To and Fro

Today we are going to drive over to Lachine, which is on the west part of the island. We need to take care of some customs things so that our stuff can be delivered when we move into the apartment on Monday. So we drive 20 minutes to Lachine, 20 minutes back to a couple of blocks near our apartment in Vieux-Montreal (that means Old Montreal, I'm trying to think of things with their French placenames, and yes, it's the place with the building that is draped with a picture of itself), and then back again to Lachine. And then back here.

One thing we didn't end up having to take care of in customs is our car. Poor Civic has some miles on her now and a bit of an underbite; it's from an unfortunate run-in with a larger station wagon on a rainy day on 66. We're thinking of driving the car back to Virginia sometime around Easter and attempting to sell it.

I'm worried that getting rid of the car again will mean that I'm limiting myself to certain jobs--when I already am limited by my language handicap--and won't be able to get access to services that I might need, like a doctor I actually like or a vet for a sick Penelope.

That being said, everyone in NYC lives without a car just fine. I didn't particularly like the doc Super Size Me, but one part that made an impression on me is that New Yorkers basically walk more than anyone else in the US. If you want to go somewhere, you walk and subway there.

And let's face it--I've never been particularly svelte, but after I quit smoking, I gained a LOT of weight. Being motivated to walk around will do me a lot of good. Ben will be able to bike, although my cycling skills mostly involve being able to not fall over on a bike. Biking in the city scares me, mainly because I'm just not very good at it.

After I quit smoking, I had to learn to live my life at a different sort of pace, and it was tough. I think that making the adjustment to not having a car is going to be a similar sort of process, but at least it won't make me gain weight!

We're going to sell the car. Even if we decide to get another vehicle, it'll be something like a Subaru that can actually drive around in the snow. Again, it's the waiting that is killing me, giving me time to think and be anxious about the decision, when if I had my 'druthers it would already have been gone by now.

Oh, and cellphones in Canada don't come with voicemail; you have to pay $7 extra for that. So basically if you miss a call, there's no way of telling who it was. I think I'm just going to give up and do it myself:

This is like...a whole other country

I will admit that when we moved here, I was primarily prepared for language- and culture-based changes from living in the DC Metro area. A lot of what has surprised me, however, has been things that I took for granted as part of the service you receive when you get a cell phone plan or a bank account.

We searched around with all of the mobile phone carriers and were unable to find either a Canadian or US company that would work without enormous fees on both sides of the border. I haven't figured out a way to have a US number that our friends in the States could call to avoid long-distance charges that would forward to a Canadian number, but we at least have Canadian cell phones now so I can give out a phone number that won't be going away when we move out of temporary housing.

The odd part of all this is that Caller ID (which comes on every phone I've ever seen in the US) costs an extra $8 here. This means that you can't just assume someone can call you so you'll have their number, because if you haven't paid extra, the phone just says "Unknown."

The next thing that was odd was that our bank account didn't come with a check card--you know how you get the thing that looks like a credit card and you can run credit or debit with it, right? Here you just get an Interac card, which works like a debit only you have to pay $1.50 every time you use it, and you can't choose to run it as credit instead of debit, or use it at credit-only businesses.

Heck, we opened a checking account, and now I'm wondering if I need to make sure that we're getting sent actual, physical cheques. I was expecting to find that banking was different because the word is spelled "cheques" here, but instead it's feeling fairly different. I kind of know the rules, but if I take things for granted or assume something, I might get screwed, and nobody will think to warn me!

Patience is the hardest virtue

So the situation with the move-in housing has thankfully been resolved. After we told our relocation lady that the 25th wasn't an option, she was able to successfully lobby the EA people into paying for two extra days in temporary housing. What this means is that we'll have a 2-day overlap between moving out and moving in, and we won't have to frantically pack our car and try to make everything in one trip.

Penelope got sick a few days ago. She'd had whatever the dog equivalent is of the stomach flu a few weeks ago, right after she'd been visiting Susanne for a while in Charlottesville, and we figured it was because she'd eaten something she shouldn't have while running around the back yard. This is a thing that dogs just do.

She wasn't able to keep food down and had to go outside almost every hour through the night, so Ben and I didn't get a ton of sleep. She'd started to look really emaciated--we keep her weight low for her hips, and the previous sickness and trip hadn't helped her keep the pounds on--and was poopin' out blood, so we took her to the vet. By the time we got her to the vet, she weighed 51 pounds, which is terrible; her usual slim-and-trim weight is somewhere around 58.

