carefully packing and itemizing about 70 boxes' worth of stuff, the day of the move dawned. Pete managed to back the truck up our narrow driveway after only mildly turfing our neighbors' lawn. (Hey, the truck was big. Really, really big.) And, about 20 of our friends -- who we love more than ever now -- packed our stuff in just under two hours. (Note to said friends: photographic evidence now exists of the move. Let me know if you'd like to see it.) It was truly a feat, in both its speed and the fact that not a single thing was damaged or broken in transit, and not all of the Glass Nickel pizza in the world can fully express our appreciation. But, we will say: thank you!

We slept in an air mattress on our floor overnight, and spent the next day driving through Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. Thanks to steady and incessant rain, the trip through Chicago was perhaps the most boring and calm one we've ever had, and as a bonus we were able to use up most of Pete's jar of American change. The cats went in carriers under the bench seats, where they were... unhappy. Our vets gave us muscle relaxants to calm them down at the beginning of the ride a bit, but there's no way to reconcile a cat to hours spent in a loud, bumpy, moving vehicle. They were troopers, but it's not like they had much of a choice in the matter.

Since we spent almost all of our time on the highway, driving the truck was kind of fun. It's exactly like what you'd imagine driving an enormous truck to be like -- "Do I have the right class of driver's license to do this?" I asked Pete rhetorically at one point -- including the tragically long stopping distances, but I rather enjoyed fancying myself as Big Rig Katie, making long hauls across North America. As it happened, this imagination was really useful, because Pete got a cold on the first day that made it difficult for him to talk, and I came down with it on the second. (But it turned out that while smiling and talking were difficult, I could still drive just fine. So, perhaps it was all for the best.)

The stopping point during our two long, long days of driving was Sarnia, Ontario, just on the other side of the border. We heard too many horrible things about the crossing at Detroit, which were confirmed by our mover here. So: don't cross at Detroit. Go north to Sarnia / Port Huron. There was no wait when we pulled in there at 9 pm, and they were quite nice to us as we went through. We also heard horrible things about 401 through Ontario, but I thought that driving through Toronto was actually pretty fun: I got in the center of the express (i.e. non-local lane) and didn't budge the whole way. (According to our local movers, however, there are often awful, traffic-stopping accidents along that stretch, particularly during the winter, so we also lucked out.) And reports of the scenery being boring were dramatically overstated; those people have clearly never driven across South Dakota.

The one real question mark in all of this was whether we'd be able to claim a spot to park the truck. Parking in our new neighborhood is tight at best, and we don't have a lot associated with our apartment building; moreover, if there was no curb place, the truck was just too big to park anywhere nearby. Also, how would we be able to negotiate the streets to our apartment? Happily, the no-parking signs that had been set out for us worked. (I'm still giving silent thanks for this.) We got the keys from the building owner, spent another night on the air mattress, and the movers arrived at 8:30 the next morning.

This was the first time that we'd paid anybody to move our stuff, and man, did they do a great job. Besides the fact that it's awkward to watch people in physical pain hauling your stuff while you direct them to this corner or that, there's no way that we would've been able to get our heavy, heavy boxes and furniture up the six flights of stairs leading to our apartment. None. I get sympathy pains just thinking about it. They complimented us on our packing job, while marveling over the weight of our boxes: "how many friends did you have help you pack this into the truck?" one of them asked. "And how many did you have left afterwards?"

Post-movers, we had lunch, went to our neighborhood car rental place, and rented a hatchback Yaris for the drive to Burlington. Since, by comparison to the rental truck, I was zooming around the city with great abandon, we scouted out the best path for us to take to the highway. Pete then got back into the van, and I followed him out of the city. You think that it'd be easy to follow an enormous yellow truck in a zippy subcompact, but it totally isn't. After the city, though, the road to Vermont goes down to a two-lane highway, and the border crossing is (pleasantly) tiny. Furthermore, the drive south on 89 is really lovely. After two days in the van, another five hours in the Yaris was a pleasure. We dropped the truck off, used the rental car to pick up some groceries and basement apartment supplies, dropped off the car the next day, and devoted the next few days purely to unpacking, which is where you find us now: Pete going into work for a few hours each day, and us running moving-errands around the city during the rest of the time. While we haven't had much of a chance to relax or explore, it's very nice to be settled.

