Montreal photos link under the title - just click on it.
As I sat typing on the terrace of the Café de Beau Poseur, or something like that last night, a young African man approached me, holding a cigarette. I held out my lighter for him to use. He said no, could he sit down and talk to me. I said I didn’t speak French. He sat down anyway and began to speak to me in English. I said I was leaving in a minute. He brought over a full glass of wine and proceeded to drink it while telling me that he was a student in McGill University up the road and that he liked to talk to new people.
I sighed inwardly. I really didn’t want to have a broken English conversation. I was too tired after six hours walking around the city under the hot Montreal sun.
“What do you study?”
“I’m doing a PhD in wind energy in France and I am here doing an internship on Canada’s alternative energy policy.”
I get my buzz from wind turbines, I do
“Oh right.” Great, a broken English conversation with a guy who’s into wind farming. Just what I need on a hot Tuesday.
Actually, he was pretty interesting. From Cameroon originally, sent to study in France by his parents when he was fifteen. He subsequently went to university and did a degree in electrical engineering and now his passion is wind power. We talked about environmental issues for a while. I said that I was shocked at how wasteful Canadians are, particularly with paper products. I suppose it is something to do with all the trees they have, and the logging companies and the lumber companies and the paper mills and the paper product manufacturers etc, etc.
We talked wind turbines. He said the average Canadian turbine is 70 metres in diameter. He wanted to develop smaller turbines that could be used in urban areas, but Canada wasn’t interested in funding this type of research. Presumably because they have enough space to build enormous great farms without anyone complaining if an entire bog slides down a mountainside as it did in Mayo.
It started to rain then, big fat drops that were more painful than actually wet, so we decided to go to Café Chaos, a worker co-operative bar further up the street. Inside it was the usual dark, red lit, grimy wooden space. This time, one long wall was covered in cartoonish graffiti of some character whose name escapes me, but whom I had doodled all over my journals in school. You know, the guy with the big nose, peering over the wall.
Microbrews in Café Chaos
His name was Loïc. I couldn’t remember it, so after about four attempts to memorise it, I eventually linked it to stoic. Loic the Stoic. It suited him. He was very intense for his age, just twenty four, and a little morose about his chances/ its chances/ the future. Very stoical. I explained who they were to him – the Stoics - and he corrected me on one of the finer details.
Right. I’m dealing with a really smart guy here.
We talked a lot about sociology and the elitist nature of French society. About the difference between social and symbolic capital and how French power-brokers use symbolic capital to keep the poor in their place. For example, using cultural questions in exams. I don’t know how accurate this is, but I wished I had had some of this ammunition at any number of EU-related conferences I attended for dealing with patronising French delegates.
The single beer turned into three. The music in the bar moved seamlessly back and forth between The Cure and some dreadful heavy metal band. It was as if the bar staff were having an argument about the music and kept switching it on each other.
We talked about Africa a bit. He said Cameroon was very conservative and religious. It sounded just like Ireland about thirty five years ago, actually. He said that when he went home on holidays one time, his uncle the bishop came to see the returned émigré. Instead of kissing the ring, he shook his hand. There was a stunned silence in the house.
I said wait another few years till they find out about the bishop’s illegitimate children and the money he stole from the diocese to educate them.
By midnight I was exhausted and I had to make my way back up the Rue St. Denis and home, but we agreed to meet at the same café for coffee the next morning and tackle Mont Royal, the dormant volcano that rises up above Montreal. And gives it its name of course.
New Jersey girls on the town in Montreal
When I got back to the hostel, Joanne the Aussie nurse who spends most of her time asleep was asleep and Shaila and Cindy, two students from New Jersey, were still up brushing their teeth and giggling a lot. Next morning, I got to have my first all native English speakers’ girl conversation in two weeks. In which I got to
a) Bitch about the impact of humidity on my hair. Shaila and Cindy assured me it was fine.
b) Talk about blokes what I saw/ checked out/ passed on the street. The girls agreed that there were some fine men in Montreal
c) Not have to worry about whether or not the other people could follow my English
It was great.
At breakfast I met a guy from Vancouver called Tyson. Who said he was a little ashamed of the name now, since Tyson had thrown the towel in during his fight a couple of weeks ago. I refrained from asking him whether he was ashamed of the name when Mike T was outed as a Neanderthal rapist. (See, see, I am learning to keep my mouth shut).
Tyson’s of Laotian ethnicity. His family were brought over to Canada after the Vietnam war by the Mennonite Church. Tyson called them extreme Christians. They pitched the family up in northern Manitoba, and they eventually escaped to Winnipeg and then Vancouver. He told me his dad had lived in the jungle for a number of years in Laos, so he reckoned he was involved in the war in some way. He told me that Laos had the unhappy honour of being the most bombed country in the world. I had heard that before. I wonder is it still the case after Afghanistan and Iraq.
Probably.
Tyson was driving from Vancouver to Halifax and back, via Gettysburg, with a friend who is getting married soon. They have three weeks to do the trip. He offered me a ride to Halifax – it was a pity I had my train ticket, as I would have liked to have done a road trip.
Anyways, we both ended up going for coffee to meet Loic the Stoic and spent a very pleasant hour on the terrace looking at Tyson’s photos of Manitoba and talking about wind turbines some more.
Then Loic and I climbed Mont Royal. It’s a dormant volcano in the centre of Montreal that is a big park and provides spectacular views of the city. Too hot. Too high. Great view though. Cannot wait to work on the photos.
Anyways, goodbye to Montreal, where all the women are pencil thin and all the men look like Johnny Depp, and it takes forty minutes to get a cup of crap coffee, but who cares.
I could live there, actually, I really could. I need to check it out in the winter first.
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