Today 26 April is Setting Day on the South shore of the Island and tomorrow on the North Shore. With the lobster Spring Season open, this means that by tomorrow morning fresh PEI lobster will be available. It’s a big thing here in PEI and lots of people are excited by this prospect, it also means that Summer is here, trees are budding, tourist sites are reopening and the cruise ship season is starting again. This year some 96 ships are expected, that is 167,000 passengers. In terms of the best cruise ports in Canada, Charlottetown and Halifax are tied for the number 2 spot, Quebec City remains as no.1, no one is surprise by that ranking.
Some statistics at our meeting of all tour companies were mentioned, PEI produces 86 million tons of potatoes, most of it is exported all around North America for either processing or consumption, we also produce 80% of all mussels eaten all over North America and 40% of all Oysters, this is due to our clean waterways. PEI does not have any heavy industry. So if you see in restaurants in your city PEI Blue Mussels that means they were grown and harvested in PEI. In terms of cleanliness, safety, secure destination PEI is rated at 99% by our visitors, no surprise there.
In Montreal I brought with me two Mont Blanc Meisterstück bought decades ago to be serviced. The shop which is very exclusive and beautiful sells all Mont Blanc products which include watches and leader bags. Each Meisterstück writing instrument is a work of art steeped in history. A century after its introduction in 1924, the Meisterstück remains Montblanc’s most recognisable writing tool. Adored by customers and treasured by craftsmen it continues to glow as a symbol of writing culture.
I had not used mine for years and wanted it cleaned. Little did I know how easy it was to do. Simply use tepid water and dip the nib into the water and leave for 3 hours, that’s it.
I bought mine years ago at the beginning of my career, many colleagues had a Meisterstück, to sign documents and the colour of the ink is also wonderful on paper. Love the 18C gold nib. When I bought mine 40 years ago they were not as expensive as today, starting around $585. to $10,000.
The story of Montblanc origin began in 1906 when a designer from Berlin named August Eberstein, in partnership with a Hamburg banker, Alfred Nehemias, developed a range of simple-to-use fountain pens. The simplicissimus pen is a pen design which includes a built-in ink well. It wasn’t long before their company was taken over by the three men who together would set Montblanc on its journey to becoming a worldwide brand: Wilhelm Dziambor, Christian Lausen and Claus Johannes Voss.
The famous Meisterstück pen was launched in 1924, and the 149 Montblanc fountain penmodel soon became a style icon of its time. By the end of the 1920s, Montblanc had become an international brand, known in over 60 countries. Some of this success can be accredited to revolutionary advertising methods, such as fitting cars with oversized fountain pens and commissioning the first advertising planes. Montblanc also branched out from pens to leather goods in a workshop based near Offenbach. In 1929, the Meisterstück nib was engraved with ‘4810’, representing the height of Mont Blanc which stands tall at 4,810 metres. Following suit, all future Meisterstück nibs were engraved with the number. Today the headquarters of Montblanc is in Hamburg. The company is now part of the Alfred Dunhill group.
I returned this morning from my weekend trip to Montreal, the flight is only 90 minutes and quite easy. In Charlottetown it takes all of 2 minutes to check your luggage and go through security. Walk onto the run way and climb the stairs to the plane. Going it was a Bombardier CRJ and returning it was a De Haviland Dash 8, small planes but fine and comfortable. Air Canada provides at this time the flights to and from PEI. There will be more flights next month with Summer Tourism Season.
At the airport in Montreal I saw something I had never encountered, you know how in supermarkets now the trend is to check yourself out by scanning items with a computer, well at the airport in Montreal, you basically check yourself in, the computer asks a bunch of questions on what you have in your luggage, spits out the luggage tag, then you take your luggage to a big conveyor belt who reads the tag on your luggage and sends it off to the plane. That’s it. It only takes 2 or 3 employees to help out if you are stuck, no more going to the counter. Proceed to security and to your gate.
Montreal has bad roads, people complain but this weekend I saw how bad the streets are, pot holes everywhere, you need a strong suspension on your car and drive slowly if you do not want to lose a wheel. Construction of condo towers everywhere in the downtown core, lots of for rent signs in store windows, half empty office buildings, many restaurants are gone, Covid did a real number on the city. Though there is a lot of money, pretty obvious. Went to Reubens for smoke meat on Ste-Catherine street, as good as every, though a glass of wine is $23. better to drink coke. Also went to a very nice Bistro called Le Moliere on St-Denis Street, high class place and the food was spectacular, had oeufs mayonnaise and roast beef rare, the Baba au Rum for dessert was wow! We also went to Chalet BBQ on Sherbrooke street near the corner with Décarie Blvd. the place is celebrating 80 years in business and it is always packed. They only sell roast chicken with coleslaw and fries but it is soooo good. The decor is really old, 1944 vintage, but the food is again wow! Montreal has lots of great restaurants.