So! We moved to Montréal! And it wasn't too bad!

Not to overstate the magnitude of difficulty involved in moving across the border, but organization made it much easier. Pete secured his work permit ahead of time (after having it sent back once because of a missing signature on one page of the paperwork, and after having it sent back a second time with a polite, hand-written note on lined Immigration stationary noting that his Postdoc probably begins in June 2008, not June 2009, and that's something he might want to get changed beforehand), while I did lots of research and made many lists of things to do. To jump to some of the most common questions:

a) No, bringing the cats was no problem. There's no quarantine required if you're bringing pets from the U.S., merely ample documentation of their rabies vaccinations.

b) We didn't try to import the car across the border, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is a major pain in the ass. "More difficult than buying our house," reported one source.

c) We prepared a detailed inventory of the contents of our moving truck per the requirements on Canada's website. They didn't ask for this or inspect the truck on the way across, however. "Oh, you're not actually moving to Canada," explained the nice lady at the border crossing, "because you'll be bringing all of your possessions back with you." Now, I am thinking of us as taking a very long, very overly-packed vacation.

I did a lot of research on the various methods of bringing us and our stuff across the border. We had a walk-through done by a highly-regarded professional moving company, which revealed that our two-bedroom Madison apartment actually held three-plus bedrooms' worth of stuff. (But quite elegantly, I must add.) Moreover, our new apartment -- located within a maze of narrow one-way streets in the center of the city -- would require the contents of the moving van to be unpacked from the semi outside of Montréal, then repackaged into a smaller moving van and taken to our new apartment. These revelations raised the quote that we were given from a sight-unseen $2800 for the move to over $8000. Lesson one: never accept a sight-unseen moving quote. Lesson two, as amply evidenced by Moving Scam and several other acquaintances: don't trust anybody who gives you a dramatically lower figure. (Plus, a lot of companies aren't customs bonded, which makes coordinating the border crossing trickier.) After a brief flirtation with ABF U-Pack (less practical for us, as we needed to somehow get our car back to my parents' house in Ohio, where it'll be living temporarily), we opted to drive everything ourselves. It was the cheapest option, and we at least had the reassurance that we, our cats, and our stuff would all be arriving at the same place at roughly the same time.

Jeez, this is getting long. To make a long story short, we immediately decided against U-Haul, and rented a 22-foot Penske. The aforementioned professional movers' walkthrough was helpful in deciding how large of a truck to get, and no matter what happens, you're driving an enormous truck; it's not like a sixteen-footer would drive like a sedan, you know? The truck rental plus gas cost about $2000 for a week, which wasn't bad, considering that diesel's at about $5 a gallon and a twenty-two footer doesn't get the best gas mileage. Because people tend to be even nicer and more helpful when you're about to move away indefinitely, we asked our friends to help us load the truck in Madison. Our Montréal apartment is a third-story walk-up, and we know very few people, so we went ahead and booked the most highly-recommended movers we could find to move our stuff from the truck to the new apartment. Then, because byzantine laws resist letting you rent a vehicle in one country and drop it off in another, we arranged to return said truck in Burlington, Vermont, and arranged the round-trip two-day rental of a small car at a nearby Montreal car-rental place. Pete spent time stressing on the phone that these vehicles would be crossing the border, and nobody could tell us whether anything more particular would be required to make everything kosher. "But," they'd say, "you'll probably be okay." We also had Pete's future boss pick up a bunch of moving placards to place on the curb outside our new apartment building to deter people from parking there. We also picked up about 1000 pounds of IKEA furniture to haul in boxes to our new place, since it's more expensive in Canada, although this was arguably not an integral part of the move.

To be continued...