Montreal

It's been two years since I was out of the country, in Mexico, so it was time to dust off the passport and visit Canada. Glenn had been in Montreal a week and a half already with his TTU architecture students, studying at McGill University. Normally Glenn would have been back at UDLA in Puebla, Mexico this summer but swine flu paranoia got the better of everyone so since the students had already paid the fee for their travel abroad semester they were off to Canada instead. Glenn had been housed in a small apartment-like dorm with a kitchen so that's where I would also be staying, free, on Texas Tech's travel budget. For the price of an airline ticket I could be living cheap in a foreign land.

The flight up was pretty easy and efficient, an hour to Dallas, then a direct three hour flight from Dallas to Montreal. My seat companion on this trip turned out to be a young Australian boy named Rob, who was the same age as Ian. He was flying from Sydney to meet up with a friend, also Australian, and after Montreal they would visit New York. He reminded me a lot of one of my cousin's sons, Arthur, and he was smart and well-informed. He was also walking with a limp and using a cane, which was rather a sad story. Apparently he had broken both bones of his lower leg clean through in a soccer game. While recovering in hospital he developed an infection in the muscles which wasn't caught in time. By the time they treated the infection and operated on the leg, all of the muscle below the break had atrophied and died, and there was no way to restore it. Faced with a permanent limp, being unable to do his job efficiently as a surveyer, and just waiting for more convalescing, he decided to take off and travel. I told him that since he was young that in a few years, with some stem cell research and modern medical advances, they might be able to restore his leg or at least give him a super-bionic one. He seemed fairly cheerful and accepting about it, nevertheless. I even got his e-mail to drop him a line. We talked about many things, including politics, family, Radiohead, and American TV shows and he was even aware of who Buddy Holly was when I told him where I lived. Those two words seem to always have an effect. If someone abroad has never heard of Lubbock just say "Buddy Holly" and they'll nod and smile. I enjoy those little moments where you meet someone from another side of the world and form a little mini-friendship even though you will never see them again. It gives you a sense of connection, a larger view of humanity. And now I feel connected to a boy named Rob, somewhere out there in the world.

Montreal, as I discovered, is actually an island, with the St. Lawrence River flowing south of it, and the Riviere des Prairies cutting across on the north. It's name is derived from the central mountain (actually a large hill) called Mont Royal. That, and a number of other hills give it some nice topography and some energizing walks, but none of the hills are as steep as San Francisco is. The Pierre Trudeau airport is west of the city, so when I landed, and after going through customs and saying good-bye to Rob, when he found his friend, I caught a bus to the downtown bus station where Glenn would meet me. Montreal is the second largest city in Canada, and is in the province of Quebec, which is French speaking. Anyone from Quebec is called a Quebecois (pronounced Kebekwa). I loved that sense of being dropped in a foreign country where instantly everyone spoke French and all the signs and billboards were also in French. Charming. On the other hand, to avoid a lot of gesturing and trying to sound out awkward French phrases based on three years of high school French,everyone there is bilingual, so as soon as you respond in English, they do as well, in a lovely French accent.

At the bus station Glenn found me then took me underground to the Metro to catch our train to the dormitory. We used the Metro so many times in my stay there that I think I spent more time underground than above, racing across the city in one place, only to pop up like a prairie dog in another part. Glenn purchased week long passes so we could just buzz through the turnstiles at ease and then be on our way within minutes to another stop. There were three major underground routes, or lines, so even a transfer was as easy as a flight of stairs to another platform. Living in a city like Lubbock that barely has any buses for mass transport, it was a fairly new experience just being able to whiz along so quickly in a city so large (about 3 million). As in any big city though, the metro has that kind of grimy weariness and urban seediness to it: the seats all warm with the contact of thousands of derrieres, the poles and handles to hold on to, a germaphobes worst nightmare, the faces of people blank and unfocused, but it was a great way to actually see the variety of residents of the city, a very cosmopolitan city, where every part of the world is represented: Africans, Europeans, Asians, Middle Easterners, Hispanics. Montreal also has a large gay population, but not very overt. I only saw one male couple holding hands. And gay marriage is legal here, which seems to have worked out just fine. I saw no signs of the apocalypse or the crumbling of civilization.

Meanwhile back on the Metro we got off about a block from our dorm, which was actually a couple of stops away, a few miles, from the McGill campus, and was, in fact, a remodeled warehouse. This was obvious in the structure of the dorm rooms, which all had about 16 foot ceilings. With the smallness of the living spaces this gave the effect of being at the bottom of a fish aquarium. Still, we had our own mini apartment and Glenn had stocked the refrigerator with nice cheese, crusty French bread, and wine, so that we could have a light, Bohemian supper.