When I think about why my husband and I rented our studio apartment in Montreal, one reason stands out as clearly as the lights of the Phillipsburg border station: No more midnight drives back after the fireworks. After the opera. After the Jazz Festival. After the Hong Kong Kung-Fu Sci-Fi Erotic Film Festival. No more.
We’ve been going to Montreal on a regular basis for 16 years now. The first ritual we adopted was spending Christmas there. Our large families are far-flung and rarely met at one house, anyway. After flying out West for summer reunions, flying again at Christmas was out of the question. We figured that Chinatown wouldn’t be closed on Christmas, and on a whim in 1983 we drove there right after opening our gifts on Christmas morning. Sure enough, the dim sum restaurants were jammed with Chinese families, and the spirit was certainly festive. After all, this is a “free” holiday if you aren’t Christian.
We discovered that the greenhouses at the Botanical Garden are also open that day, with a magnificent display of decorations — not only the poinsettias, but also cyclamen and the entire orchid house were in full bloom. What a treat to wander through that steamy micro-climate in the middle of frozen Montreal. This became our Christmas ritual, unchanged for a decade.
Finding out these secrets only encouraged us to be more adventurous. We spent one weekend visiting neighborhoods that on the city map had strange names or patterns of streets. This led us to accidentally discover Jamaican grocery stores, Malaysian restaurants, Salsa dance clubs. At a Haitian grocery store we found business cards for a Haitian restaurant, miles and miles north on Pie IX — in English, Pius IX, a revered Pope, but pronounced “pee-noof” in French.
We were at that very spot the night that Baby Doc lost Haiti. People were going nuts, and the food was great. We saw this as a sign that we’d been given a mission: Learn about this city and tell others.
So, we went deeper. Reading the weekly newspapers we found even more obscure restaurants, arcane film screenings and esoteric facts about Montreal politics. We rode buses to the end of the line and back. We listened to the morning traffic reports on CBC during the week to learn the names of the main streets.
I barely speak conversational French, but we found that when people figured out we were from Vermont and not from Ontario, they’d either help us along with our limping French or move smoothly into English. For all the contentiousness ascribed to the language issue, we found that people in shops, restaurants, entertainment venues and in the M&ro were always helpful and polite.
If you can speak any French at all and just try, you’ll find Francophones appreciate your attempt. On the other hand, we’ve also overhead Anglophone employees complaining that they have to address obviously English-speaking patrons in French first, because of the language law. In those cases, you get “Bonjour, Madame. How may I help you?”
The money exchange issue was also easier than we expected. The ATM machines are on the same worldwide network as our local banks. Put in the card, and that wonderfully colored Canadian money comes out, with the bank statement the next month recording the withdrawal at bank exchange rates. No travelers checks, no money changers; we started frequenting the ATMs convenient to our favorite haunts.
We began to feel more like locals and less like tourists. Our friends back in Vermont started asking us for recommendations on lodging, restaurants, where to buy a bridesmaid’s dress. We built directories on our computer about festivals, best places to watch fireworks, and the location of the Rocket Richard Memorial hockey rink.
But as happens with most vacations, there was the dread factor: about halfWay through you start thinking about “the end.” On those trips to Montreal, the reality of the drive home would strike first at check-out time on Sunday. Reality would really set in at 8 p.m. when it was time to head back to Burlington. It was the same drive back, every time: the orange lights on the Trans-Can highway — don’t miss the St. Jean exit or well be in Sherbrooke — and then Phillipsburg at 11 p.m and questioning at customs.
Two years ago this May, we were having a cup of coffee on Laurier and I was thinking: fireworks festival, Jazz Festival, Film Festival. By now we were planning our summers around these. Why not formalize a summer vacation in Montreal? Isn’t the city full of students leaving for home? Wouldn’t it be like Burlington, where the “sublet available” flyers start fluttering in April?
We checked the classifieds and, indeed, found many sublets available. We drove around checking out the neighborhoods and facades of the buildings, and an idea began taking shape: a twomonth sublet in July and August would give us lodging for both the Jazz Festival and most of the Film Festival, with no check-out time. We could drive up on Friday, and be back at work Monday morning. We could finally shop at Jean Talon market and go right “home” to cook a fabulous dinner.