The vet hooked us up with some things for her tummy and the visit was significantly less expensive than it would have been in DC, so that was a pleasant surprise. We'd been referred to this vet by our real estate lady, who said that they were probably the best vets in Westmount, so it was nice to see that they were pretty affordable.

So now we are feeding Penelope white rice and ground beef in painfully small amounts, and waiting to move into our new apartment. I am bad at patience.

The Waiting Game

Right now we are doing some serious logistical juggling to ensure that we have a place to live right up until we move into our place to live...what an enormous pain.

Basically, we have to be out of our corporate housing by noon on the 26th, which is the same day we have permission to move into our new apartment. I'd really like to have some time cushion, but I'm not sure what time we'll be able to pick our keys up on the 26th. Hopefully this doesn't involve repacking the entire car and driving over to the new apartment and sitting outside of it for two hours.

Here's some kid arguing with a pineapple in French. Does anyone else remember this?



My favorite part is when Jacques starts nailing Ananas back into his crate after trying to logic him out of existence.

Ben appears to be settling into his new job well--he's learning new things and I think that's important for his happiness. I've heard in several places that the only place someone who speaks absolutely no French at all can work is a call center, and I'm just not doing that.

There's a local language academy that has a TESOL certification program that consists of about a month of full-time classes and classroom teaching. The program runs around $2500CN and takes up a lot less time overall than a lot of the certifications at other places, which run part-time and are completed over the course of a year.

Right now I am trying to decide if I want to take full-time intensive French lessons or get the TESOL Certification. What it boils down to, of course, is time and money; I can't afford to do both of these one-after-another. What I'm really interested in doing is working in a field where I can use both my writing AND ESL skills, but there's not a certification or graduate degree up here comparable to the Masters in Composition and Rhetoric that existed at Mason.

Deneigement

I've been learning some French words here and there, whether by puzzling them out myself or asking a Francophone friend in the States. Once you start knowing a few words, it makes new ones easier to figure out, and there are a lot of suffix and prefix cognates from English to French.

canneberge--cranberry
neige--snow
sauge--sage
tasse--cup

This leads me to my favorite French word so far, which I first saw on a TV news report: "deneigement." De-snow-ment? Oh, like snow removal!

Montreal is serious about its deneigement. For one thing, I noticed on this news report that there's a guy whose job is "directeur de l'Unité de déneigement." So the Montreal urban area (l'Unite) has a director of snow removal, and I guess its this guy's job to think about snow removal all year long, even when it isn't snowing.

Once we started learning about deneigement, a few things came together.

First of all, the sidewalks are incredibly cleared considering it's just been snowing and snowing and snowing since we got here...maybe a foot or two. If you check this video out at about :30, you'll see the little thing responsible for it.



Then there was that...odd noise at night, that sounded like an air raid siren--and believe me, after our exciting fire drill our first night here, I was on alert to any subsequent alarms for some time. Turns out that it is the tow truck warning siren. Before the parking area of a street is plowed, the deneigement people put out a sign with times that the street should remain clear so it can be plowed. Then this truck comes along the street and makes a really loud noise to remind everyone to move their car...then, just minutes before the tow truck comes, the noise truck goes and sits beside each car and blows its horn for like 5 minutes in a last-ditch attempt to get someone to come move the car.



And since there's too much snow to simply push it off the road--the sidewalks need to be clear too--where does the snow go? Behold:



So these big trucks with plows underneath come and push all of the snow to the center, then this other truck with this grabby bit sucks the snow up and shoots it into a truck driving parallel to it, and then the snow is taken away to outside of town!

People complain about snow removal here just the way they do anywhere else, but compared to where I'm from, this is a well-oiled machine.

Curling and Cheques

Oh, and we watched curling last night.

I should look to see if I can find an expat-Canadian blog where some Canadian yuppie has moved to the US and is all:

Dear Diary:

Today I ate a cheeseburger. The word "cheques" is spelled "check" here.

Love,

Etienne

We could be, like, sister-blogs and I could tell him to go eat some cheese grits and introduce useful words such as "soul food."

