-Blaise Cendrars
When we got back to New Brunswick, we had a long walk ahead of us. After the day before, walking 7km felt like more than it should have. There is this massive bulk of communication towers there we found out was Radio Canada. The lot of it is huge and the wires form a little city, like an industrial plant but no smokestacks or lights--all cables.We met a dark-skinned (maybe part-aboriginal) girl in Sackville named Ellen and her hipster (tall shaggy hair, glasses--like me!) boyfriend who took us to a vegan bakery/deli--we got two soup bowls to go (one free because they burned it--supposedly!), a loaf of bread and some sweets. She explained how burned food causes carcinogens and likened chemistry to artistry "always an ELEMENT of creativity." They said Montreal was a city of sex, in a disparaging way, to which i exclaimed" Great! I love sex!" which put the guy off but the girl laughed. I suppose i was hitting on her. Oh well. C'est la vie! I told them what wonders couchsurfing was. I've yet to hear back from them.
On the way back to the train station we found a more industrial bakery with the door open and a woman signaled us in, where they were selling bread cheap. It felt like we were buying bread on the blackmarket. We bought some fudge there too, blackmarket fudge. I can say with great assuredness that the bakeries in Sackville are superb. I wish we could have stayed there longer. To do it over again, i think i would've skipped a night in Montreal for a time in sackville, oh yes, oh yes.
We made it to the train and had twelve hours before we'd arrive in our first city on the "Big City Hub" of Montreal, Toronto, Québec City and Ottawa.
We got off the train and i must say, i was nervous. Angelique had warned us that the French in Québec were notorious for being rude to people who didn't speak the language, people who didn't even try. Well, fuck. I know a morsel of French, maybe.
So when we got off the train in Charny and knew there was a shuttle we must take to Québec, i was silent. I was silent to the man asking me in French if i was going on the shuttle. I said, no. I thought he was asking if i wanted a cab. Then i figured it out and felt like a twit. But still, i kept silent--getting into the backseat of the "shuttle" (or minivan as we like to call it in English.) I didn't want him to know i spoke English, because he’d immediately pigeon-hole me as a tourist. I chose rather to be a mute, aloof Frenchman instead of taking the risk of speaking. But I’m pretty sure he knew anyway, and just figured I was an asshole. I mean, he obviously did. But with the contraption I had going in my mind, I figured he was taking us way out to the middle of nowhere to rob us.
Oh shit why did we come to this wretched, French-insistent country! I missed the good ol' Tim Horton's Canada so much, immediately.
But no, the guy just dropped off the other passengers, at a bus station, at a hostel, at a hotel, then us? Well, we're going to Rue 4eme (4th Street), I tried to tell him.
What? He asked.
I'm not sure, i told him. I pointed to those words on a piece of paper (Rue 4eme).
He shrugged, laughed a little and said alright--whatever.
He snapped on the meter. I guess he was just planning on prowling 4th street until we found a place that looked nice. Mark thought fast and quickly said, just take us to the train station. He turned off the meter. Phew! I guess the guy wasn't trying to rob us. I was just crazy paranoid and self-conscious not knowing the language, so i made up this evolving scenario that got as bad as possible. Then he pulled out his gun and shot Mark in the face and tasered me. No, no, no. Jk, lol. Simple frightened tourist syndrome. Oh, merde!
Québec is a wonderful looking city, even the train station is austere. Each building is filled with history, a city filled with big white stone monuments. There is an old city and a new city (or greater city). The old city contains an ancient wall preserved from the fight with the British and another citadel which i guess is some kind of fortress.We were staying in a neighborhood called Maizerets (I think) with an acrobat/sailor named Hugo and his girlfriend, an architect, named Emilié. We found out later that because Québec houses the base of Cirque de Soleil, many performers live in the neighborhood we were in--where the circus school is. We showed up at about 8:30 in the morning. Hugo is a thick athlete with a strong square chin and wide-apart eyes; he is a handsome guy. Emilié was a tall, wonderful looking woman with red hair that would be called "ravishing." Her temperament was consistently bright and energetic. She made a feeling that was at once comfortable. When we first saw her, she was wearing a bathrobe. We had come during their breakfast.
Hugo and Emilié were incredibly hospitable, even giving us a key after having known us for all of ten minutes. We were awed, but that's couchsurfing for you. Amazing people everywhere.
Over toast and nutella, Hugo told us about the rocky history of Québec, how it was the oldest settlement in Canada, set up to be the New France. But then the British took over from the Seven Years' War. The Americans tried to "liberate" the City, ceding it as a French-American colony, but failed. Then it was set up as a garrison, to protect British Canada from the newly established America. A turbulent history.
The French secessionists formed out of a racism from the segregation-like act in 1791 put in the constitution that divided Canada into the "Upper" English-speaking colony and the "lower" French. Hence the divide between English-speakers and French-speakers. That also makes the hostility an antiquity, a tradition really. The way North and South is still prodded over the Mason-Dixon line. It's kind-of absurd to carry on about woes from so long ago. Though, how can i knock a people's demand for a particular culture's standards.
Emilié had school in the "Old City'" she said she would take us there. She had an umbrella that said "Merde. Il pleut" And it was the only French that i knew off the bat for the whooooole trip.
We were curious how one becomes a circus performer, so Emilie told us. Hugo had become a circus performer because he used to be a volleyball player. His jumping skills were noticed, so he started to work on professional trampoline acrobatics. From there, he continued on into circus school.
While we were on the bus, Emilié also explained to us how she was involved in constructing (or modelling) green buildings in the area. Her hero was Frank Lloyd Wright, the laureate of Pittsburgh. A man sitting near us was reading a wakeboarding magazine in French; I was happy I could identify what it was. Outside of her academy, Emilié showed us that in Québec the two stores that sell exclusively Christmas regalia are right across the street from one another, in the “Old City” square. She explains how it's both nauseating and cheerfully pleasant. Afterwhich, we separated from her.
Stranded in the midst of the city, knowing no French and aware of the problem that lay in this, we tried to avoid most confrontations. I suppose it is true that people will pretty much ignore you if you don't speak French. I went into several book stores and could find no French-English phrase book. I would assume from this that they don't want your petty half-assed attempts. They want you to know, or to leave. That or i just went to the wrong book-stores. One woman in a restaurant just stepped in front of me, when i hesitated speaking; I let her. It was rude, but fuck it. So she fell into the stereotype. Besides her, we really had little problem. People seemed generally nice, impatient at times, but nice.
Still, it is interesting. The whole of Canada surrounding them speaks English. A large part of their own population does too. There is so much media imported that’s English. Why don’t they just give in. It’s an interminable pride that stands out, way national, way aggressive. It’s at once absurd and majestic. I really liked how French it all was. It’s been under “British” rule since 1861, but they’re sticking to their guns. It’s admirable. The city has that magic feeling of dead souls, of people inhabiting its wall—living history. It’s an old place with old buildings, stone roads and pastel paint on many of the houses, if they’re not built of big white granite stones. I like that image of a city, of it’s being a big monument within a color chromatic. You can feel that wealth of Old in Pittsburgh and in New Orleans and New York City. It takes old buildings with personality. It is staring back at you from balconies and dark open doorways, ghosts. They are ever-present, lost in some subliminal past. It makes the soul warm to walk through it.
We walked around the city for a little while, came to the citadel and climbed it. Another girl we corresponded with on couchsurfing, Meg (or VegMeg is her CS name), asked us to join us for lunch. She was a vegan chick who offered us a place after we had found one. It was only right to thank her in person.
She took us to two of the vegetarian restaurants in the city. One (where the woman stepped in front of me) was a small market. I had delicious kung-pao tofu there. The other was a bigger buffet we went to for dessert. They were both excellent.
Meg was a bit of a critical vegan, completely devoted towards the necessity for Veganism. She criticized me for eating cheese, which she described as "fat that breaks up in your mouth," I have really tried to limit cheese-intake since meeting her. She also told us about interesting farming techniques, like the Santa Cruz Farm in Santa Fe that is entirely vegan, using only plant-based compost and mulch for fertilization. Mark and her talked about the problems of farming, calling dairy and cheese manufacturing "the holocaust" because of the way animals are kept, carted and slaughtered--a phrase I'll never forget.
Meg was a great sweet girl with a terrific humor. She had lived in Quebec City for a few years, having moved there from Ontario for a job. She did not want to learn French, so she just picked it up casually. I guess this could be construed as both rude and egotistical. If you’re going to be in a place as a visitor, the least you could do is make an attempt to learn the culture. Meg just kind of shrugged her shoulders, not my problem. Rude or not, the gesture was kind of charming. I’ll survive. They’ll survive. Let’s not kill each other over loose ends. A ‘whatever’ approach. Hmm. Whatever.
We decided to take off to walk around the city all day, walking through the streets in between rainstorms (it hailed that day, right before our eyes!), or hiding under canopies. When we could we were taking pictures. Mark took the majority of important pictures. I stuck to taking pictures of graffiti, something that always fascinates me. Because it was election time, there were a bunch of campaign posters. For some reason, I found French graffiti really intriguing. I wanted to try to explore the differences in how street-people exposed problems. I found that a lot of French graffiti was seemingly well-informed and some of it was even inspirational, a cry from the self-indulgent name-blasting that usually eats at walls in the States. Then, I guess there’s a lot of different kinds of graffiti everywhere; I shouldn’t be so judgmental.
I bought a bottle of wine and some groceries to make the crisp potatoes and anaheim peppers meal, but it turned out as mush because i fucked it up somehow. Sort of like the game telephone, you repeat something again and again and again--albeit inconsistently—and you have a new result each time: genius or mush.
We watched parcour tricks on youtube, where people leap from fire escape to fire escape like super mario or monkeys
and they showed us the "chinese poles," which one of the people living there, Francis, was his specialty. two very high poles on climbed up like a bear and then did backflips to get onto the other one, tripped out shit.
We talked a lot, about sailing, Québec, Québecois folk music and Hugo and Emilié's misadventures in Europe--like tricking a station agent in Metz into believing their 13-day pass was a 30-day pass and getting lost in the middle of nowhere in Turkey when the train broke down.
Hugo was a seasoned storyteller, you could tell, a born entertainer. He would cup his hand to his mouth to make it static-y when doing impressions of the conductor: "Attention--Ladies and Gentlemen--we have come upon--a slight--delay..." He did impressions, hard stares with pauses and crescendos that erupted into gestures with his hands. Emilié stood fast behind, fact-checking and supplanting the story with asides and alternate gestures. They were like a comic duo, a team.
We also made friends with François, their roommate. There's a picture of him on your right. He told me of his brilliant experience doing missionary work in Honduras. They went down there on Christmas, and the town all had their doors open. Food was being cooked all around and libations were plenty. It was a giant community event, truly happy and they had just arrived. It was the only traveling he had ever done, but it sounded wonderful. He also told me about Bela Fleck, and the importance of the jazz banjo. He explained that the essential difference between jazz opposed to classical comes from the players forming "a whole new arrangement of the song at the same time. playing it for the first time--that's the definition of the movement."
We left the next morning, early early. Took off to Montreal. But not before they told us about a spin-off cirque de soleil called Les Sept Doigts (The Seven Fingers) show we were invited to, with discount "performer's" tickets, I might add. I could only pray we wouldn’t be asked to much acrobatics to prove our authenticity as said “performers.”
Stranded in the midst of the city, knowing no French and aware of the problem that lay in this, we tried to avoid most confrontations. I suppose it is true that people will pretty much ignore you if you don't speak French. I went into several book stores and could find no French-English phrase book. I would assume from this that they don't want your petty half-assed attempts. They want you to know, or to leave. That or i just went to the wrong book-stores. One woman in a restaurant just stepped in front of me, when i hesitated speaking; I let her. It was rude, but fuck it. So she fell into the stereotype. Besides her, we really had little problem. People seemed generally nice, impatient at times, but nice.
Still, it is interesting. The whole of Canada surrounding them speaks English. A large part of their own population does too. There is so much media imported that’s English. Why don’t they just give in. It’s an interminable pride that stands out, way national, way aggressive. It’s at once absurd and majestic. I really liked how French it all was. It’s been under “British” rule since 1861, but they’re sticking to their guns. It’s admirable. The city has that magic feeling of dead souls, of people inhabiting its wall—living history. It’s an old place with old buildings, stone roads and pastel paint on many of the houses, if they’re not built of big white granite stones. I like that image of a city, of it’s being a big monument within a color chromatic. You can feel that wealth of Old in Pittsburgh and in New Orleans and New York City. It takes old buildings with personality. It is staring back at you from balconies and dark open doorways, ghosts. They are ever-present, lost in some subliminal past. It makes the soul warm to walk through it.
We walked around the city for a little while, came to the citadel and climbed it. Another girl we corresponded with on couchsurfing, Meg (or VegMeg is her CS name), asked us to join us for lunch. She was a vegan chick who offered us a place after we had found one. It was only right to thank her in person.She took us to two of the vegetarian restaurants in the city. One (where the woman stepped in front of me) was a small market. I had delicious kung-pao tofu there. The other was a bigger buffet we went to for dessert. They were both excellent.
Meg was a bit of a critical vegan, completely devoted towards the necessity for Veganism. She criticized me for eating cheese, which she described as "fat that breaks up in your mouth," I have really tried to limit cheese-intake since meeting her. She also told us about interesting farming techniques, like the Santa Cruz Farm in Santa Fe that is entirely vegan, using only plant-based compost and mulch for fertilization. Mark and her talked about the problems of farming, calling dairy and cheese manufacturing "the holocaust" because of the way animals are kept, carted and slaughtered--a phrase I'll never forget.
Meg was a great sweet girl with a terrific humor. She had lived in Quebec City for a few years, having moved there from Ontario for a job. She did not want to learn French, so she just picked it up casually. I guess this could be construed as both rude and egotistical. If you’re going to be in a place as a visitor, the least you could do is make an attempt to learn the culture. Meg just kind of shrugged her shoulders, not my problem. Rude or not, the gesture was kind of charming. I’ll survive. They’ll survive. Let’s not kill each other over loose ends. A ‘whatever’ approach. Hmm. Whatever.
We decided to take off to walk around the city all day, walking through the streets in between rainstorms (it hailed that day, right before our eyes!), or hiding under canopies. When we could we were taking pictures. Mark took the majority of important pictures. I stuck to taking pictures of graffiti, something that always fascinates me. Because it was election time, there were a bunch of campaign posters. For some reason, I found French graffiti really intriguing. I wanted to try to explore the differences in how street-people exposed problems. I found that a lot of French graffiti was seemingly well-informed and some of it was even inspirational, a cry from the self-indulgent name-blasting that usually eats at walls in the States. Then, I guess there’s a lot of different kinds of graffiti everywhere; I shouldn’t be so judgmental.
"It is precisely the possibility of realizing a dream that makes life interesting."
"There is only one thing that can make a dream impossible: Fear of failure." "This is a Failure."
Hugo explained that this is an attack on this woman's conservative policy. Being that one of the most vital economic forces of Quebec's economy is the arts, this person calls this woman "Conasse!" or "Bitch!" "The average salary of an artist is $11,000 annually. The threshhold for poverty is $18,000 annually." Then the pun, from "Quebec takes force." to "Quebec makes the force."
This is a cannonball.
I bought a bottle of wine and some groceries to make the crisp potatoes and anaheim peppers meal, but it turned out as mush because i fucked it up somehow. Sort of like the game telephone, you repeat something again and again and again--albeit inconsistently—and you have a new result each time: genius or mush.
We watched parcour tricks on youtube, where people leap from fire escape to fire escape like super mario or monkeys
and they showed us the "chinese poles," which one of the people living there, Francis, was his specialty. two very high poles on climbed up like a bear and then did backflips to get onto the other one, tripped out shit.
We talked a lot, about sailing, Québec, Québecois folk music and Hugo and Emilié's misadventures in Europe--like tricking a station agent in Metz into believing their 13-day pass was a 30-day pass and getting lost in the middle of nowhere in Turkey when the train broke down.
Hugo was a seasoned storyteller, you could tell, a born entertainer. He would cup his hand to his mouth to make it static-y when doing impressions of the conductor: "Attention--Ladies and Gentlemen--we have come upon--a slight--delay..." He did impressions, hard stares with pauses and crescendos that erupted into gestures with his hands. Emilié stood fast behind, fact-checking and supplanting the story with asides and alternate gestures. They were like a comic duo, a team.
We also made friends with François, their roommate. There's a picture of him on your right. He told me of his brilliant experience doing missionary work in Honduras. They went down there on Christmas, and the town all had their doors open. Food was being cooked all around and libations were plenty. It was a giant community event, truly happy and they had just arrived. It was the only traveling he had ever done, but it sounded wonderful. He also told me about Bela Fleck, and the importance of the jazz banjo. He explained that the essential difference between jazz opposed to classical comes from the players forming "a whole new arrangement of the song at the same time. playing it for the first time--that's the definition of the movement." We left the next morning, early early. Took off to Montreal. But not before they told us about a spin-off cirque de soleil called Les Sept Doigts (The Seven Fingers) show we were invited to, with discount "performer's" tickets, I might add. I could only pray we wouldn’t be asked to much acrobatics to prove our authenticity as said “performers.”
OH BOY, CAN'T WAIT FOR LES SEPT DOIGTS
This is the best thing you have ever written.
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