Montreal

I really liked our visit to Montreal - I'd never been there before and at one point, we turned to each other and said things along the lines of 'If McGill has a program/job that one of us could take, we should consider it'. That's how much we liked the city.

The thing that really fascinated me about Montreal was the bilingualism. The official two languages of Canada are pretty much invisible in most of the rest of the country (government signage and packaging contain both, but not much else is evidence that there are two official languages). In Montreal, all signage is in French with only occasional English subtitles, and everyone who works retails seems to be fluent in both languages. Which is really kinda cool!

Language was the thing that had me worried about going on this trip - well, that and border crossing (but that always has me a bit nervous these days) - my French is not good - signs, packages, simple directions I'm okay on (you know, lots of nouns) but with longer things like a newspaper, and speech, I'm at a loss. I'm pretty sure I've forgotten almost everything I learnt in school. But we managed just fine - although I didn't attempt much French because I've retained so little of it, we got through fine. I did worry that we would find ourselves in a situation where we'd get stuck, but we were in the tourist areas, so it was never a problem. There was one salesclerk who walked away from us when we talked to her, but after watching her for a moment, I think the reason wasn't the language but just that she was a bitch.

It's also a very clean city - even the panhandlers seemed polite. Old Montreal is really neat, as is the shoreline and the view from the hills just above downtown (where we were staying) was beautiful. We rented an apartment for the weekend, that cost less than a hotel and had a kitchenette as well as including continental breakfast (a nice one too - no skimping there) in what our landlord informed us was the 'McGill ghetto', presumably because we were four blocks from the university and lots of students lived there. Really nice place - not quite what I think of when I think ghetto - but then again, can't say I've ever seen a Canadian ghetto before, so maybe there are more ghettos down east that are just as pretty.

Eddie was great! He made all kinds of jokes about the Queen - I'll never again be able to listen to 'God save the Queen' in quite the same way as before - and he showed us how to make the queen smile by creasing the $20 bill. He made an impromptu airplane which didn't fly and therefor prompted the only heckle of the night. He had told the audience just before his failed paper airplane that he was now a pilot, and the heckle was obviously something to that effect, since he replied in typical Eddie style, "but madam, I don't have to fold my airplane before I fly it". He was the perfect entertainer for that audience - fluent in French (though the show was mostly in English) and cracking jokes that he wouldn't be able to do in a show in America 'cause no one would get them.

We also saw 'The Daily Show: Secrets Revealed' with Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee which was a kind of roundtable with question period afterwards. It was also amusing. I wanted to try to get into the new Family Guy DVD screening (it doesn't get released till September), but the timing was too close to a show that we already had tickets for and we didn't want to miss out on the second one.

I'm glad we went, and I hope I can catch the festival again next year. The kids also want to go, so maybe we can take them up there over one of the fall holidays or something, so they can see it too.

We spent an extra night after the festival camping in northern Vermont before heading all the way back home. I'm happy to say that all three border encounters were just fine. Although the line was longer at St. Armand than it ever is at St. Stephens (in NB), we were waved right through. At the NB crossing, we've had to pull over and go into the office each time. We even went through the border patrol at the VT/NH border without any problems, though what or who they were looking for there, we couldn't tell. We at first thought drugs because there was a dog, but there was only a dog on the one line, and then we thought some other kind of smuggling because the only vehicle in front of us to produce ID was a guy in a truck, but then we thought they must've been looking for someone, because the only question they asked was where we were born and our citizenship. Odd. Does this happen often I wonder? We were already about 100 miles away from the border when this patrol stopped us, so I wonder what the purpose was.

Speaking of mileage, the car rolled over on the way back - 200,000 kms ! and it's still ticking... though I wonder for how much longer that will last...

Going to Canada from here always feels a bit weird. I feel like I'm going home when I go up there, and I feel like I'm coming home when I come back across the border. It's very strange to feel that you're going home both ways.