I am looking forward to scratching the surface a bit more here, beyond the list of cliche things that I'm Supposed To Do in Canada. Overall, I don't feel particularly out of place, exactly--I think there's a good chance I'd experience more culture shock if I moved to California or somewhere else where nobody wears black all the time. Here, there's all of the identity politics stuff in Quebec going down, but most everyone has been nice after I say "bonjour" and they seem to want to do things like smile at you and watch sports and wear black which are all things I am totally down with.

One small thing I noticed when we were in Canada last time was the Nanaimo bar. It's a layer of squished crumbs, then some nice-tasting icing, then some chocolate melted on the top. My past experience of no-bake cookies in West Virginia was nothing but horrible. If an alternate name for a confection is "Boiled Cookies," stay away. Nanaimo bars are delicious and not boiled at all, I assure you.

We found an apartment!

Here's a Google Street view of the place where we just signed a lease, 223 Avenue Melville in Westmount, QC:


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Ours is the first floor of the brick building you're looking at. To the left and down the street are a school and Westmount Park. We're close to a Y and the library, as well as a lot of shops and restaurants a couple of blocks away.

Overall we are a good 7 or 8 blocks away from both of the the closest Metro stops, Station Vendome and Station Atwater. This amounts to about 15 minutes to a Metro station, but on either side of the street are buses downtown. Ben can catch the 24 bus all the way down to 2 blocks from his job.


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If anyone in town asks where we live, we will probably tell them that it's Victoria Village, which is the district of Westmount we're in.

What is this "Westmount?"

Montreal is on an island of the same name. Back in 2001, the "One Island, One City" ("Une île, une ville" rhymes in French) initiatives started, which basically sucked in the 27 separate independent municipalities and made them part of Montreal. The reason my mailing address is Westmount is because Westmount tried to back out in 2004, and was able to regain some of its autonomy.

Here's how the real estate agent explained it: rich Anglophones live in Westmount, rich Francophones live in Outremont--until they get really rich, and then they move to Westmount. So we're living in a neighborhood that should be relatively easy to negotiate in English, but it's also ground zero for a lot of the identity politics that are being worked out in Quebec. for example, the last time Quebec attempted to secede from Canada, parts of Montreal--Anglophone parts of Montreal--voted "No" to independence. 50.56% of the voters voted "No," and a lot of people blamed Anglophones in Montreal. Check out the map in the above link--I live in the dark red section of the island now.

Where we have ended up is a neighborhood with a lot of money and a lot of English speakers. We looked at apartments in trendier neighborhoods like Mile End and Plateau Mont-Royal, but it's at that stage in gentrification where the apartments are still kind of crappy and have "personality" but cost a LOT. I'm down with a funky apartment in a cool neighborhood, but not for those prices. So overall we're living in a neighborhood with a lot of young professionals that is within walking distance to downtown, and paying significantly less rent than we did in DC.

Apartments in this city are advertised by how many rooms they have, so you see listings for 2 1/2, 3 1/2, etc. This system doesn't make a ton of sense sometimes--the 1/2 is for a bathroom, but the number doesn't change if there's an additional bathroom. We looked at 4 1/2 apartments, in the hope of finding something that has two bedrooms so we can have room for crafts and visitors (that's you, Dear Reader).

What we've ended up with is a 1-bedroom 4 1/2, which means that we sort of have a kitchen, then a dining area, then a living room with no doors. Here's a shot from the dining area:

For a bit more perspective, here's just the room on the right:So you can see that there is a lot of light coming into this apartment, which was a big factor. Nothing but hardwood floors in this city, so same here. There's also a filled-in fireplace with an electrical outlet in the middle, so we have a mantelpiece and a place to stage some form of fake fire.

The good news is that while we don't have a second bedroom, we have a futon courtesy of Will & Susanne, and the room closer to the kitchen will probably be turned into an expanded kitchen/craft stuff/computer room/guest area. We'll keep an eye out for some screens and I think that will do well for dividing the room up to accommodate visitors.

We move in on the 26th of February.

Montreal City Hall

I tried to describe this to people after we returned from the visit to Montreal for Ben's interview, but I don't think I did it justice.

Imagine a building that is undergoing renovations, and on the outside of the scaffolding on the building is...a slightly larger picture of that building on fabric. And the real building underneath doesn't look like the cloth version of itself anymore because it's being renovated.

