Montreal is a city that brings the funk. This is a slang expression that, if I am not mistaken, means "to be outlandish." It is full of street art, hobos, people with tattoos and facial piercings, and a queer admixture of old, decrepit buildings; old, beautiful buildings; and new, standard-looking buildings. It is filthy and smells of weed smoke. It is fairly green. It has a shared bicycle system but too few recycling bins. It has excellent restaurants if one knows where to look for them (I.e., It has excellent restaurants, and one has to know where they are in order to enjoy them.). Its sidewalks are broad enough that people congregate on them to dance, make music, and engage in other forms of social behavior.
I found Montreal horrifying, as it is much less conservative than Vancouver, and I do not have too much to say about it, as I did not take notes while I was there and am not that interested in making this a long post. The most enjoyable thing that I did there was to go biking with my brother. I feel very strange writing this email, as it is going to my family, so they know that my brother and I went biking (My blog posts are direct copies of my emails home.), but so be it. My brother and I had not been on an extended bike ride since I was ten years old, and I was immediately drawn back to that time as he led me through the city, calling directions over his shoulder.
Ottawa was fantastically interesting for a visitor from western Canada (me), as its parliamentary building is famous all over the country, but few of us (I suspect) have been to see it. It was vastly cleaner than Montreal and seemed much more up-scale: even the cafes lining the only pedestrian-only section of the city were fairly expensive. Quebec City, for its part, had a much richer history than Montreal, which I would not have guessed. It, too, seemed much more conservative than Montreal (every city does), though, since its old city was more or less separated from the part where people live and work, I mostly got a sense of what it was like a hundred or two hundred years ago. It turns out that Quebec City was a stronghold for Canada when the country still just barely existed, as a result of which its founders built extensive fortifications, which still stand today. There are many more statues proclaiming Canada's greatness in Quebec City than in any other part of Canada that I have seen; while I swelled with pride over Canada's history and nationhood as a result of these, I also found them a little jingoistic. The most interesting statue that I saw was one of Dante that had no obvious connection with the rest of the city or with the country as a whole. I guess that one of its sculptors was a fan or pseudo-fan of literature.
I am sure that I noticed and thought of a great many more things than I have put in this email, but I am desperate to get through it so that I can get to my other two, the ones about Paris, and get back on schedule. I have been putting off writing in my blog specifically because of not wanting to have to do several posts before attending to the one of the day: catching up on posts has become a stumbling block for me. One interesting facet of this trip is that I have vastly more work to do on it than I have had on any previous trip, which has turned me into a very strange traveller: while I can think of nothing but traveling when I am in Fayetteville, I am looking forward, more than anything else in this trip, to the times when I will be able to sit down and get some serious work done. No one who knows me should have ever expected those words to leave my lips (in that order, &c.).
I am plumb out of ideas at this point! I suppose that a bunch of my impressions have left me, never to return. Once I finish my first two posts about Paris, I should be ready to approach my posts more systematically and make them more narratively-based. Only time will tell!
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| Residents of Montreal are hooligans. This is some street art. |
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