This weekend was the funeral of my aunt L. the youngest of my mother’s sisters and brother. They are all gone now and attending we were 20 of us, all cousins, people I grew up with. The church of St-Laurent was built in 1735, a very old parish, think Montreal was founded in 1642. A place full of memories for all of us, we were baptized in that church, marriage and funeral all take place in that church. The cemetery is at the back, and looking around from the family plot (my mother’s family) you see the graves of all the people of her generation, and all preceding ones, I see names of all the people my maternal grandparents knew and it struck us the current generation that they are all gone, so the next time it will be one of us. The cycle of life. Took time to visit the graves of other relatives, aunts and uncles. This parish is an example of how religion has vanished from peoples lives. The parish church is surrounded by a large college building and a seminary now a well known music school. The chapel next door has been leased to a Christian Orthodox community. The church hall is a very old stone building, rarely used now. The parish priest is alone and he is also responsible for 5 other parishes. All dying slowly. To think that just 50 years ago this was an important thriving Catholic community. The church is also famous in 1837 it was the site of the start of the revolt of the Patriotes after a speech by Louis-Joseph Papineau. The priests hid the participants in this uprising against the British in the crypt. This bloody and violent uprising led to the granting by the British authorities of responsible government in Quebec and then in Ontario.
Montreal today is not the city I knew as a kid, that is gone. I do not recognize it much. So many landmarks have totally disappeared, replaced by flashy new buildings. All the places we use to go have gone. It is jarring and says that nothing ever stays the same. Of course my memories go back 60 year, lots has happened. It was nice to see all my cousins after so many years.
Last week the first ship came to Charlottetown, the MSC Poesia, with 3000 passengers, the ship is on the last leg of a 120 day cruise around the world. It was a nice day, weather wise but we saw few people walking about, I was not called in to work, not enough business. The next ship and the opening of the Season will be on the 29 April, it is also Setting Day which is the opening of the Lobster Fishing Season.
Friday, I fly to Montreal in the morning a 90 minute flight, to be with family for a family funeral. We are all staying downtown at Peel and Sherbrooke street, the old neighbourhood for us all. A short trip back on Monday early morning.
In the meantime I got a second job for the Summer, with another tour company, there is a need for French Speaking guides as we are getting more and more French speaking tourists, from Quebec but also from other French speaking countries. So when there are no cruise ships, I will be working with the other company who has bus tours travelling all around the Maritime Provinces, I would pick them up and tour Charlottetown or the Island. It is less structured than the Cruise ship tours, time is not so important in terms of departure and return, with ships sailing time and embarkation time is very important.
We are almost at the tipping point in terms of changing wardrobes from Winter to Spring / Summer wear. Of course the switch in temperature will be sudden usually 24 to 48 hours. Already this year March was the warmest month in history and April is very Springlike, all of which is unusual and damaging to the Maple sugar/syrup industry. The prices will continue to be high for maple syrup this year.
A quiet life, all around and I should be thankful for that.
From time to time you fall on a text from an historian or philosopher giving a very different perspective to what you learned or thought was mainstream, only to discover that there is another version, other side of the coin, which gives you a new point of view to consider.
Ashkenazi Jews mostly came from Germany after being invited to settle in the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania in the Middle Ages. At that time, this also included several parts of Western Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Our North American perspective is shaped by this group and its history. Cuisine, Tradition, Cultural background. The current government of Israel is composed of Ashkenazi Jews.
At school we had teachers who did not belong to that group and my parents had friends who came from the Middle East, Egypt and Morocco. They identified as Sephardic Jews, who have a different cultural background, cuisine and closer roots to Arab world. Our teacher was from Morocco and she came to Canada after 1967 and the 6 day war. While on posting in Cairo, I would meet with Boutros Boutros Ghali, then foreign Minister 1977-1991 and later would become UN Secretary General 1992-1996. He was from an old Egyptian Coptic Family and his wife Leia Nadler was Sephardic Jew.
