Conan in Vancouver
"I've but come from the last wineshop open—Ishtar's curse on those white-livered reformers who close the grog-houses! 'Let me sleep rather than guzzle,' they say—aye, so they can work and fight better for their masters! Soft-gutted eunuchs, I call them. When I served with the mercenaries of Corinthia, we swilled and wenched all night and fought all day—aye, blood ran down the channels of our swords. But what of you my girl? Take off that cursed mask—"
—Conan the Barbarian speaking in Robert E. Howard's Black Colossus
Two Weeks in Vancouver part I - The Drop
I had the good fortune to be sent out to Vancouver for two weeks by my job. It came at around the best possible time of the year for me, because I had nothing extra-curricular going on at the home front and we're in the doldrums of a clinging winter here. As it turned out, the trip went really well, both professionally and personally. Most importantly for this blog, it also gave me a real chance to compare my homeland with my adopted land. I've been out to the west coast many times since I moved to Montreal, but it's always been on vacation. In this case, I was actually "living" and "working" in Vancouver for two weeks. Though still a brief period of time, it gave me a better chance to get a feel for what it would really be like to live in Vancouver and how that compares to Montreal. I have many thoughts and they will probably take a few posts. Today, I would just like to talk about my immediate impressions of returning to Montreal at this time of year. Depressing!
Have no worries, folks, Montreal still wins hands down. But I had a profound shock dropping out of the clouds yesterday evening. Now during my two weeks in Vancouver, I literally had about 5 hours of sunshine. I love the rain and the grey, so I enjoyed it for the most part. When it rains in Vancouver, it's steady but much lighter than rain on the east coast. You can often get away with no umbrella and riding your bike does not require complete impermeability to have any semblance of comfort. But basically, it was a very cold and wet spring in Vancouver. It actually snowed twice, once on Vancouver Island and once on Vancouver itself. We had a good 3 or 4 centimetres of slush on the ground one evening. The mountains had a beautiful and fresh white glow on them. Fortunately for me, the 5 hours of sunshine that I did get took place when I had a chance to take a walk on the beaches, once in Lantzville and once at Jericho beach in Vancouver. Both were breathtakingly beautiful.
Despite the weather, it is spring time in Vancouver. There are no leaves on the deciduous trees, but they are just starting to bud and blossom. There are flowers in people's gardens and window boxes and the lawns are green. I didn't really consciously realize this. The whole time I was there, I was getting snow melt reports from my girlfriend, but I didn't really get the basic gist of what she was saying: nothing has really changed here. So when the plane dropped out of the very low clouds over Dorval and PET airport, it was a profound shock and I have to admit a bit depressing. The city was a colourless grid of bleak low buildings, outlined in grimy snow. It really was like leaving the land of colour and arriving in one of black & white. I felt like I was returning to communist Moscow, circa 1972. I know this isn't really Montreal's fault. The weather is the weather and the east coast is just shabby in general (you can make the same comparison to a February trip from San Francisco to New York).
But the airport doesn't help. The new international section is quite nice and so far very efficient. But the domestic side of PET extends the communist Russia metaphor. The luggage takes around 25 minutes to get to the carousel (far and away the worst luggage time in North America in my experience), the signs for ground transportation are confusing and inconsistent and there is nobody around to help. In an attempt to create a more efficient taxi line, they have entirely blocked off the middle of the outside sidewalk, so if you aren't getting a cab, you have to walk back inside and go around to get to the bus section. And hey, how about a city bus that goes directly to and from the airport? Why is that so freaking hard for this city? Vancouver has an express bus that costs $3.00, makes constant express trips to the airport from a central location and takews about 25 minutes. And they are building a train.
And the taxis here are so bootleg. In Vancouver, they are all almost entirely new hybrid vehicles and they have a sophisticated, computer-driven dispatching system. The driver has a console in his vehicle with which he sees trips as they become available. And they are silent. The screaming and squawking radios in Montreal are so third world at this point and make for an extremely unpleasant trip.
I really do love this city and as you will see, these complaints pale in comparison to my very real concerns about Vancouver. But there are elements of infrastructure and fundamental comfort and ease in Montreal that are really terrible and I can understand why people who have spent their whole lives here and have never really known the culture and society of another Canadian or American city can become so mesmerized by the sun, cleanliness and modern sophistication of a retirement village in Florida or suburban Vancouver.
And despite my stumbling around the Montreal airport in a frustrated daze, swearing aloud and feeling like smashing something, no security personnel ran up and killed me with a taser, so that is a big plus for Montreal.
Snow Rage!
This winter is kicking ass! We have been getting so much snow, it's just awesome. I have to admit that I got caught up in being a bit down last week, but now I see that it was just the flu attacking my morale. Because today I'm psyched! The sidewalk in front of my house is a windy snow trail and you have to climb up over big banks to get to the intersection. I cross a small park diagonally on my way to work and yesterday on the way home, I noticed these boards lying flat in the snow. Upon closer inspection, I realized they were the tops of the park's picnic tables!
