Quebecophile for a While First Post

Welcome to Quebecophile for a While blog’s first post. I’ll chronicle our life here in Quebec over the next six months. I’ve also been posting pictures of outings and sights around Montreal on Facebook, so if you want to see those photos and future posts there you know what to do. 

A quick refresher on our journey….Marti and I are living in Montreal while I am on sabbatical, working at McGill University, working in the Bioresource Engineering Department. My primary goal on sabbatical (this is for the boss to read) is to create the content for a new course I will teach….hey this is boring, let’s talk about Quebec.

A Quebecophile is someone who loves Quebec, and obviously we do, or will, or might, or should since we decided to live here for half a year. We love winter and they have it here in spades, but unfortunately, we’ll miss it as it starts in earnest in January and we plan to leave…hey this is boring, let’s talk about Montreal.

Montreal is described as the city of festivals (by me). When we arrived the International Jazz Festival was in full swing. We attended the free outdoor shows one evening. Five, count it, cinq stages set up with free music in the Place de Arts district. Not small stages and not small acts. Great music, great environment, great, polite crowds. 

The next weekend the International Music Festival was concluding. Then the Just for Laughs Festival started running for two weeks. Again, lots of free street performers trying to get guffaws from the crowds and several free outdoor venues. We didn’t spend much time at the outdoor venues as the acts we saw were performing in French…hey this is boring, let’s talk about culture shock.

I only had one panic attack so far, and that was when I realized there are no blond-haired people here. As some of you know, I am 100% Finnish, land of the blonds, (I was very blond as a kid), and I also grew up in Northern Wisconsin where there are many blonds. But after being here a week I felt like I was on another planet, realizing, like, 100% of French descendants are dark haired, and all the immigrants, Chinese, Hispanic, African, Middle Eastern, are, like, also all dark haired. Thank god I married a blond.

The other culture shock was the topless matriarch who road proudly perched like a double bow sprit of her husband’s 50-foot, double-decker boat as they slowly cruised through the canals that run along the southern edge of Montreal. This was her way of celebrating Canada Day, comparable to our 4^th of July, and her French heritage...viva bra France!

Not much else on the culture shock page, except the French language is dominant in parts of the city. More on this later. One other observation is the common dress here and typical fitness of the populous. More on that later too.

So, staying under five-hundred words per post, I’ll end this…..hey, this is boring, let’s talk about…

Bonne journee, 
Tom