When we lived in Rome, the Jewish community was proud of its ancient roots going back to the Roman Republic some 2700 years ago, they kept many of their middle-eastern traditions including their cuisine which is very different from what you would see in Canada, no bagels or smoke meat. The Rome Synagogue is also striking with its Egyptian Temple architecture and its large organ. Many American Jews would during visits to Rome look down on such displays, that did not faze Italian Jews at the Synagogue who felt quite secure in their oriental past.
A recently heard from Israeli historian Avi Shlaim whose family was from Baghdad. His family moved to the new state of Israel in 1948. He is one of Israel’s “New Historians”, a group of Israeli scholars who put forward critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel. His book , Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, published by Oneworld. Shlaim says; If I had to identify one key factor that shaped my early relationship to Israeli society, it would be an inferiority complex. I was an Iraqi boy in a land of Europeans.” . He defines himself as an Oriental Jew or Mizrahi. The crisis in Gaza and in the West Bank has brought forward this division within Israel. It was always there but now it’s on the front burner so to speak. Shlaim and many other Jews from Arab countries and I also include here Ethiopian Jews who represent 45% of the population of Israel today, call out the Ashkenazi Europeans as white supremacists.
The key concept in the book is the concept of an Arab-Jew, that it is possible to be both Jewish, and Arab. At the same time, this is denied by Israelis today. They say it’s a contradiction in terms. It’s an ontological impossibility. If you’re a Jew, you cannot be an Arab and if you’re an Arab, you cannot be a Jew. So my book is a refutation of this Israeli belief because I was born in Baghdad in 1945. And in 1950, we left Baghdad for Israel and we were Arab Jews. We were Iraqis whose religion happened to be Judaism. We spoke Arabic at home. Our culture was Arab culture. We had many Muslim friends. And there was a long tradition of Muslim-Jewish coexistence and even harmony. So for my family and me, Muslim-Jewish coexistence was not an abstract idea or an ambition. It was the everyday reality. Iraq didn’t have a Jewish problem. Iraq had many minorities and the Jews were one minority, among others, and there was a long tradition of religious tolerance. In Iraq we were equal. We were equal to all the other minorities.
When we moved to Israel, we were outsiders in the sense that Israel was a European style society. The Zionist movement, which led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, was a movement by European Jews for European Jews. So the ethos of the newly-born State of Israel was a Eurocentric one. There was from the beginning, cleavage, tensions between Ashkenazi Jews, the Jews of Europe and oriental Jews, Jews from the Arab lands, who collectively are called Mizrahi. And as a boy, I felt this very acutely. I felt I was looked down upon by my new society. This is not to say that I encountered direct discrimination but rather that it was the prejudice, the disdain for oriental Jews in Israel that I felt: that everything Arab was considered primitive and backward, the Arabic language was considered an ugly, guttural language and I internalised these values. And the opening scene in my book is when my father comes to me in the street when I’m playing with my friends and he speaks to me in Arabic and I’m acutely embarrassed.
So in many ways it is important to read to learn how what we know in North America and the decisions by our politicians are shaped by Jews of European descent who dominate the landscape and the discourse. We really do not know the other Jews who did not have this European background. When I lived in Jordan and in Egypt, I was very aware of the differences/divisions within Israeli society and it takes time to understand them. These divisions very much shape the conflict now with the Palestinians and other Arab countries. What will happen next?
Today I learned that Robert MacNeil of the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour died at 93. His colleague Jim Lehrer died in 2020. MacNeil was born in Montreal and graduated from Carleton University in Ottawa, he grew up in Halifax where his father was a Royal Canadian Navy Commander and later a Canadian Diplomat. MacNeil only became a USA citizen in 2007. The news hour is something I love to watched, it was informative and interesting, no gimmicks, no sensationalism, no big stars telling you the news. I watched it for years. Today the PBS Newshour is the successor and I still enjoy watching it because if I want to know what is happening in a political context, I will find good solid reporting with no drama, just plain serious journalism. Judy Woodruff until 2022 was the anchor and today others follow and it is still a great news program.
I try as much as I can to avoid the circus of the trials around Trump and co. However I have a feeling that by July, we will see him stuck with a criminal conviction in New York. I can see also that he will have lost a lot of money and properties and will be greatly diminished, the famous bond deal having failed. Today at Mar-a-Lago, with the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, they gave speeches on the upcoming election, presenting themselves as the saviours of America. What Johnson had to say was pure nonsense, both on the border and on immigration. I did not listen to the whole thing, it was so ridiculous and lacked basic credibility and was factually wrong. What as a Canadian, I fail to understand is the ultra partisan positioning of the Speaker of the House. In Canada, the Speaker of the House of Commons is strictly neutral. Who is Trump now? A has been, a nominee for a Party taking a huge risk on a tainted nominee. In any other country, the party would have dumped him for a more solid candidate. What a sad spectacle.