Surreal.

That's Montreal's City Hall, which usually looks like this, but when we saw it in November had been completely encased in the picture that's partially up here.

Extras

Moms are asking for pictures, so here are some additional ones before they are forgotten about.

A blurry picture of beers--I'll take a better picture later but I wanted to give beer fans an idea of the scope of Canadian beers.


Drive pics:

Smoked Meat and Poutine: Check.

Montreal is surprisingly Jewish for a city that's historically been filled with super-devout French Catholics. We have a large Hasidic community in one section of town (smaller than, but comparable to NYC's), and a lot of the city's food bears more similarities to NYC than I expected. Two of the city's signature foods are smoked meat and bagels which are allegedly unique to the city--I haven't tasted a "real" Montreal bagel yet, but smoked meat is just...smoked meat. That's its name. Smoked meat is like, a thing. Let me 'splain:

The idea of "smoked meat" can be confusing because it sounds more like a category that would include things like smoked salmon and whatever lutefisk is, but instead it is its own unique thing, like pastrami or corned beef. As a matter of fact, smoked meat exists somewhere on the continuum between pastrami and corned beef, although it tastes like neither. Wikipedia informs me that the methods use to preserve the meat are unique, and you can go and read more about it there.

We figured we'd kill two birds with one stone, so we ordered some poutine. Fun fact: if you're French Canadian, you say it more like the guy who runs Russia than "poo-teen." Again, Wikipedia provides cool insight into possible etymology of the word. Most people know that poutine is cheese curds and gravy over fries, but what nobody seemed to be able to tell me was what in the world a cheese curd actually is. After consuming cheese curds, I can tell you that they are vaguely squishy and squeaky (leading to their nickname of "squeaky cheese") and not particularly melty. They are cheese, which is really all I needed to know in the first place.

We obtained these smoked meat sandwiches and poutine at Dunn's, which is one of the places to go to get smoked meat, the other being Schwartz's. What they don't mention when they recommend that you go to this restaurant is that their mascot, a pickle who this website informs me is named "Dillon Dunn," is TERRIFYING.

It seems like anything you'd order that would normally have pastrami or corned beef on it comes with smoked meat instead; I ordered a Reuben and it was delicious.

An Aside

I emailed a professor of mine who'd taught at McGill for tips about living in Montreal. After some useful advice, she concluded with this:

"They don't have pretzels in Montreal."

Thus, the name of this blog. Should I locate pretzels, I will take pictures and change the name of the blog to "Where the Pretzel Sat," making a web address change unnecessary.

The trip north

This is the eventual route that we took to Montreal:


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It took us around major cities and promised slightly nicer scenery. The internet told us that it would take around 11-and-a-half hours, which was relatively equal to estimates of other routes.

The movers came on Tuesday and took away all our things. Normally I try to be a relatively confident person, but the idea of having a bunch of people come into my house and poke around in my stuff makes me incredibly anxious, so I spent most of the time sitting on my sheetless bed or, when the bed went away, in the corner.

Being unable to pack was also nerve-wracking. There's the weeding process you go through when you move--"Do we really want this?" "No." then you throw it away--which we didn't really get to do with anything other than the stuff that got left behind. I am not looking forward to going through this process when we unpack, especially because I'm not sure I'll have unlimited access to a dumpster in the city.

If we'd been leaving the day the movers came, we would have had a lot more space in the car, but we also had to keep the things we'd need for the few days we'd spend in an empty apartment; things like the comforter and pillows take up a lot of space in a car, even if they are squished.

A large portion of the car was packed up with our bar, honestly. We weren't allowed to ship any kind of alcohol into the country with the movers, so we had to take it across the border ourselves. It was completely legal--I provided a list of everything we brought to Customs--but an enormous pain in the butt. As we've gotten older, we drink significantly less amounts of significantly better booze, so there was probably several hundred dollars of liquor there, accumulated over five years or so. I gave some of it away but it still made up three large boxes.

We tried to leave as much space as possible for the dog in the car, but things were more cramped than I would have liked. It took her a while to actually figure out that there was space for her to lie down, and even then she ended up in some funny places, like sleeping on the arm rest.

The drive up to Montreal was relatively uneventful for the first day. We didn't end up leaving DC until almost 6pm on Friday. Ben's last day of work was that Wednesday, so we spent most of Thursday and more of Friday than I'd like throwing things away and cramming everything possible into the car.

