Where's Leonard?

The weather suddenly got hot yesterday, in the upper 20s, so we took a bus downtown. It takes about an hour from Baie D'Urfe which is near the far western end of the island, beside the lake and full of large houses on extensively wooded plots - you would all love to live here!* Sue and Paul's place is back from the lake but they have a lovely house and garden - the latter full of colourful birds attracted to Paul's many bird feeders; grackles, red cardinals, finches, chickadees and large American robins being among the regular visitors.

Good to be in downtown Montreal, its a fashionable place, the women have a city chic which is unlike Vancouver where practical cold weather gear is the order of the day - that or running/cycling or other activity gear. We took the metro to the Place des Arts to visit the contemporary art museum, paid our senior rate of three dollars for several exhibitions - the first artist was described as 'deliberately insolent' which I thought a good way of covering your own back and true enough he was of least interest - particularly as we were bowled over by much of the rest of what we saw, notably the large paintings and mixed media work of Betty Goodwin, who died last year and was a major figure on the Montreal arts scene and the extraordinary photographs of Robert Polidori from abandoned or ruined places like Beirut, Chernobyl and New Orleans after the floods. Talking of major figures we did not see Leonard walking the streets...

Its only in Montreal that you see virtually no English signage. The language police have done a thorough job since we were last here many years ago in getting rid of all English words. Sue and Paul's road has changed from Cambridge Road, to Upper Cambridge, to Rue Cambridge to settle on just Cambridge. Everywhere else in Canada the two languages get equal billing, here in Quebec Province its French only - with the odd private sign with a word or two in English or on interpretation board at sites but always in much smaller size. This is an odd sensation because one feature around the world is the use (and abuse) of English on advertising and signage everywhere - Cambodia for example was full of English signs on everything. But here you dust off that limited French to read the signs, not a lot of trouble of course.

Brian

* you would all love to live here in the few weeks of the year in the short spring and autumn when the weather is habitable!


We went into 'Baie' ( used to be Hudson's Bay Company) and I got a great bargain, a silk, long sleeved vest (undershirt) for $19.99 reduced from $70.00, even the lady on the till went "hmm" as she rang it in. I know it may seem a little unseasonable but I can tell you I can clearly recall the biting cold of my winter Thursday stints on the Country Markets stall on Cambridge market.

It was quite a funny shopping experience because there were two non french speaking women at one of the two tills doing something that seemed terribly complicated, things were exchanged, receipts examined, changes made and things returned. I don't know what was going on but it took the most incredibly long time and the ever lengthening line wanting to pay for goods was getting extremely restive. Then the lady on the remaining till had a problem with a ticket and her till stopped working, so things got even worse. The consensus was that the reason it was all going wrong was that these two women DID NOT SPEAK FRENCH!. The woman next to me said something to this effect to me, prety pointless as my French is just about non existent (I am good at body language though) I said 'sorry, but I don't speak French' but perhaps I was forgiven because I was a tourist and my shopping was mercifully uncomplicated.

We now know where the francophone cabin attendant from Air Canada go when they are deemed to mature to fly, they get retirement jobs at the 'Baie'. The three ladies I saw in the underwear department were very stately, well made up, beautifully dressed but of a very mature vintage and very disaproving of any one who made mistakes with the very complicated Baie offers, or who could not speak French.

All three photos by me!

Tess