Say that, for the last two years running, you have spent your summers basically getting paid to live with your best friend in a desert paradise. Next say that, this year, you can’t, because you’re too busy with your thesis even to post on your blog every once in a while and far too poor to fly to Mexico. Now say that she announces she’s going to Montréal to study English for the summer, a city you’ve always wanted to see and which you’ll soon be living twelve extra hours away from. Grammatical quandaries aside, tell me, what would you do?
Here in Montréal, people are incredibly stylish. There are poor people, of course, but in general it seems that poverty is considered extremely unfashionable. Even the Mormons are setting aside the ubiquitous black backpack for a sleek satchel, and schnazzing up the white-button-down-and-black-pants look with a snappy necktie. It’s intimidating at first, but it turns out that people here are very very very friendly. They love their city and want you to love it, too, no matter how you’re dressed, and they’ll even tolerate your crappy French if you speak crappy French (which I do).
For instance: tonight we were exhausted after, oh, I dunno, six solid hours of walking (on top of yesterday’s twelve), and we wanted to grab some dinner someplace close by. We asked a girl walking down the street if she knew of a good Indian place nearby, and she said no, but tell you what: go into that hotel over there, and ask for Joey, the concierge. Tell him Maria sent you, and he’ll find you a restaurant. So we did that, and Joey magically procured the business hours for “the best Indian restaurant in the city” for us, then gave us directions. “You see that bank there, on the corner?” he asked. Sure, we said. “Okay,” he said. “Turn down that street, go past the bank, and it’s the first restaurant on the left.”
The first restaurant on the left, people.
Montréal is a city of baby-daddies. I haven’t scanned my photos thoroughly, but I’m confident that in the background of at least a couple I will find young professional fathers pushing their kids in strollers or carrying them around on their shoulders, because you couldn’t throw a rock in Montréal without hitting a baby in the arms of some tall, stubbly francophone. It’s infuriatingly sexy.
The next time I film a zombie movie, I will definitely set it in Montréal. Due to the long, miserable winters, an entire parallel urbanscape has developed underground. It haphazardly connects the Métro stations across the city, and in the event of zombie attack you could just seal it off and live down there for months and still shop at American Apparel whenever you wanted. Of course, with so many entrances and exits it would be impossible to keep the zombies out forever, lucky for my plotline.
Nohemí and I have walked all over this city, and we have brought one another up to date, and like always, it feels like no time has elapsed since the last time we were together. And, like always, we have talked about a million things that make me think, and make me think that maybe I think more than other people do sometimes, and that I like that about myself and about my friends. We swapped memories about our friend who died last year, and somehow it felt as though by evoking him from a café-térrace hundreds of miles from his or her or my home, we put something important into the world for a moment.