We spent the night in Scranton. While the scenery in a lot of the places we went through was lovely, the area of Pennsylvania that we passed through had that special flavor of Appalachian despair that seems to encompass everything--the people, the houses they live in, the kinds of businesses that exist. It's the same kind of situation in major cities, but it just doesn't feel the same.


As we went into New York state, the scenery got nicer. There's a kind of haze in the pictures that I took which is a combination of poor photography on my part (no surprise there) but also the constant flurries of snow that were in the air.

After a few hours on route 87, we ran into two nasty white-outs. I actually called Will, Ben's dad, to see if this was an enormous storm that we should pull over to motel for. He didn't see anything at all on the radar; I think it was a small storm that we hit at just the right moment to be difficult for us. And so we turned our lights down and drove very slowly, navigating by the rumble strips on the side of the road, which were the most visible indicators left since the road was suddenly covered in snow. After a while, we came out of the storm and things were back to normal; the experience still feels surreal in retrospect.

We passed through customs with no issues and got our work permits. Traffic in Montreal was basically nonexistent (I can scoff about traffic the way people up here can snoot about snow). We were tired, but we were able to find our keys and apartment with only a small amount of fuss. We got the dog upstairs and the minimum amount of stuff we needed out of the car, and crawled into bed.

This is when the fire alarm went off.

Ben and I walked together to his first day of work. That morning, it was around -18C, or 0F (I’m trying to pick up Celsius and the metric system while I am here).

Our current apartment is at 454 de la Gauchetiere West, in a restored paper factory that bills itself as “New York-style lofts.” Lots of exposed brick and concrete, with pale hardwood floors and enormous windows—while I’ve never been in one of those New York-style lofts, it reminds me of a friend’s apartment in a former mattress factory in Atlanta.

Penelope has made herself as comfortable as possible, but I feel like I am the wrong size for the kitchen. The cabinets doors in this place are hinged at the top so they swing up, meaning that I am almost too short to access the top cabinet.

It took about 3 days for me to realize that we should take our shoes off in the long concrete hallway instead of in the living room. If your jeans are cuffed, small rocks and pieces of rock salt jump up into the cuffs and fall on the floor when you take your pants off.

We are lucky to have a small park across the street from the entrance to our apartment, where we appear to be the only dog owners who pick up their dog poop. The man we met outside during our freezing fire drill assured us that Montreal was “very European” but I think he meant in smoking cigarettes and not in not bothering to pick up poo.

When we first got Penelope, I’m pretty sure she hadn’t ridden much in a car, but by now she is an old pro. She likes to stick her nose out the window and sniff, but she sometimes also just looks out the window or moves to the middle of the back seat and looks through the windshield. I don’t think Penelope has ever seen windows this large—our apartment in Arlington probably provided a very boring view of the top of the building across the quad at dog-level. Now whenever she sees me opening the blinds, she comes and tries to peek out.

Ben’s work is maybe 4 or 5 blocks from the apartment his company is renting for us, although he has to go a little underground to get to it. Montreal’s underground city is just strange, really…in the downtown you can enter a seemingly random office building and try taking its down escalator—chances are if it’s got one, it’s attached to the underground city.

The closest grocery store is 3 blocks away. It’s an IGA, which is hilarious if you’ve ever seen an IGA in the states because they are inevitably trashy and constantly on the verge of closing. This IGA sells a lot of lamb, veal, and duck and is swanky and delivers. It’s mostly underground, too.

The beer selection at the IGA is pretty exciting, as there are plenty of beers there I’ve never seen before. I placed an order for some, including a six-pack of Unibroue’s Raftman beer, which I don’t think is distributed in the States. This is possibly because the picture of an enormous flannel-clad lumberjack doing something on a river with logs and a pole was deemed “too sexy” for American audiences.

We are looking for apartments in the Mile End, NDG, Plateau Mont-Royal, and Village sections of town, all of which tend to be a bit more urban and have lots of public transportation. We’re hoping that we might be able to get rid of our car once we get settled, although I’ll have to adjust to a completely different kind of lifestyle—today I looked up where the pet stores were that sell Penelope’s brand of food are, realizing that getting rid of a car means lugging large bags of dog food on the Metro.