Vive le Montreal

Memorial Weekend 2009, I had all sorts of big travel ambitions: 2 weeks in Spain.  1 week in Mexico.  Africa may or may not have been thrown into the mix as well.   

As logistics foiled my ideas (thank you SWINE FLU), I pared down my grandiose plans to a long weekend exploring Montreal with my good friend Monika.  On the agenda was hanging out, relaxing, and eating our way through this foodie city.  But as American Airlines put a wrench in Monika’s weekend, I ended up on my own with a hotel room twice the size of my apartment in NY, and a whole weekend of exploring “Canada’s Cultural Capital” solo.  5 days of scouring travel literature, peppering my Quebecer friend Line with all sorts of cultural and societal questions, and wandering the neighborhoods, here’s some stuff I’ve noticed.  To sum it all up, Montreal really felt like visiting the Love Child of North America and Europe:

That’s Line on the right.

• It really is true that visiting Montreal is like spending time in Europe.  So much so that I had to keep reminding myself that the 1.5 hour flight I took was not to France, but in fact to Canada.  All around me I heard French.  Round little school boys, hip shopkeepers, the shirtless homeless man with a missing tooth and cans of Natty Light in his pockets, damn it sounded like they were all waxing poetic like Shakespeare or Nietzsche.  Kind of like when you hear Shakira sing in Spanish, then later realize that she is singing about talking to a horse. 

Cute French-speaking school kids on a field trip to Montreal’s Old Port.

 

• I thought I had the language thing covered, since Lonely Planet equipped me with many simple phrases.  However, they neglected to include a key explaining HOW TO speak in French; so thanks to my 4 years of high school Spanish, I naturally began speaking in some sort of unintelligible French-Spanish-English combo.  Really, how was I supposed to know that so many French letters are silent?  (Thank you Line for clearing that up!)  Fortunately, after the customary “Bonjour” followed by a “uhhh… Parlez vous anglais?”, the jig was up on my faking French and we could communicate in English.

This is what happens when you order a meal in a language you really don’t understand.  Poutine: french fries doused in gravy and cheese curds.  My arteries wouldn’t let me consume more than half of this.

One thing I think that really lends Montreal to it’s Euro vibe and keeping it from being as inundated with American culture is the language barrier.  Take music.  A few years ago, in 2004 both the NY Times and Spin magazine dubbed Montreal North America’s “Next Big Scene,” due to bands like Arcade Fire, the Stills, Wolf Parade.  I read somewhere that there are tons of really great French speaking (singing?) bands, but haven’t “made it” because their songs are not in English.

 

Bluegrass band performing at Marche Jean-Talon (a huge farmer’s market not unlike Pike Place in Seattle) 

• Bikes are everywhere.  I love it.  But they aren’t the cute upright one-speed bikes with baskets that I saw all over Amsterdam.  More like 10-speed mountain bikes.  And all over the city there were municipal bikes locked up that you can rent for about $1 an hour.  I tried to find out more about them, but they were so new (like a couple weeks old) that no one seemed to know specifics.  I actually saw the same thing when I was in both Washington DC, and Brussels, Belgium last spring.  And there are talks to have the same in NY.  Color me excited.

• Some neighborhoods, namely the Latin Quarter and the Village are how I imagine New York’s East Village, Lower East Side were like a decade or two ago: burgeoning art scene partially due to affordable rent (when I told Line I pay $950/month she thought that was pretty reasonable…until I clarified that was just MY share of the 3 bedroom).  I haven’t lived here long enough to say from experience, but I constantly read about artists and other creatives being priced out of said neighborhoods, killing NY’s cultural scene.   As my mother taught me, you can’t judge a book by it’s cover; however  I defiitely saw more punks, hippies and artists looking types in the 5 days I was in Montreal than the 3 years I’ve lived in Manhattan.

Near the Latin Quarter. 

  Hackey sacking at the Tam Tam drum circle in Parc du Mont-Royal

 

  Chair outside a boutique in Old Montreal

  Mural in the Village.

Marche Jean-Talon