One train ride may be worth a thousand Posted by João on 10:18 pm

In my 18 years of living in Canada (from 1979 to 1997) I only rode the train once.

As we all know, Canada is a vast country. Getting from one place to the next can take hours on end if not days or even weeks. Flying is most definitely one of Canada's best friends. Here in Portugal, to get around the country, you can opt for the Rede Expresso (buses) or CP (trains) as far as public transportation goes. In Canada you can take Via Rail or the Greyhound bus. For those living in the northern outreaches of Canada, however, seldom do rail or 'the dog' become travelling options. And this is the very reason why in my 18 years living in Prince George, B.C., I only rode the train once.

It was on a trip to Vancouver in 1991. On the way down, the bus ride lasted (and still does) 12 hours. On the way back, as I ended up sleeping in, I also ended up missing the Greyhound back up north. My only option was Via Rail, a ride that would take an extra 2 hours compared to the bus. The first few hours on that Via Rail train provided some amazing scenery. The ride through the Coastal Mountains (before and after Whistler) was truely beautiful. The closer I got to Prince George, however, the less exciting things got. No knock on the scenery (although not as breathtaking), more like the fact one gets a little sick of being on a train.

Jump forward to October, 2009. A couple of years ago I spent 33 days travelling to Toronto, Ottawa-Gatineau and Montreal to carry out fieldwork with Portuguese-Canadian descendants. From Ottawa to Montreal there I was again for the second time on a train in Canada.

I thought back to that Vancouver to Prince George trip 18 years earlier and thought about how distance truly makes Canada different. Not only different in comparison to a country like Portugal, where bus and train and getting around is a lot easier, but also different within itself. I mean Ottawa to Montreal is a couple of hours on the train. Rail travel around Ontario and Quebec is a lot more common; locations a lot closer. And for this very reason there are a lot of Canadians that also don't 'get Canada', at least not the complete package. In Vancouver they say "there's no hope beyond Hope (the town)". That's because many have never gone beyond Hope (outside Vancouver's Lower Mainland). For these folks, Canada is truly not the vast country those in rural communities and far off towns know. But then again, maybe this is common to big city folk in general. Surely for us who live in the metropolis, we may ride a lot more trains and buses, but the truth is we ain't getting far. God only knows how many times I've ridden the Lisbon - Cascais train line, for example. Equally beautiful - as much as I try not to take it for granted - but the truth is there are times when it feels like we're approaching Prince George on that line as well.

The Pop Shoppe memories Posted by João on 9:01 pm

Do you remember the Pop Shoppe? I sure do. For those of us who grew up in Canada during the 1970 and early 80, Pop Shoppe pop, in fact, was a major part of our lives. Out of London, Ontario, the Pop Shoppe was more like a ma and pa business that quickly grew and grew and grew. Founded in 1969, by 1972 there were over 500 Pop Shoppe outlets in Ontario alone. Pop Shoppe grew to be as popular as cigarettes back in the day. The company always avoided using traditional retail channels, selling its pop instead through franchised outlets and through its own stores, using refillable bottles that came in cartons of 24 for the stubby bottles and 12 for the 1 litre bottles.

Now my fondest Pop Shoppe memories were the Pop Shoppe flavours, which numbered nearly 30 in total by the 1980's. I certainly loved the grape soda, the cream soda, the black cherry, the lime rickey, the grape, the orange, the blue raspberry and not to mention pink (whatever that was) as much as the next guy, but my favourite was definitely the root beer. The cool thing was that if didn't want an entire crate of just one flavour, you could pick and chose from the vast variety and take home a rainbow crate of pop.Then, after a week or two of sucking back all that pop, you'd put the empties back into the crate and return those empties to the Pop Shoppe outlet. As I remember, no visit to the Pop Shoppe shop was free of the clinking and clanging of returned bottles.

So while the 1970's put Pop Shoppe on the pop map, by the early 80's due to competition coming from the big boys of the pop world (yeah you guessed it, Coke and Pepsi, among others, after all they did have the advantage of selling ther products in every single grocery store on the face of the planet), the Pop Shoppe closed the pop shop doors in 1983.

Jump forward 11 years to 2004 and the Pop Shoppe is re-established. Basing their marketing and sales strategies on nostalgia, a number of flavours were brought back and a couple of years ago even the stubby bottle was re-instituted. So anyone having a hankering for a cream soda or grape pop can now kill that hankering, but is that magic still there? Well one thing that's no longer there is the Pop Shoppe shop itself as the new Pop Shoppe pop is now sold through regular retail grocery stores using conventional retail distribution; long gone are the clinging of return bottles and the rainbow coloured cartons of pop. They say you can never go back. Well fair enough, after all the business went down in 1983 due to the competition.

So in the end you can have your nostalgia back but those precious moments (as reflected below) remain in our memories.