It’s been a nice mix of relaxing and eventful here in Longueuil the last couple of days. The eventful? Exploring downtown Montréal, getting more than a little lost on a bike ride in Parc Michel-Chartand, and acquiring a new best friend in the neighborhood. The relaxing? Plenty of good reading and lounging time, late dinners on the patio with Guylaine and Richard, and a delicious night at a bistro called Le Tire-Bouchon (The Corkscrew).
Downtown: Downtown Montreal feels a lot like the downtown of large American cities, except cleaner and there’s a higher probability you will run into a beautiful old church. Highlights included strolling through McGill University’s campus, going inside Marie-Reine-du-Mone Cathedral (which is supposed to be a scale model of St Peter’s Basilica), window shopping along Rue Sainte-Cathérine, and seeing some of Les FrancoFolies de Montréal musical festival. I didn’t like this district as much as Vieux-Montréal, just because it didn’t feel much different than the US, but I still had a great afternoon. The only difficulty was finding the metro to return back to Longueuil. I found my way back to the location easily enough, but the metro station is located somewhere amid what was seemingly a small civilization (fittingly called The Underground City). You had to look for tiny little signs with hard to interpret arrows pointing you along amid a giant mall and hundreds of crazed shoppers. Richard told me later that it is the largest underground complex in the world. There are apartment buildings, hotels, condos, banks, offices, museums, universities, an amphitheatre, and many more malls and metro stations all connected through this crazy complex.
Parc Michel-Chartand: This is a huge park in Longueuil not far from where I am living. At Guylaine’s suggestion and assurances, I went on a bike ride to this park. Guylaine was right, it was fairly easy to find (aside from accidently biking on a golf cart road for a hot minute), but when I say this park is huge, I mean huge. Apparently it’s 1,850,000 m2, and 235 km of bike trails traverse it and the other 300 parks of the city. These Canadians cannot get enough bike-riding. So I found the park and it was lovely. Parts of it felt like Fontenelle Forest in Omaha (I even saw a deer!), while other parts included a huge community garden, a toboggan hill, numerous playgrounds, and a tranquil open area with a pond. I enjoyed myself a lot. However, it seems as if this park is accessible to everyone in Longueuil. It also seems as if everyone in Longueuil lives by a golf course and has a pool in their backyard. Put all of this together and it was virtually impossible to find my way back. I had been traversing through and around the park in every sort of direction and had forgotten where I had entered. I tried a few different paths and they all looked the same. I eventually made it back, but I’m not even sure if it was the same way I had used to get there! It’s a good thing I became more familiar with this park while I was by myself and not with two 9 year olds.
One final observation about parks and then we can talk about something else. I know that whenever I pass someone hiking or biking on the trail at home, we often say hello or nod. Here, that never happened. It seemed weird to me at first that a people said to be so friendly never really acknowledged each other at this park, but I have a theories as to why. Perhaps the people of Canada don’t view these activities as out of the ordinary. You don’t go around saying hi to people you pass on the street or waving to people in their cars. Whereas in the US we feel we might have a special bond with other walkers, hikers and bikers, maybe in Canada riding your bike or walking around a park is just something everyone does and it would be too hard to greet everyone.
My charges: Since my arrival, I hadn’t really had much time to spend with the kids between school and other activities. Yesterday however they didn’t have any practices or shows and we got to play on the playground across from their house. We made an obstacle course with sidewalk chalk, which included one portion in which you had to faire la poule* (dance like a chicken). Soon half the neighborhood had joined in and it was interesting to see how and when they learned that I wasn’t Canadian. Soon I became something of a collector’s item with kids quizzing me on how to do math or say the colors in French and testing their geographical knowledge of the US. When we were playing on the playground equipment a bespectacled tyke named Nicholas-Claude took a liking to me. At one point he grabbed my leg and refused to let me go even, when I was walking. This lead to the kids all called him my petit ami (boyfriend) and Ophélie getting a little frustrated. I believe she pretended to twist her ankle just to get me back!
That evening we went to dinner where I had a fabulous 3 course meal and got to meet Richard’s sister and her husband. The kids started getting impatient though so I ended up playing some games with them on the side of the restaurant. These games are wonderful for my French. One of them consisted of a person crying out “J’ai perdu mon wicidyce!” (I lost my… some made-up word that I have no idea how to spell). The other people respond “C’est comment, ton wikidyce?” (What’s your wicidyce like?). Then the person responds by describing one of the people in the group. If the description matches you, you try to tag the describer before they run to a designated area. My other favorite activity was telling jokes to the others and getting a score from 1-10. I had the kids cracking up trying to do yoga poses and falling over or being a frog that accidentally catches a bee instead of a fly. These games lasted until late into the night and were good reassurance for me that I am decent enough with the language and pretty good with these kids.
*Interestingly, the French (and the French Canadian) have different words for chicken that you eat and chicken the animal. I guess this isn’t too different from our own language though because we do not pluralize one of the two; if you were to say, “I ate chickens” it would be as if you ate the live animals.
And on that note, The Language: I love being around the French language every day. I get to learn the names of new foods because all of the labels are in French, I ‘borrowed’ some of the French songs on the Portelance-Lavoie family’s iTunes, and I get to be around native speakers. It’s interesting how different the pronunciation of some of the words are. The one that comes to mind now is bien, but I’ve noticed tons. One difference that I do like is that to say you’re welcome here you can say bienvenu rather than the ugly de rien or long je vous en prie. There have been a few funny incidents though. Ophélie was telling me about a gateau (cake) she had eaten, but for some reason my brain switched to Spanish and I thought of a gato. I expressed my surprise right away and we had a good laugh when we realized what had happened. I’ve also mixed up marmotte (marmot) and mammouth (mammoth), two things that are fairly different. It’s good when I make such big mistakes though because then I get corrected right away. With small errors, they are too nice to say anything and then later I feel like a fool when I realize I used the wrong pronoun or conjugated something horribly.
Bye Bye (they legitimately say that here),
Meredit
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