You used my photo for what?!!

Country No. 33 - Canada

I have just returned from a family wedding in Canada’s Saint Adolphe D’Howard - a beautiful lakeside settlement located 100km north of Montreal in the Laurentian Mountains.

“Glad you’re finally visiting a proper country not a two-bit tax haven” remarked my Aussie pal Rhys while @oldspeechwriter thought I should be able to count Quebec as country 34 quoting Charles de Gaulle’s famous ‘Vive le Quebec libre!’ speech. Tempting as it is to bag another country, not even I am that brazen.

We were there for the away fixture of a two-part wedding. The home leg took place a few months ago on a blustery day at Marylebone Town Hall.  It was a joyous occasion where Canadian friends and relatives were crammed in with us on a red Routemaster bus, squished into a quaint old pub sharing canapés, before crashing out at our boxy Kilburn apartment. When I think about the sheer vastness of Canada I now realise quite how toy-town ours must seem to them.

Although I’m not going to try to make multiple country claims, I do feel that French-speaking Canada is a land unto itself. I’m reminded by the best man that our warm Québécois hosts are atypically typical. The groom works for Montreal’s celebrated Cirque Du Soleil . The groom’s mother is an active Bloc Québécois supporter. The family owns maple woods and a sugar shack, selling maple syrup produced using traditional means. “It’s rather like marrying into a Scottish family who just happen to own a distillery” he says.

I feel lucky, of course, to get this peek into a different world, and what a world. We’re here in the peak of their summer, during a heatwave, staying in a lakeside mansion where the wedding reception is taking place.  The place came with its own boat for Chrissakes.  But the residents of Saint Adolphe are not moneyed yuppies. This is a rural place, with an ageing population and few local jobs to keep young families here. The winters are too long and summers too short for a thriving tourist industry. Despite this, it’s hard not to dream of forgoing the depressing London property ladder for a lakeside cabin in the wilderness.

Montreal is an hour away and impressively we get there in less time than it takes to cross London. My first impression – if I’m honest – is of a slight pervading French naffness: they seem to have imported the culture wholesale. We see a lot of soul patches, white boys with dreadlocks, women who are twenty but dress fifty. And the clown-density is above my comfort level. Reminding myself this might be because the Just For Laughs festival is on, I check the cultural programme and recoil at the pictures of comedians posing with red noses, singers in chiffon and Jimmy Carr’s smug mug gurning back at me. I don’t feel like this is the hipster haven I was expecting.

Over the next few days the city grows and grows on me. I get into Québécois cinema - which seems to combine the depth of French film with the edginess of the US indie film scene. I also discover that Montreal has many things I assumed were entirely unattainable in North America: good bread, strong beer, nice airport staff, a thriving bike culture.  Best of all we get to grips with the terrasse culture – another French import – where you can pull up your Bixi bike (Boris bike to Londoners) almost anywhere and find a leafy backyard or terrace in which to nurse a strong beer and watch the world go by.

The heatwave finally broke, as we were flying back to Montreal from a weekend in New York – watch this video and bear in mind that we were watching this from ABOVE the storm, in a twenty-seater tin can plane, just slightly freaking out. We had been blissfully unaware until the abnormally friendly flight staff bade us to open the window shutter and ”Look oot-side at the awesome view”. Yikes.

All in all I think this will be the first of many visits to country no. 33.

Country No.32 - Monaco

Having been to Gibraltar, Liechtenstein and most recently the Vatican, it was only logical to check out – Monaco. Originally I was planning to bag the other famous microstate – Malta, but at the time of booking things looked a bit volatile with Libyan fighter jets defecting there and boatloads of people seeking refuge.  The only thing people are seeking refuge from in Monaco is paying taxes.

 A few people have been asking when I’m going to go to some “proper countries”, not these phonies who think that they are too special, rich or religious to be lumped in with everyone else. They have a point; all of the four principalities/microstates I have mentioned combined wouldn’t be as large as event the borough of London I live in.  But I sort of like that.  It seems wrong that Salt Lake City and New York City are part of the same country, that French-speaking Quebec is lumped in with Canada. I know it’s not good to be a militant separatist but I like how these quirky countries make it work.

For regular readers – I like how Liechtenstein have clearly read my blog and taken that thought to its logical conclusion – “Hey we’re all about filthy lucre dudes, so why don’t we go right on ahead and just RENT OUR WHOLE COUNTRY OUT”. I wonder what the deposit is like on that rental. And do you have to paint the place Magnolia and put some Vanish on the wine carpet stains before you leave?

So Monaco, second smallest country in the world after Vatican, with about 2km squared in land, costs a mere 1 euro to get to on the bus from Nice. That has to be the best euro you’ll ever spend  - 45 mins of climbing and winding up the coast, past stunning Cap Ferrat, David Niven’s pink palace,  and the place where the Stones recorded Exile on Maine St.

I was expecting to get gypped when we arrived but it seems these people have so much silly money they didn’t need ours. The sculpture garden was free, the famous Cathedral was free, the Palace was free – and in use. There was a conveniently located Carrefour where I bought some deck shoes for 5 Euros and the King’s Zoo was a mere 4 Euros each.

The Cathedral where Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier have simple headstones was stunning outside and sweetly utilitarian inside. The old town was charming, I had forgotten my printed number (DAMNIT) and didn’t want to go down the slippery slope of photoshopping it in, so we found a No.32 door and a charming cafe next door.

As we ate we could hear the excitable tones of a foreign sports commentator. At the time we assumed it was a tennis match playing in a bar, but we realised too late it was the Monte Carlo Rolex Open Masters . I think we may actually have been hearing the game itself, we tried to buy tickets for the next day but they had risen from 50 to 500 euros a day in the last week. I kicked myself for missing the chance to see Nadal’s guns in the flesh ;-)

All in all it’s a nice place but looks a bit timeshare-y, and you get the impression that most of the action takes place in the super-yachts rather than on land. Pottering round the Zoo we got a sense of how unnatural the place really is. Perched on successive levels up the side of the sheer cliff face, with stairs winding up to the castle, there was a creepy Michael Jacksonish feel to the place. The animals seemed over-socialised and greeted us too readily. A parrot practiced its English on us and the marmosets and Lemurs placidly let us stroke them through the bars.

The saddest was a lone Hippo who rose gloriously from the water, looked over at the Abramovich super-yachts and then flobbed himself back in the pool again. Like his royal owners you get the strong impression that after a short while, life here gets very very boring.  Shame the Monaco citizens aren’t allowed to used their own casino…

No really, you used my photo for what?!!

For a little while, I havent had much to blog about. My photos have been used plenty but in a very predictable way. @Zhogger’s cute laptop was popular and cropped up in a few places, as did various other pics from govcamp but nowt to write home about.

But today I did a little detective work, working backwards from this picture being popular on Flickr, I spotted it on this expat site and then using Babelfish I saw an intriguing thread about my pic being used on a book cover.

Well here it is. As a reeally amateur photographer I am torn feeling pleased to make the grade, especially with a book I’d like to read and cross that publishers Polirom weren’t courteous enough to send me a copy.

Speaking of which, I’ve never been to Romania. Maybe I should kill two birds with one stone and go to their offices to demand they pint me a pint or at least a shot of tusica .

Has anyone else had any similar experiences with their Flickr pics? Or does everyone just do ‘rights reserved’ or ‘non-commerical licence’?