'Continental' Breakfast

A post for last Sunday (below) was added after the post for Monday (because the short entry for Monday was easy but the long post for Sunday was difficult). If you haven't already seen the Sunday entry, please check it out.

On Wednesday (the 29th), my brother Alan will stop at EWR on his way from Las Vegas to Maryland (to see his dauter's family) and thence to Israel (where others of his children live; his former wife is Jewish), and we are meeting for breakfast at the Airport. He'll be arriving on a Continental flite at 5:35am. What fun. It's a good thing I've already moved my schedule from wake-up around 3 o'clock in the afternoon to before 9 in the morning or meeting him would be out of the question.
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MY question to readers is, is there any particular eatery in the Airport open at that hour (5:30 in the friggin morning) that is better than the others? If there's a particularly good place in another terminal (open at that hour), and there's a free shuttle between terminals, that would be doable. Advice, anyone? (Email me at ResurgenceCity [ ] aol.com.)
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I'm going to see if there's anyplace to take pix while I'm at the Airport, and if I spot something worth showing, I'll look for a cop to ask if it's OK (and show my bizcard so he can see my purpose). Flying has become such a hassle that I'm rarely in an airport anymore.

I don't have any fotos of the Airport area, so I'll put in a foto from my weekend trip to Montreal, a duty-free shop at the border where I wanted to change my remaining Canadian money for U.S. currency. Despite a sign about changing money near the entrance to the duty-free shop, I didn't see anyplace to do that, just cash registers for purchases. I saw some very nice Eskimo carvings (in Canada, Eskimos are called "Inuit") but no prices, and I don't like to ask prices. Legislatures should require that prices be posted. So I didn't buy anything and didn't ask occupied employees how to convert money. I was in no mood for hassles.

In any case, I was very unhappy to see, once I got home, that Bank of America charged me $5.00 for using a non-Bank of America ATM in Montreal, even tho there are no BofA ATMs in Montreal. Only in investigating that charge online did I find that BofA has a deal with Scotiabank (formerly the Bank of Nova Scotia) such that in Canada Scotiabank's ATMs are regarded as the equivalent of BofA ATMs (no fee). I didn't notice a single Scotiabank anywhere in my travels. BofA also charged a 55¢ fee to issue Canadian currency as my withdrawal from that Montreal ATM. Coming back, I went to a McDonald's the first exit from the border and finally got a strawberry milkshake — which was not available in Montreal! — and was able to change money by paying with my Canadian currency, from which they gave me change in U.S. currency, but at a $1.25 exchange rate. C$30 came out to US$24. The manager remarked that I had just bought a $9 milkshake (instead of the usual US$2.90 for a large shake), but I'd have lost something even in a bank, because the exchange rate without fees would yield US$27.75, and any bank is going to charge a conversion fee too, tho I don't know how much. Plus, I would have had to make a trip into a bank to conduct the transaction, so doing it at McDonald's seemed simplest and most convenient.

I have long been hostile to the border between the U.S. and Canada as utterly unnecessary — Canada should have joined the Union as several states decades ago — and this trip across the border, with its associated delays and expense, has powerfully reinforced that feeling.

The last time Alan was thru Newark, we had lunch at Forno's, at a much more reasonable time of day, then played some pool in my basement. This time he doesn't have as much time, so we'll just stay at the Airport. While food is not particularly important to me, it would be nice if there were someplace with an ambience as little institutional as possible.