← PreviousThe Thousand Islands, a dress rehearsalWednesday 1 July
1 July is Canada Day. But in Quebec it's also the scene of a local oddity with a nickname of its own: Moving Day. Most leases run from 1 July to 1 July, a historical quirk that led the BBC to send a crew to film a report. No law imposes the date, but the unwritten rule has stuck: people move on Canada's national holiday. In Montreal that means removal vans in every street, on the day itself and the days around it.
Of course, concentrating moves on a single date has its drawbacks. Renting a van costs three times as much, and the pavements turn into open-air dumps where people leave whatever they no longer want to take. Like so many Montrealers, today we leave our little ground-floor flat for a flatshare where we'll stay until 12 July, the day we hit the road. At noon, in stifling heat, we meet our flatmates: Charlène, 27, finishing her psychology degree, and Florian, 23, who works at the restaurant just opposite. Both are lovely, but the real joy is the apartment: modern and bright! What a change! No more switching the lights on in the middle of the afternoon, no more floorboards creaking at every step. And the crowning glory, a big, furnished, sunny terrace. We spend most of the afternoon basking there under a blazing sun, chatting with our new flatmate.
In the evening we go to friends who live in the heart of Old Montreal, in the building facing, funnily enough, Cassandre's office. The historic quarter has lots of charm, but outside the hours when tourists and office workers pass through, it's quiet, almost asleep. As it's only thirty minutes on foot, we make a detour via the Old Port. The air is still warm after 8 pm, the atmosphere gentle, lots of people out walking; you'd almost think it was a normal summer, as if Covid had slipped from everyone's minds. A little early, we have a beer in a small park facing the port before joining our friends for a boozy evening that will end far too late for a weekday. We're not twenty any more!
Thursday 2 July
We now live on rue Sainte-Catherine, in the Village, the gay neighbourhood, barely ten minutes' walk from downtown. The gay community is everywhere: bars and shops revolve around LGBT culture, rainbow flags fly from windows and shopfronts. Among the passers-by we see a diversity and freedom of dress we didn't see in our old neighbourhood. That's the good side.
The flip side is that the neighbourhood is home to several homeless shelters and supervised injection sites. Many of Montreal's drug users therefore gravitate around here, and it's common to see people in a bad way right on the pavement. It doesn't translate into crime, as the police presence is massive if passive, but you can understand that some people feel unsafe. We don't, and we accept the raw side of the neighbourhood, far from the usual gentrification of city centres. It takes all sorts to make a world, and you don't grasp the complexity of a big city by looking only at its polished districts. Charlène tells us the city is considering moving these centres to our old neighbourhood of Hochelaga, to “clean up” the heart of the city and group the working classes together.
It's also Stéphane's birthday! Once again far from our families, and there's always a little pang at not being with your own. To celebrate, we go to one of the best Japanese restaurants in the city, specialising in original makis and sushi. It's delicious, and even Cassandre, not a great fan of this kind of food, devours every maki without a second thought. The next evening we gather with all our friends, and friends of friends, in a city park to celebrate again until the early hours.
Monday 6 July
Our last week in Montreal. We've stopped working and use these days to rest, see friends and finish the last preparations, while trying to survive the overwhelming heat of this third heatwave since May. From Monday to Friday the thermometer hovers around thirty-five to forty degrees by day and doesn't drop below twenty-five at night. The apartment is stifling; despite the fan, our bedroom averages thirty-two degrees at night. These restless nights leave us constantly tired, unable to do anything productive.
On Thursday and Friday we leave the city in search of somewhere to swim, the heat is so unbearable. It should be easy: we're in Canada, a country with thousands of lakes and one of the largest reserves of fresh water in the world.
In Ontario we'd often been able to swim for free in lakes and rivers. Here in Quebec, at least around Montreal, we soon discover that most access points charge a fee, or failing that, that parking costs absurd amounts, ten to fifteen dollars a day. You have to get at least an hour and a half from the city to hope to find a free place to swim. The main reason: most of the region's lakes are surrounded by private property, keeping their waters for the residents. The few remaining lakes sometimes have a tiny, barely maintained public beach where everyone crowds in, or rather crowded in, since Covid now imposes quotas. To sum up: a record heatwave, every swimming pool closed, and no way to swim for free in a country brimming with water. Quebecers are among the most heavily taxed people in the world, nothing is free, and you end up wondering where all that money goes when you see the state of the roads and infrastructure. For lack of anything better, we fall back on small paying beaches, or rather lake shores, as Charlène, our southern flatmate, would say, lifesavers under this blazing sun.
In the evenings we meet up with friends in the parks too: sausages on the barbecue, boomerangs and frisbees flying, alcohol flowing in moderation. We're really starting to have fun, our little gang grows closer by the day, and leaving only gets harder. But leaving a place reluctantly means you've had good times there, that the experience was a good one and that you'll come back gladly. We promise all our new friends we'll see them in October, when our road crosses Montreal's again, and we prepare our bags and our minds for what looks like the journey of a lifetime: crossing Canada by car.