This photo of the Roman Forum is a proposal for the future, it is to replace the Via Fori Imperiali and make the street a pedestrian only zone. This has been discussed for decades by various interested groups. You really do not need car traffic in the area. Not to forget that the street was created by the Mussolini government for military parades and nothing else. I do recognize that without the ideology of IL Duce we would not have the Roman Forum we see today. It would be still a neighbourhood and all the ruins we see would still be buried below.
It will probably happen in the next few years, people walking in the Forum area without car traffic. Seeing photos like this makes me so nostalgic for Rome and life in Italy.
After all these years away from Rome, I still miss our lives there, the quality of life and all that goes with it. Simply does not exist here, it is unknown. I will be forever grateful that Rome and Athens were my last posts and a chance to live in great cities, where quality of life was and is a value.
I am making the ultimate Traditional French Canadian Hot Chicken Sandwich. This is a dish that everyone knows, something from childhood in French Canada. St-Hubert BBQ which is the ultimate rotisserie chicken restaurant makes the hot chicken sandwich sauce and that is the only sauce anyone would use, you do not make your own. It comes in a little sachet just add water, it is just so perfect. The dish is served with hot buttered peas on top, because you need your greens. In French it is called Hot Chicken Sandwich, it may sound like English to you, but it is French.
Ingredients; one rotisserie chicken, plain white bread, the whiter the better, St-Hubert BBQ sauce and green peas. The sauce makes the dish. You can have a side of french fries which you douse in white vinegar. When I think of this dish, I think of Montreal. For the chicken some restaurant will ask if you want just white meat or brown meat, I like both. So you have your 2 pieces of chicken and you put your chicken meat and top with the other piece of bread, that’s the sandwich part and then pour generously the hot sauce over it and top with buttered peas. Voila!
There are lots of recipes on the internet for hot chicken sandwich, mostly American ones and they really do not appear appetizing to me. You would have this dish with a Coke.
A fellow Montrealer, Alex Lacasse, who is a chef in L.A. who is on YouTube and Instagram.
The month of April is dedicated to the love of a good burger in Charlottetown. Originally it was created as a festival to promote the sale of Island beef. But with time it has evolved and now restaurants that do not have beef on their menu create a burger with seafood or other meats. Last night because the tradition dictates that we go for dinner across the street to the Water Prince Convenience Store, its a restaurant for the last 35 years, we had their creation of Burger Love, it was a egg bread bun with 6 battered oysters on lettuce. It was very good and I got some of their coleslaw and home fries to go with it. Dessert was a lemon square and it has that great tangy lemony taste. It is the sort of restaurants were you meet neighbours and friends. They also have a wonderful seafood chowder with lots of meat to it and their little buttery scones. All of their food is made on the premises, so it is high quality. The owner came by to talk and Islanders love to talk. We were sitting next to his aunt who introduced herself and she marvelled at the fact that we have not left the Island in 4 years. She is an Islander herself, who travels off island from time to time.
Burger Love is only one of many food festivals in PEI. Seafood Festival is coming up later in the Spring and then their will be the first Lobster day and everyone will have an opinion on how lobster taste this year. There is also a potato festival with great recipes for what can be done with potatoes in terms of cakes and incorporating them to other cooking recipes which would not come to mind of hand. The Wine festival is also a big event with wine producers from around the world coming to Charlottetown. All those festivals always have a charity attached to it. This year Burger Love participating restaurants give back to Anderson House $1 per burger sold, this charity addresses family violence at home. Yes we do have lots of social issues in PEI.
I do some research on this topic and find the following quote from Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher and writer who lived in the 6th century BC about the same time as the Buddha:
If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.
Jerry and I get around. In 2011, we moved from the USA to Spain. We now live near Málaga. Jerry y yo nos movemos. En 2011, nos mudamos de EEUU a España. Ahora vivimos cerca de Málaga.
Telling the stories of the history of the port of Charlottetown and the marine heritage of Northumberland Strait on Canada's East Coast. Winner of the Heritage Award from the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation and a Heritage Preservation Award from the City of Charlottetown
Larry Muffin At Home 