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.