Tales of a Northern trip

Monday July 26 - I am now on the train from Montréal (indeed correctly pronounced "mon - french 'r' - éal") to New York, writing this the old-fashioned hand-writing way, later to be digitalized for your reading pleasure. I would have wanted to see so much more of Québec and Canada, but for several reasons I decided to come back to the States today. Those include finding a third housemate, furbishing the house, and financial conservation. Canada is expensive, perhaps even more than the United States.

I will return one day though, when overall conditions are more favourable, because I found Montréal to be an amazing city. And I really mean amazing - I have not yet taken to overawesoming everything as Americans are sometimes inclined to do. Montréal has a charming architecture, a lot of green, a lot going on, and a wonderful atmosphere created by its friendly and remarkably beautiful people of all cultures. I also had the impression that people were more real than in the US. Real, and also less fat. And beautiful - did I already mention that?


As lakes and woods and prairies and faraway mountains flash by, I myself will flash back into my trip to the North, which started on Thursday evening. In New Haven I started my night of bustrips and it was devoid of any sleep because of the extreme discomfort of Greyhound transports - if only they would use the buses I took in Mexico...
I arrived at the bus terminal of Montréal at 5:20am, as scheduled, and realized that I had not prepared very well - I knew the address of my couchsurfing hosts, but had never bothered to look up where it was actually located or how to get there. Luckily an Asian guy on a street corner knew where the road was, hesitatingly he pointed in a direction and I started walking.
After 45 minutes I was getting close and I decided to go get some breakfast for the 6-person apartment. I also sent a message to ask if I could already arrive (at half past six in the morning).
Reply: "Ouait - comme je t'ai dit on dort mais fais comme chez toi". So I thought that Vincent, the tenant I had been in touch with, would get up to show me in and would then go back to bed.
When I found the place, I knocked on the door. No reaction. I felt the door and it was open, so I thought "this must be the right place". I went in, up some stairs, into a living room, took off my shoes, plugged in my cell phone charger, looked around ab it, and got ready to nap on the couch, when suddenly a door opened and a semi sleep drunk girl came into the living room. I introduced myself: "Salut, je suis Simon, le nouveau couchsurfer" - "Moi je suis Pascaline, enchantée" - "Vincent t'as dit que je venais, non" - "Vincent? Vincent, c'est qui? Christophe, tu veux dire?". My jaws dropped as I realized that I wasn't supposed to be there. "Je crois que je me suis trompé d'appartement," I said with an embarassed smile on my face.
It turned out that, fortunately, Pascaline knew Vincent. His apartment was just below hers. So I went out through the front door and into the other apartment, the door to which was unlocked as well.
As I discovered, it is not uncommon to leave your front door open in Montréal, and this is not because of a collective forgetfulness or negligence. Montréal is a very safe city, where girls can walk the streets on their own in the middle of the night with headphones on without having to worry. But this level of safety implies some measures: no alcohol can be sold in corner shops or night shops after 11pm (these shops are officially called "dépanneurs" which they should also be called in Ghent) and it is illegal to be in a public park after midnight. But I think it's mainly the laid-back nature of people that guarantees the security.

In the living room I made myself at home again and one by one I met each of the six persons living there as they got up and came out of their rooms.
First was Joël, a straightforward and friendly gay who had some hots for me. After kindly making clear that I'm straight, I still enjoyed the priviliged treatment of being served many a glass of Southern Comfort on the rocks.
Second to get up was Véronique, a nice and smart girl with whom I would later that day go to get Poutine, the local fastfood. It's fries with gravy and rubbery cheese bits - good, but Belgian fries with stoofvleessaus and mayonaise are still unbeaten.


