I spent this weekend in Montreal.
I planned the trip in part as a way to ameliorate the loss I felt when I cancelled Barcelona, and also out of an itch to put more stamps in my passport. I acknowledge that U.S -> Canada is cheating a little bit.
Regardless, I’ve had an incredible four days. I’ve learned more French in these hours than in a year of trying to teach myself, walked enough that everything below the waist hurts, and eaten more fantastic food and drunk more beautiful wine than I can say. I went back to church for the first time since Catholic school and spontaneously started crying in the street at least three times.
And it doesn’t hurt that the exchange rate was in my favor: Despite having a truly indulgent weekend, I had money left over at the end, which I blew on a bottle of decent sparkling wine from Limoux. Which I’m drinking now.
I think maybe we need travel because it reminds us who we are when we’re at home, or shows us how to be a better version of that person. To walk into a totally different culture with your eyes and hands open, to set aside some time and money and promise yourself to do nothing with it but be, see, ask, receive.
Anyway. Here’s something I wrote about it.
MONTREAL
This will go down as one of my favorite evenings: sitting on a porch in a setting Montreal sun, drinking the wine I spent my last Canadian dollars on, piecing out the Québécois chatter of the children next door. Their family is having a barbecue and playing in the pool. There is a ubiquitous clinking of cutlery and glasses. Everyone’s outside. It’s 80 degrees Fahrenheit today and in the parks, I saw women sprawled out in their pants and bras, shirts beside them in the grass, spontaneously shed.
Taking it in. It must be so much more precious here, that sun.
But I don’t know that. I’ve only been here while it’s lovely and fresh. While young lovers kiss openly in the streets wearing little, and a patient, hook-nosed man carefully washes the windows of the Biodome. The queue inside built hugely, pregnantly, ignoring him.
Young women wrote me restaurant recommendations on receipt paper and old women talked to me in slow French long past my apologies, my tilted head, my je ne comprends pas. She asked me to excuse her. I wish I told her: non, vous n’avez besoin. At a café, the handsome barista checked on me in broken English when the older man beside me wouldn’t leave me alone, his hand on the back of my chair: Is he OK?
Squirrels fat enough to surprise chase each other up trees, the maple leaves form a green canopy against the sun. It rises early, ready. It pulled me onto the top of Mont Royal to watch it seethe over southern mountains; it pulled me into these streets that made me walk until my legs shook, until I thought I couldn’t anymore.
So to the sweet Saturday night basement jazz, the kitsch shops full of papiers old and new; the beautiful and copious wine over fresh-sliced charcuteries and the church so beautiful I cried when I walked in, went back the next day to mass for the first time in almost ten years; to Linda who works in the fur shop in the vieux port who told me I was bold for my tattoos, like her daughter, and who said yes, that’s all we are, after all: our experiences; to the easy, accentless French and English back-and-forth so many Montrealers have mastered; to the ones who caught me after my feigned alo or bonjour and tried their English on me for practice (and let me practice my terrible French on them):
Thank you, Montreal.
Even though it hurts, I think it means a good thing when you have to leave just as you start to feel right at home.