But Canada is a foreign country. So, on the next trip up we stopped at the Canadian immigration and posed the question. Happily, the only limitation was on imported furniture. We might have to pay duty. Otherwise, if we weren’t attempting to establish residency or looking for a job in Quebec, there were no restrictions whatsoever.
That’s all we needed to hear. Armed with a roll of quarters and classifieds, I started making calls. It wasn’t until I heard the first answering machine that I knew I had another problem: what phone number to leave for a return call. And would anyone call us in Vermont? I left pleading messages, and finally someone did call us during the week. He was a Concordia student from Hong Kong going home for the summer; he wanted someone to finish out the last two months of his lease. We made an appointment to see his place that weekend.
For the next three days we hemmed and hawed: Could we do this? Did we deserve this? Was it dangerous? All around us, however, we had friends renting summer camps on the lake, getting their sailboats out of dry dock for the summer, planning that bicycle trip to the south of France, leaving for the islands. What we were doing was unconventional, perhaps, but not fundamentally different. We’re taking our summer vacation every weekend instead of for two weeks, we rationalized, and we’ll be in Montreal instead of on the lake.
Moreover, with the decline of the Canadian dollar the cost was surprisingly affordable. Our monthly rent would be about the same as one weekend at a nice Montreal hotel, and certainly less than a long weekend at most Vermont resorts, or a weekend in Boston or Saratoga. Still, even though we could rationalize it, the apartment still seemed a little too indulgent, probably because we didn’t know anyone else doing such a thing. Finally, we realized the only obstacle was guilt. We got over it.
So we took a double air mattress and some kitchen things up to outfit the studio apartment, which was conveniently located one block from the Atwater Metro, just off St. Catherine. We could walk back at night from anywhere downtown, and we usually did. We could spend all of Sunday in the city, then either stay over until Monday or leave Sunday night late. We could shop at the Atwater Market and bring home a feast, catch a classic film at that beaux-arts gem, the Imperial Theatre, then walk back. And believe me, midnight on St. Catherine is a lot more fun than midnight at U.S. Customs and Immigration.
It was a great summer, but when it started to wind down we realized that we didn’t want to give up this “summer camp.” We wanted to try this for a year. So, as the lease ran out we looked around and found a better studio for the same price closer to downtown. We renewed for a second year last September.
Our new neighborhood is between St. Catherine and Sherbrooke near the Fine Arts Museum. It’s an amazing multicultural mix, with women in chador selling pizza, a Lebanese pharmacist, a Parisian French restaurant, a Thai restaurant where you can bring your own wine and a wood-buming-oven baker of Montreal bagels. There’s a grocery with five different kinds of feta cheese. We are one block from the Metro, but only a 15-minute walk from Eaton Centre in the heart of downtown. A 20-minute walk takes us up the side of Mount Royal past the Cuban Consulate to the observation plaza and the skating rink. There’s a bakery on the corner with fresh croissants starting at 7 a.m.
We continue to explore unusual events and out-of-theway restaurants. But sometimes we just close the door and spend four hours on Saturday reading the Toronto Globe and Mail. We’ve gone to Colombian dance parties at the recreation center next to the Catholic church on Rachel and St. Urbain. We put our radio in the window to pick up the UVM hockey games while eating take-out barbeque from Billy’s House of Wings. We cheered along with 200 expatriate South Americans at Champs Sports Bar last fall when Chile beat Peru for the last spot at the World Cup in France, and we’ll haunt the sports bars this summer for the satellite feeds of the playoffs.
Montreal is only 90 minutes away, but we may as well be on a different continent. As a friend used to say — parodying the advertisement of a Waitsfield restaurant — “It’s like going to Europe without hardly leaving Vermont.”
It isn’t just the sign,law, which mandates that no outdoor signs be in English, and that indoors the French typeface has to be at least twice the size of the English. It isn’t just the ambiance, which is cosmopolitan, sophisticated and a little nihilistic all at once. For us, it’s the pleasure. It’s the people. It’s the food. This is not a province settled by Puritans and Calvinists, after all. And increasingly, Montreal has a world face, not just a French face. The diversity of culture has truly widened our horizons. The view from here sure beats a boat.
This article appears in Mar 18-24, 1998.
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