Montreal’s "Just for Laughs" comedy festival comes but once a year, but misadventures in translation in a bilingual society provide comedy all year round—especially to a travel writer trying to trying to decipher badly-translated menus and travel brochures.

Travel by UFO—the ultimate adventure travel. I thought it would make a cockamamie travel story, and began looking for an abductee who had travelled with aliens. “How were the in-flight movies? Interesting scenery? Bring back any souvenirs?”

You can’t know a tattoo artist without wondering about the world history of this ancient human fetish. Clément Demers’ Montreal tattoo studio was filled with books, articles and old photos collected and inherited from his father-mentor and I couldn’t resist delving into them.

Quebec’s Raelians believe that their prophet—the French sports reporter and race car driver Claude Vorilhon who now calls himself Rael—is Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed all wrapped into one. I had to go to Valcourt, Quebec to see the UFO-Land theme park for myself. And to peek inside the famous alien ship.

Like the tattoo lover who stood before me proudly showing off his fine-line art work, I was a Hitchcock fan, too. But I thought this guy was carrying his zeal for the Master of Suspense to painful extremes. There was the film director's jowly face tattooed smack in the middle of his back—along with scenes from every movie Hitchcock ever made!

A dream job— a summer’s house-sitting gig in a beautiful Montreal condo proves to be a daily housemaid’s tale of cleaning scattered peanut shells off Oriental carpets and pulling feathers off flypaper. Who was in captivity—the bird or the bird sitter?

"A walking tour of Plateau Mont Royal? How can it even be work?" Benoit Ethier exclaimed in words that he would one day eat. The young Montreal actor in-between shows had eagerly agreed to work as my assistant, gathering information for a walking/shopping tour of Plateau Mont Royal for a U.S. guidebook publisher.

Crossing the US-Canadian border without reporting to customs is never a good idea. But what happens to you if you don’t even know where the border is? In some Quebec and Vermont towns it can be in the middle of your local library--or even your house! A tour of the Vermont-Quebec border with an officer on border patrol duty explains it all.

Croque-Insectes—the Montreal Insectarium famous insect tasting—is a gala gourmand affair. Tall starched chef’s hats. White linen and silver platters. Elegant looking hors d’oeuvres that sound more edible in French—trempettes au couvain d’abeilles— than the English "bee larvae dip."

All I had in the way of weird souvenirs, I told Montreal’s Smart Shopper Sandra Phillips, was the 75-million-year-old Hadrosaur shinbone I bought in Drumheller, Alta., and the bit of turf I'd smuggled from a Donegal bog. But her Montreal living room (which probably glows in the dark) was like an annex of American Museum of Natural History.

I have often wondered how the fortunes get inside the cookies, so I set up a tour of Montreal’s only fortune cookie factory. Then I ran my own bi-lingual fortune writing contest in the Montreal Gazette—with hilarious results.

The story I am about to relate concerns a poor innocent alien dummy created for Canada’s Man and His World, exposition, whose face travelled from Australia to Russia and was proffered as proof - even by a former Soviet cosmonaut - that we are being visited by aliens. It is an Alien Phoax (photo hoax) of the Funniest Kind.