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.