3 November
At noon we carry on our tour of Montréal à Table, the festival during which the city's restaurants put together gently priced menus, by going for brunch at Jacopo, an Italian place in the heart of Old Montreal on pretty Place Jacques-Cartier. The setting is authentic and refined, but the food won't be a revelation: fresh ingredients, honest dishes, not much imagination. For the price we can't complain, and we come out with our bellies stretched tight. A short walk around the centre to digest, then we head home to spend the rest of this Sunday indoors, like Montrealers with nothing left to prove.
7 November
The week slips by like any ordinary working week. We're each finding our feet in our new jobs, and a healthy little routine is settling in, the kind that does you good after months of living out of a bag. Tomorrow night Niska, the rapper from Évry, is playing the Olympia in Montreal, and we're going with four other French people we “met” on the Facebook group for working holiday visa holders in Montreal, whose thirty thousand members have mostly become permanent residents, incidentally. A concert being no place to get to know each other, we agreed early in the week to meet the night before for a drink.
We meet straight after work at 5:30 pm at L'Abreuvoir, a big downtown pub that combines a nightclub, a bar and a huge, very convivial heated terrace. Around the table: Marc, from Réunion, who has lived in Montreal for four years; Célia, a student at Centrale Lyon on a university exchange, originally from Morangis, a town Stéphane knows well; Kevin, another Réunionese (the community is big here); and Yacine, a working holiday visa holder who arrived a year earlier. We talk about everything and nothing: the cold we'll have to tame, life in Montreal, Quebecers, France. Pints follow pints, a burger comes along, and everyone heads home sure that tomorrow night will be a good one.
8 November
Friday night finally arrives. Montreal has its own Olympia too: a solid concert hall built in 1925 on the model of its big Parisian sister, with exactly the same number of seats. At 8 pm we meet our new friends on rue Sainte-Catherine, in front of a sign announcing a sell-out. A DJ warms up the crowd with a mix of American hits and fashionable French rap. The show is supposed to start at 9, but the hour passes and you can feel unease on stage: the DJ is stalling, replaying tracks we've already heard. We start to worry, because a strange syndrome afflicts French rappers in Montreal: they cancel their concerts or, failing that, botch them. In September Koba La D, another son of Évry, had come on stage an hour and a half late, visibly high, and left after twenty-five minutes. It's almost 10 pm when Niska finally appears, for an hour of energetic but inevitably truncated set: at 11 the bouncers signal that time is up. We come out drenched in sweat, happy but a little frustrated, and end the night at the bar from the evening before.
10 November
This weekend, for the third year running, the Zero Waste Festival is being held, organised by the Quebec association of the same name. Talks, practical workshops and an exhibitors' fair cover a thousand topics: zero waste at school or at the office, living without plastic, eco-anxiety, sustainable tourism… We spend the afternoon browsing the stands and listening to the speakers. In Paris a zero-waste lifestyle can quickly get expensive; in Montreal, as we'd noticed, prices are much gentler. The city has plenty of bulk shops where you can buy not only food but also cleaning and cosmetic products at reasonable prices.
Compared with Australian or American cities, Montreal is ahead on ecology. Many buildings and houses have a bin reserved for organic waste, destined for compost. But there's a long way to go. Although banned in several municipalities, the plastic bag is still everywhere, even if reusable bags have become the norm over the last few years. And in the big chains, Costco, Walmart or Metro, over-packaging rules: fruit and vegetables still sleep under plastic.
The average Montrealer throws away 460 kilos of waste a year. The city wants to cut that mountain by ten kilos per person per year by 2030. To get there, it plans first to tackle food waste by forbidding supermarkets and institutions from throwing food away, which they'll have to hand over to food banks instead. Other measures will follow: the ban, planned for spring, on single-use plastic items, and a ban on shops throwing away or destroying unsold clothes.
16 November
This week the first heavy snow of the season fell. Technically it's still autumn, but the thermometer and the landscape make us forget it: nearly ten centimetres piled up in a single night. The city has pulled a thick white sheet over itself, and the ski resorts around are getting ready to open within a week. Before it all melts, we go for a walk in the huge park next door with Guewen, a friend from south-west France we met in Australia.
Surprise: when we arrive, a trail several kilometres long has already been laid… for cross-country skiing! The scene is so picturesque we can hardly believe it. We're in the middle of the city, the park is ringed by big boulevards, and yet you only have to step a few metres away from the road to feel you're in the Canadian countryside. We stick to the footpath so as not to end up under the skis of the day's few cross-country skiers, and walk for an hour and a half without reaching the end of the park. At 3:30 pm the light is already fading; at 4 we start to freeze and hurry back to the apartment.
