Healthcare-related post

Last Thursday, I started feeling...not right. My nose was doing that thing and the back of my throat was all that way--I presume that you probably have those personal warning signs that your body sends you when you are potentially going to get sick. That's what was going on with me. So some friends were having people over for board games but I let them know I wasn't coming because I felt like I might have a cold.

Over the next two days I first lost my voice and then developed an incredibly painful sore throat. By Sunday, it hadn't gotten better, so I hauled myself up and Ben and I walked over to the local Urgent Care-type clinic in Westmount. It turns out that their doctor had called in sick, so we had to hoof it further downtown to another clinic.

We walked in and this place was totally packed and blasting a radio station playing what I presume were the best hits of the 70's, 80's, and early 90's. The line to the counter was so long that it kind of blocked off the entranceway, so the sick people coming in had to squeeze by the sick people who were already in line. It wasn't a disaster area, but it looked like a crowded non-emergency waiting room, the kind of place that if you walked into in the States you'd know you could be there upwards of 4 or 5 hours.

"Okay," I thought, "if this is terrible I have to be honest about it and tell people on the blog in the interests of semi-journalistic semi-integrity."

As you're probably aware, one thing I was interested in checking out while I was in Canada was the healthcare system. I'm in favor of single-payer healthcare, where doctors and hospitals and such do their thing and the government takes the role of the insurance company and takes on the part of the bill that they're responsible for, as well as negotiating rates and all that.

Have you ever NOT had health insurance? Do you know what that's like?

I wrote a big long bit here describing what it's like to not have health insurance, but then I erased it because a) I'm not going to convince you of anything new and b) if you ever didn't have health insurance, you probably don't want to think about what that was/is like. I'm sorry I brought it up.

Anyway, because I didn't have health insurance for a particularly desperate portion of my life, I think that the world would be a better place if people did have health insurance. I'm willing to entertain something less-than-fabulous, or something half-broken, or something with death panels; I don't care.

So here I am, sitting in this germy waiting room in some of the worst pain I can remember, and I think, "Yeah, this might end up being terrible."So we sat there and paid our $120 cash (we're not on the gov't insurance just yet so we have to use Ben's work insurance, which means getting reimbursed after the fact). Ben went across the street and got me a smoothie from a Tim Horton's. I wrote him little sad notes on the back of a pap smear pamphlet they had lying around.

To my surprise, we were really only there for maybe half an hour before my name was called. I went back, hopped up on the bench, he took my temperature, asked me a few basic questions, wrote me a prescription, and I was on my way. Took maybehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif...4 minutes?

I went back out--Ben was surprised to see me so soon!--and we got the prescription and caught a cab home because we'd already done so much running around.

In retrospect, now that I'm not deathly ill, I am okay with the experience I had at the clinic. Doctor didn't actually tell me what he thought I was sick with, he just gave me some antibiotics and got me out the door. This isn't particularly awesome healthcare, but I also didn't have to sit in the waiting room for a good 4 hours until he saw me. All in all, it got the job done and that was good enough for me.

We went home and Ben made me lasagne the way I like, with bechamel sauce. Hasn't been until today, really, that I've felt human again, which means I was out for nearly a week. Of course since Ben was taking care of me and I wasn't doing my usual around-the-house stuff, there may or may not still be a bit of evidence lying around...

Ruffles All-Dressed Potato Chips

Last night, while hanging out with some attractive people and rolling some Platonic solids, I was offered some of these:

These, as you can probably tell from the picture, are Ruffles All-Dressed Potato Chips. "All dressed" isn't really a phrase applied to food in the States.

I encountered "all dressed" when we were trying to figure out how to order a pizza to our corporate housing. The top choices for toppings were Hawaiian and "All Dressed." Hawaiian is what I thought it would be--ham and pineapple, and closer inspection of All Dressed revealed it is pepperoni, green peppers, and mushrooms.

I assumed that this particular chip flavor would be similar, but based on the packaging, it has vinegar, onion, and tomato flavors. One thing I have not been quite able to bring myself to eat here has been ketchup flavored potato chips (saying "here" is a bit off because you can get them in Virginia and I didn't eat 'em there, either), so when my companions told me that they were a lot like ketchup chips, I had my doubts.

Anyway, the all dressed chips weren't too bad! They reminded me in passing of my favorite chip in the Whole Wide World, the Utz Carolina Style Bar-B-Q chip:
The Washington, DC area was right on the Carolina/Crab Line, where in some stores the specialty chip flavor was Crab Chips (Old Bay flavored) and in others it was Carolina Style.

Carolina Style chips are kind of like vinegar 'n' barbecue, and the All Dressed chips were kind of comparable, although they didn't have the near-painful kick that Carolina Style do. I will probably keep my eye out for other All Dressed chip brands to check out differences.

In case you were worried, I'm not planning on turning this into some kind of hyper-focused food blog where I review only Quebecois potato chips, but I have been feeling the urge to cook for people recently. I always had to restrain myself from feeding REAL American food to my ESL students (restricting myself to maybe writing the words "soul food," "tex-mex," and "creole/cajun" on a notecard I gave them). I'd always ask, "have you tried some American food?" and they'd say, "Yes, pizza, spaghetti, hamburger."

But I would like to cook interesting things for people. Maybe I need to find a Canadian counterpart who wants to cook me Canadian food and we can switch off every other weekend or something. I mean, I like poutine, other people should enjoy biscuits and gravy, right?

Still living in another country

KFC is called PFK.

Smoked Meat and Poutine: Check.

Montreal is surprisingly Jewish for a city that's historically been filled with super-devout French Catholics. We have a large Hasidic community in one section of town (smaller than, but comparable to NYC's), and a lot of the city's food bears more similarities to NYC than I expected. Two of the city's signature foods are smoked meat and bagels which are allegedly unique to the city--I haven't tasted a "real" Montreal bagel yet, but smoked meat is just...smoked meat. That's its name. Smoked meat is like, a thing. Let me 'splain:

The idea of "smoked meat" can be confusing because it sounds more like a category that would include things like smoked salmon and whatever lutefisk is, but instead it is its own unique thing, like pastrami or corned beef. As a matter of fact, smoked meat exists somewhere on the continuum between pastrami and corned beef, although it tastes like neither. Wikipedia informs me that the methods use to preserve the meat are unique, and you can go and read more about it there.

We figured we'd kill two birds with one stone, so we ordered some poutine. Fun fact: if you're French Canadian, you say it more like the guy who runs Russia than "poo-teen." Again, Wikipedia provides cool insight into possible etymology of the word. Most people know that poutine is cheese curds and gravy over fries, but what nobody seemed to be able to tell me was what in the world a cheese curd actually is. After consuming cheese curds, I can tell you that they are vaguely squishy and squeaky (leading to their nickname of "squeaky cheese") and not particularly melty. They are cheese, which is really all I needed to know in the first place.

We obtained these smoked meat sandwiches and poutine at Dunn's, which is one of the places to go to get smoked meat, the other being Schwartz's. What they don't mention when they recommend that you go to this restaurant is that their mascot, a pickle who this website informs me is named "Dillon Dunn," is TERRIFYING.

It seems like anything you'd order that would normally have pastrami or corned beef on it comes with smoked meat instead; I ordered a Reuben and it was delicious.