Montreal
I'm just home from a weekend in Montreal.
*notice I don't type 'Montr�al' that's because despite what many people think there are no accents on English words, which Montreal is, when I'm saying it in English. That whole 'mon-re-awl' pronounciation bugs me. When the French stop calling Nova Scotia 'Novelle Ecosse' I'll call it 'mon-re-awl'.*
The weekend was good. Fun. We stayed at a nice hotel the Sheraton Centre-Ville, downtown on Rue Rene-Levesque. It had a pool and a sauna and a mini bar - that we didn't touch, because I may be flush with cash with the new job and everything, but I'm NOT going to spend $4.50 on a pack of Ritz Bitz. The weather was shite. But considering the fact that it snowed in Toronto, the rain in Montreal was fine. We're not big shoppers unless we are actually shopping for something, so we ignored the stores. Well the weather played a part in that. The only 'indoor' stores are going to be in malls and what's the point of going to a mall in another city anyway? The language on the signs would be the only way you'd know that you weren't in Toronto, or Barrie, or Madison WI, for that matter.
I'm always fascinated by the lanugage thing. I love that people in even the most menial jobs are fluently bilingual in Montreal. I love that a skill that would immediately mean you'd earn 20% more at most service jobs in the rest of the country, is just what you need to work as a waiter at Mikes on Ste. Catherine. So while we both discovered that our ability to understand is relativelly undiminished, our ability to create sentences is more or less gone. It sucks really.
With no shopping and not much walking (raining did I mention?) we did a driving tour. We had fun driving up to see the Olympic Statdium. I wanted to go up the cable car to the top of the tower-y thing which affords a specatular view of the city. Or would if the cloud cover wasn't lower than the top of the tower. So we drove by and kept going. It is a pretty spectacular piece of expensive boon-doggle though. Thirty years later and it still looks weird and spacey. And they still haven't finished paying for it. I know that it's a complete mess and most Montrealers resent it. But they've at least got something that is, well it's INTERSTING. It's a massive spectacular failure - oh it's most definitely a failure - but at least it's a cool one. Look at our Skydome (er, excuse me the Rogers Dome - ugh!) It cost some huge amount of money was sold and resold for less and less money, until Ted Rogers bought it this year for $25 million. Which is less than a tenth of what it cost to build. And I'm sure that the only people who lost money on it were the taxpayers. All of this wouldn't be so bad if it was interesting, or unique, or anything, but it's not. It sucks.
So we swung around the big 'o' and kept going. We drove up to Westmount which is the swanky area of town. (You can always tell the swanky areas in Montreal, because they have English names). It's like a fairy tale Rosedale on a mountain. Very nice.
Our entire trip was us just going from one meal to the other. It was great. So we got up, ate, went someplace, ate, came back, slept, ate etc etc etc. Kinda perfect weekend really. On Saturday we went out. We knew we were in Montreal so we'd have to go late. so we slept a long time, then watched a movie in the hotel (I, Robot). Then we went out.
First we went to Le Drugstore. This is an amazing 4 storey complex of a bar, and despite being cool and huge it's NEVER full. I mean the place was nearly empty. No idea how they make any money.
But the DO have video lottery terminals (the bane of any poor neighborhood I'm told. But I tried anyway, I spent $7 and won $12 - so I cashed out and bought more beer.
Then we went over to Sky. We ended up at a fundraiser for the local Lebanese gay group. It was kinda hot. The music was great. The guys were fun and ethnic. Like they were gay and they whatnot, but they were still unabashedly Lebanese. So their femmy dancing looked like belliy dancing, not some weird appropriation of western gay culture. It was a lot of fun. We ended up talking to a guy named Ralf. Good Lebanese name.
So the weekend was good and fun. It was nice to reconnect with Eric a bit. We got to spend a lot of time together and it was good. That's all I'll say here about that - it's the one area I don't blog about.