30 November
For two weeks now the cold hasn't let go of us: the thermometer rarely climbs above two degrees, and this sunny Saturday is no exception. In fact it's often on these dazzling days that it's coldest. A little clarification is in order, because French clichés about Canada die hard. Need we recall that Canada is the second-largest country in the world after Russia, with nearly ten million square kilometres? That's roughly the size of the European continent, eighteen times the size of France. So saying “it's cold in Canada” without saying which province doesn't mean much. It's like saying “it's cold in Europe”: someone in Barcelona and someone in the depths of Lapland don't live the same life. Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal don't share the same climate, whatever the season. The far north has a polar climate, with summers that rarely pass ten degrees, while the west coast and the Vancouver area enjoy the temperate mildness of the Pacific.
Back to Montreal. The city has a continental climate: hot and humid in summer, around thirty degrees on average, and very cold in winter, around minus ten. But it gets an average of 305 days of sunshine a year, against 250 in Paris, and rain is actually rare. Since we arrived three months ago we've counted barely ten days of rain, and never a whole day: a few hours at worst. The sky is blue, or at least bright. So yes, it's cold, but it's not the North Pole. The wind chill can plunge very low, but the cold is dry, and you get used to it very well as long as you're well wrapped up.
So today the sun is shining and we go for a walk along the north bank of the St Lawrence, around the Old Port. Sunshine doesn't mean mildness, and we realise it as soon as we step outside: it's minus eight, minus fifteen with the wind chill. The Old Port is the city's historic harbour; it stretches for more than two kilometres south of Old Montreal. Laid out in the early 18th century, it grew in the 19th with the industrial revolution, before port activity moved further east in 1976. Redeveloped in the early 1990s, it's now a historic and tourist site that draws more than six million visitors a year. In summer the banks are covered with sand, parasols and showers for sunbathing by the river; in winter a huge skating rink is set up there.
After an hour's walk we have to admit that the sun isn't enough to warm us. Cassandre's ankle boots are too thin, the cold seeps through, and her feet turn to ice. You don't mess about with that: the first shopping arcade we come across offers an absolutely necessary stop.
Speaking of shopping arcades, let's kill a very French urban legend: the one that says Montrealers spend the winter in an underground city because in Quebec winter lasts nine and a half months and it's minus four hundred thousand degrees. Let's say it once and for all: THERE IS NO UNDERGROUND CITY. There's a network of shopping arcades, metro stations and car parks connected underground, nothing more. Sorry to disappoint you, but we don't live underground in winter like Tolkien's dwarves. The streets of Montreal are full of walkers in the middle of January. And if Montreal has an underground city, what about Paris, which you can cross from end to end without ever poking your nose outside? Here, apart from along the metro, you have to brave the cold to get from one place to another. After a bit of shopping downtown we head home: tonight some friends are coming over for a crêpe evening. Thank you, Bretons, for an invention that takes us back home even thousands of kilometres away.
4 December
Remember the interview Stéphane had for a snow-clearing job? Karl, the manager, calls him back this morning to suggest he come and try the machines before the next big snowfalls. At 9:30 he's at the office, and a young man called Hubert gives him an express training: five minutes at the wheel of the snowplough in the next street, then off to the neighbourhoods of Longueuil. Quebec is very permissive towards employers, who pretty much have a free hand, and it shows in the work ethic: Stéphane finds himself in charge of a two-tonne machine without anyone checking whether he has any licence at all. A tablet shows him the route and the private driveways that the customers of the company Progazon want cleared during storms. The machine is no rocket science: it drives like a big car, with a joystick to aim the blower that throws the snow. After three hours going round the streets, Stéphane brings the machine back almost out of fuel and rushes off to his other job.
As in Australia, quiz nights, “trivia”, are all the rage in Canada. You find them all over Montreal, almost every night of the week. The principle is simple: answer general-knowledge questions over several rounds. We'd got into the habit in Australia, sometimes even on specific themes like cinema, but the concept doesn't really exist in France, or at least not in Paris, and not for lack of looking. Luckily a bar in our neighbourhood runs one every Wednesday night: we go and try it.
Lots of teams of regulars are there, and the machine is well oiled: a pen, a booklet of several pages with the question numbers and space for the answers. Four rounds follow one another: identifying people, objects or places from photos, general knowledge, a music quiz and multiple choice. The questions are tricky and revolve a lot around Quebec, so we're often stumped. After two and a half hours we finish among the bottom five teams, but if you remove the questions about Canada, we do surprisingly well. It's fun, but we won't be back: each round is followed by a thirty-minute break, which makes the evening interminable, and expensive, since you have to keep drinking to pass the time.