My lovely wife and I returned today from our great trip north. Montreal and Quebec City are both lovely, as are the people who live there, at least as far as I can tell. (I practiced saying “Je ne parle pas français” a lot.) We spent most of our time walking around soaking in the sights and stuffing ourselves silly, with the former hopefully offsetting the latter to some degree. We spent the last night of our trip in Burlington, Vermont, which is also a lovely place, perched as it is on the shore of Lake Champlain. Delicious flatbread pizza and locally brewed beer were the order of the night, followed by Ben & Jerry’s of course.

I won’t pretend to have any brilliant insights into Canadian culture, much less French Canadian culture, though I did get that feeling, as I have on previous trips to Canada, of being in a kind of alternate-reality U.S. Most things seem familiar, but there are enough differences to let you know you’re in a foreign country. (Not that Canadians think of themselves as the goateed-Spock version of the U.S.; or would we be the evil version of Canada?) Also, the Canadian media seems just as obsessed with Michael Jackson’s death as the American.

Here are a few highlights: