Montreal: it's the closest thing
to a foreign city. 750 miles. Oh, Toronto is closer. So's
Ottawa. But they're not so foreign. They speak French in
Montreal.
The city's just across the St.
Lawrence Seaway from upstate New York, a mighty stone's
throw from Vermont. It's the southernmost city in the
vast Quebec Province, with 3 million people.
Forty-percent of Quebeqois live in greater Montreal. The
city is on an island, bounded by the St. Lawrence and the
Ottawa rivers. By train, it's an easy trip: a coach to
Toronto from Niagara Falls, Canada, with a 3-hour layover
in Toronto, then board the CN/VIA train to Montreal
(1-800-872-7245).
Karen and I do just that, on a Monday.
A "sleeper" round-trip fare costs about $150 each. A
layover in Toronto gives us time to wander around the
city and its bookstores, and a Chinese meal.
At Toronto's World's Biggest
Bookstore, we pick up a few books: Patch Adams'
Gesundheit!, Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism,
William Stevens' A Change in the Weather, Jerry Mander's
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, and a
book on Crete. My single bag is getting heavy; it will
get heavier.
The 540 miles to Montreal from Toronto
is a breeze if you're stretched out in a berth, reading
or sleeping. A wake-up rap at 7:00 a.m. from "Jacques"
gives us time to stuff ourselves with yogurt, fruit,
pastries, coffee &endash; (part of the price of the
sleeper) and we're ready for Montreal an hour
later.
It's too early to drop our two bags
off at the YMCA, so we wander down to Old Montreal along
the St. Lawrence wharf where the only thing open is the
Basilique Notre-Dame in Old Montreal, built when the city
was founded in 1642 (and rebuilt in 1823). What interests
us most are the massive paintings, sandwiched between the
programmatic "stations of the cross," of the interaction
depicted between the French colonials and the Iroquois
and Huron: the French women, for example, are shown as
pious, highly coifed, stiff. In a word, ersatz. The
Indian women are depicted as earthy, natural, interested
in the nature that surrounds them. In a word, savages.
It's hard to read the artist's intent. Like Goya with his
royal family portraits, maybe he (or she) got one over on
the Catholic Church.
Karen is impressed with the city's
homage to the central role women played in its founding:
Marguerite Bourgeoys, Jeanne Mance, Marguerite
d'Youville. I agree, noting the trademarked big red
puckered lips kiss in "Montreal" flashed at us from
brochures and billboards.
It's time to check in to the YMCA,
drop off our bags, take a shower. With taxes, our
reserved double-occupancy room costs around $35 U.S. For
the overworked and underpaid staff, checking in is
protracted, but gives us an opportunity to see and hear
our fellow transients: from the remnants of the far-flung
French Empire - Algeria, Morocco, Guinea, Congo
Brazzaville, Cameroon, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cochin
China. The ethnic and racial diversity that's a
consequence of French imperialism and colonialism are
clearly different in Montreal compared to the other the
major cities in English-speaking Canada; but the nuances,
except for an acceptance of surface differences (dress,
for example), escapes us. We're snapshot tourists, after
all (though we haven't brought our camera).
There are a few European tourists too,
checking in. No French. Swedes and Germans. mostly. We're
given the wrong key to our 6th floor room but eventually
we get the right one. Our L-shaped room is tiny - shower
and toilets are nearly a city block away - with a single
light bulb over the sink. The rickety fragile-looking
bunk bed wobbles under the weight of a dufflebag. Dozens
of pigeons coo on the windowsill, waiting their turn to
get inside an open window in a room next door. Wreckers
are taking down buildings all around us. We assume
they'll tell us if the Y is on the demolition
schedule.
The next day we switch to Hotel Viger
in Old Montreal, a B&B hotel (third floor walkup):
cheaper, cleaner, quieter, about the same price as the Y,
run by efficient Algerians.
It's March, and cold. Snow piles here
and there in the city reach heights of 30 feet and more.
There's a break in the weather and it's just above
freezing and sunny and the Montrealers are out in full
force, dressed in leathers. Fully a third of the men and
women wear fashionable leather jackets; many of the women
sport black leather pants. Clearly they're more
acclimated to the cold than we are.
My attempts at French &endash; even a
"bonjour" now and then &endash; are met with English. How
do they size me up so quickly? Karen says it's my raggedy
red coat. "Nobody wears red." It's true. Maybe it's a
British thing.
Inevitably, the people Karen speaks to
think she is French; her accent is Parisian, having lived
in Paris for a year. She enjoys Quebec French much more
than Parisian.
Montrealers are truly bilingual. They
don't speak English with any sort of accent, unlike, say
Premier Chretien with his Canuk-sounding English. They
have spoken English since infancy.
We spend a day wandering the city:
bookshops and bakeries, old buildings and coffee houses.
More to rest our feet, we stop in at Dow Planetarium to
see a show on the sun. The name "Dow" puts me off, still
stuck in the 60s and associating DOW with the manufacture
of napalm. There are only a few of us in the
planetarium's audience. The huge peanut-looking light
machine in the center whirls frantically around, trying
to impress us, but there's no hope. The technology is
ancient. We could only be impressed by the complexity of
the content, but that too falls short. Babytalk
astronomy.
With all its students, the average age
of the city's population seems to be about 23. We look
for The Yellow Door, a famed coffee house that was the
first stop for many U.S. draft dodgers and other Vietnam
war opponents in the 60's. It isn't open until Thursday.
Amazing it's still there at all.
We wander through McGill, one of the
city's four major universities, clinging to the sloping
side of Plateau Mont Royal (from which the city gets its
name). The university is on prime real estate. It's where
the French in 1535 encountered the major Iroquois
village, Hochelaga. There are not many lines in the
average tour guide devoted to the obliteration of the
indigenous populations.
With all its students, the average age
of the city's population seems to be about 23. We look
for The Yellow Door, a famed coffee house that was the
first stop for many U.S. draft dodgers in the 60's. It
isn't open until Thursday. Amazing it's still there at
all.
We hike the mountain and its
elaborate, multi-tiered park system, designed by
Frederick Law Olmstead (landscape architect who designed
New York City's Central Park, and Point Chautauqua,
etc.), along with runners, dog-walkers, bikers ("Bicycle"
magazine rated Montreal the best city in North America
for its biking) and others - to reach the mountain summit
and its huge lighted cross - though towering over the
Christian symbol are television, radio and telephone
antennae.
Our plan is helter-skelter. Karen has
a map and certain objectives: Place Royale square where
the Iroquois Confederacy fought the French. And
Pointe-a-Calliere, the mostly underground museum that
shows the ruins of ancient buildings, the ancient sewage
and river system, first European cemetery (done up like a
working dig). We do these things.
I'm more interested in randomly
wandering around, perhaps because I'm too lazy to study
the travel guides. Late in the evening, we drop in at the
IMAX, located along the wharf. It's ironic. Like many
others in the audience, we are tourists in Montreal who
are going to a travel film about yet another part of the
world where we are yet again tourists. But we let the
irony go. That's the nature of big cities. There are no
IMAX theaters near Mayville. The 3D film, "Galapagos", is
short and simplistic, but underwater photography and
sound puts us in the middle of huge schools of fish,
swooshing above, below and behind us; and amidst flocks
of nesting, flightless cormorants, and iguana closer than
we'll ever experience them. Our own scuba memories of
diving off Belize's coral reefs in depths of 60 feet are
nearly overwhelmed by the film.
Old Montreal shuts down early. Night
life centers on The Village, the city's homosexual
community; and the Latin Quarter, and most anywhere there
are students. Montrealers don't seem to be overly uptight
about the commercialized sex that's a part of any big
city. The peep shows and "adult" book and paraphernalia
shops are sandwiched in between haute couture, banks,
Burger Kings and upscale furniture stores.
Hungry, we head for Chinatown, just
west of Old Montreal, and look for the place the locals
seem to be eating. Finding it, we feast at a Cantonese
smorgasbord. It occurs to me that chinatowns - ethnic
enclaves, communities, commercial districts surely - are
also, in a sense, ghettos. Montreal's reflects the
history of French Indochina colonialism, though the
nuances of this escapes me, a snapshot tourist.
Back in our room, stuffed once more
and dead tired, having walked most of Montreal, we turn
on the tube. We don't have television in our home in
Mayville, so it's a trip, now and then, watching. But
Montreal TV seems almost as bad as the U.S. counterpart.
A lot of Hollywood films and TV re-runs, dubbed into
French (the dubbing is not so much for the Montrealers,
but for the rest of the province). We watch a few minutes
of Kojak. Telly Savalas says, sucker hanging out of his
mouth, "Qui aime-tu, babie?" ("Who love's ya, baby?") We
turn the tube off.
Like the Chautauqua area, the scramble
for the tourist dollar subsides during winter, and
weekdays are less tourist-oriented than weekends. It's a
good time to visit. Much of the city seems to disappear
underground during the winter: miles and miles of
well-lit sub-city walks lined with shops, mostly
connected to the subway system.
After croissants and coffee, we're off
for our third and last day: by train to the Olympic
Village, site of the 1976 Summer Olympics, just east of
downtown Montreal. The place has been turned into various
ecological exhibits: biodome, insectarium, butterfly
gardens and the like. We take it all in - along with the
hundreds of racially mixed bused-in young school
children. We even sign on for the ride up the world's
silliest elevator shaft - Montreal Tower - arched over
the stadium. We have yet another wrap-around view of the
city.
In the evening, after dinner at Le
Commensal, a vegetarian weigh-your-food restaurant in the
Latin Quarter (squeezed between McGill and the University
of Quebec), we hunt for a National Film Board on Rue St.
Denis, but are stopped short by a showing of The Fight
Club from the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. The film stars
Helena Bonham Carter, Brad Pitt, Edward Norris, Jared
Leto. The film, like the book, is perhaps unfortunately
titled. First thing: it's not about professional boxing.
The wonder, to me, is the level of sophistication (or
alienation) the writers-producers-directors-actors assume
on the part of their audience. This, after all, is a
major film, not some sort of experimental low-budget
flick. Ultimately, it's a reactionary film, but
brilliant. Go see it. It's playing in Montreal, just $3
(Canadian).
On a Friday morning, too soon, we're
aboard a commuter train destined for Toronto. Before the
train is underway, cell phones pop out; business men are
doing deals in English: Americans, Canadians… We're
not out of the station and I already miss Montreal, the
language mostly: not understanding banal conversations or
cell phone monologues, I'm left to my own banal thoughts
and observations.
Friday evening our car inches forward
in the line to the U.S. border check. We about what lies
we're going to have to tell. The Customs officer leans
slightly out of his booth window:
"What are you bringing
back?"
"Nothing," I answer.
"Go on," he guffaws.
Is his response ironic, or is he
giving us the go-ahead to re-enter the U.S.?
Whatever, we drive on through, back
into the land of business.
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