Third came Antoine from Liège, who was on a working holiday program in Canada. He works for festivals and is a very nice guy. He let me use his bike all weekend long which made for an excellent way of transport.
Then I met Vincent, a kind and relaxed person with a high teddy-bear factor.
Last were David and Laura. He is Belgian too, had studied in Liège and was also on a working holiday. She is 18 which makes her the youngest housemate in the apartment, and she studies at the only school of Showbusiness in the world, situated in Montréal. She's really friendly but I had a lot of problems understanding her québecois (they wouldn't like me saying that she speaks French with a strong accent). The poor girl always had to repeat three or four times what she wanted to tell me.
Québecois is French, but pronounced in a totally different way. When Laura wants me to stop doing the dishes, she yells "Arrayte!" instead of "Arrête!". "Tu veux une bière?" sounds like "Tu voux une biayre?", "Ca va?" as "Ca veut?" and "je viens" is abbreviated to "je vi-". But I like it.

After chilling for a while at the apartment, I took the bike and went to Vieux Montréal and le vieux port over the special bicycle lane network throughout the city. Vieux Montréal is a very nice area with small streets and old stone buildings. It contrasts sharply against the background of skyscrapers and the new harbour. A funny performance of an Australian juggling with machetes and axes earned him my last US dollars.


On Friday there was a big birthday party for Vincent and Antoine - barbeque, beer and music. I had some sleep to catch up so I didn't hold out very long, but when I woke up at ten Saturday morning, I met Vincent who proudly told me "nous sommes encore quatre, les survivants" as he took another beer.

On Saturday I took the bike again and went to see the Olympic Park built for the 1976 Olympic Games. The stadium is quite impressive to say the least.


Then I biked down to the islands Île Sainte-Hélène and Île Notre-Dame. Here, the World Exposition of 1967 had taken place. There's also a big fairground called La Ronde. Noteworthy are the Biosphere which now houses a museum, and a 24/7 casino in the former pavilion of Québec and France. On Île Notre-Dame there's the Gilles Villeneuve racing circuit where every year in June the Canadian Grand Prix du F1 is held, and I did part of it on the bicycle.


After that I went to the city centre where there was a comedy festival going on. Instead of watching, I descended into the so-called Underground City, a huge subterranean maze of corridors connecting multi-floor shopping malls, apartment and office buildings, metro station,s cinemas, etc. This comes in pretty handy when outside temperatures fall several tens of degrees below freezing in winter and you don't really want to go outside.

I had the impression that there was always something to do in Montréal. In the evening, I rolled down the Mont-Royal plateau where I was staying, to the bank of the Saint-Lawrence river and to the big bridge over it, which had been shut to traffic and served as a tribune for l'International des Feux, a big fireworks festival where each week a different country shows off with the most beautiful explosives. Canada was up and they clearly did not want to lose the home game. I beheld the biggest, loudest and most overwhelming fireworks show of my life! This video clip shows the beginning of the finale - magnificent! Of course, my memory stick was filled to the brim just before the end - that's how these things go. At least with me.

Sunday was rather quiet - I still had the plan to go to Québec-ville but it turned out to be very expensive, as I found neither rideshares nor couchsurfers who could take me.
After noon I walked up la Montagne, Mont-Royal, took in the view and had my picture taken as a genuine tourist should. I then strolled to the Oratoire Saint-Joseph where pilgrims climb the stairs on their knees in search of something. Pain, by the looks of it.


Back in the apartment I relaxed with the homies and we watched a movie after which I went to the closing night of les Nuits d'Afrique, a free festival in the centre with African performers. I loved it. The music of Oliver Mtukudzi from Zimbabwe was so happy and rithmic and enchanting that everybody was moving to it, regardless of race, age, gender or weight. He was able to make us feel what he had said at the beginning of his show: "where we come from... music is like food".

I passed a lovely weekend in a fantastic city which I will definitely return to one day for its atmosphere and its beautiful people, the latter becoming more and more obvious as the train approaches New York and more and more Americans are getting on...

Final anecdote: I got this close again to missing my train this morning, as I had no cash for the subway ticket and Murphy's Law struck when three machines refused each of my banking cards. And once again, I realized that we rely too much on technology and that robots are taking over the world...