So officially, we are at 317 cm total for this winter. The record in Montreal is 383 cm in 1970-71. I just read that generally about 25% of the snow falls in March, so we have a good chance of breaking the record. I'm keeping my fingers crossed! Last week was a huge boost as we had a big storm of 25 cm on Wednesday and then another one right after it on the weekend that dropped 35 cm easy. It was most excellent.
So the news now is about the increase of snow rage in the province. Some guy outside Quebec city went into his house and got a rifle to threaten a neighbour who was blowing snow into his yard. And yesterday two dudes in Montreal got into an altercation over a parking spot. One guy pulled out a gun. The cops came. Turned out the gun was fake, but fake or real, the crime is the same here so he got collared. Awesome. The quotes from the authorities say that these kinds of things tend to happen but that they are on the increase because everyone is so fed up with the quantity and duration.
What they fail to mention is the real reason for all the anger and frustration. Cars. Every single problem with the snow, every ounce of frustration is because people can't easily get into their precious cars and easily push the buttons that take them to where they have to go. For people who don't drive, the snow is a minor hassle at worse and generally a good thing. A few minutes of shoveling out your walkway and sweeping your stairs compared to all the losers on the block spending hours digging out their cars on Sunday night so they can drive to work. To get a car out takes way more work than clearing a driveway or walkway because there is so much detail work to do.
The municipalities are all way past their budget for snow removal for the year. The Cols Bleus' union has granted them the right to work double their normal shifts, but we are already seeing accidents due to exhaustion. A woman pedestrian was killed the other night by a dump truck making an illegal left on a red. All this effort? So the cars can drive.
I did see one ray of hope in the news media. Almost all of the coverage is about the problems and how fed up everyone is. Happened to catch an on-the-street interview with a guy from Charlottetown (are the Maritimers the last true Canadians?) who was shovelling his driveway. He said "I'm really enjoying it actually. After you get warmed up, you get kind of exhilarated. You look back and see how much you've cleared and you really get a sense of accomplishment. We're Canadian, right? This is what we should be doing!" Hell yes! That's the spirit!
Bring it on, weather gods. My shovel is ready!
Luge contre Diable (sled vs. handtruck)
Just an update to let everyone know that the hand-powered move is complete. I can no longer call it carbon neutral, though, as I hired a truck and some guys to do all the big stuff. There really were some things that I could not have done on my own. They took 3 hours, cost $250 and did a kickass job. If anybody in Montreal needs a recommendation for a good mover, and one that you can book with a phone call and not a lot of bullshit (some of the bigger moving companies are very bureaucratic), let me know and I'll give you his phone number. I was very happy with the work and I am a very picky mover.
Still, the hand-hauling was a lot of work. To summarize for those who may not have read my
previous post on this move, we moved one block north and I attempted (and mostly succeeded) to do the job with a handtruck. I got two good snowstorms during the weeks of back and forth. I had to do a lot of rolling in the street where the car tracks had made flat trails through the snow. But when I went to clear out our little storage space in the basement, I found our sled. It's a cheap plastic job, big enough for two people and it turns out to be perfect for hauling boxes and furniture in the snow. I was able to get close to 400 lbs on that thing and when the snow was good it was quite easy to drag. It was always a little hairy crossing Mont-Royal (the single street I had to cross, but a busy one), because that was sometimes down to the tar and I was worried about spilling everything on some of the more precarious loads.
Overall, the sled really kicked ass. A very impressive tool for hauling stuff over snow-covered terrain. The diable was still not bad, but it is much more limited to the shape of things you can carry. The sled can take a wider range of weird shaped items. I recommend having both for your next winter hand-move.
La Nuit Blanche
My god does Montreal rock!
I'm pushing 40 and my days of really going out are getting fewer and farther between, so I haven't really been paying attention to the night life scene as much as I used to. Plus, we were in the middle of moving. But a featured event in The Hour mentioned an organ performance downtown in an anglican church that would feature some improvisations on classic horror themes like The Exorcist, Jaws and Halloween. It ran from 10pm to 3am and I'm familiar with the outside of the church because they just tore down this horrific shopping mall that had been built in front of it to allow passers by to see the beautiful front.
So surrounded by boxes, we decided to go and check out the organ show. Montreal downtown on a Saturday night is usually somewhat busy, but I was taken aback by how many people were out. It was packed! And there was a long stream of people filing into the church. I'm talking like hundreds. It turns out (and everybody in Quebec probably knew this but me) that La Nuit Blanche is a major party and it has gotten bigger and bigger. There are all kinds of performances, all the art galleries are open until 5 am and free and just general partying. It was fantastic. The organ show was really cool, but we also checked out the Musée d'Art Contemporaine, the Belgo building and a really amazing installation in the hallway of the Place Des Arts, basically the fuddy-duddy tour. We skipped all the dance clubs and dj shows and got home before 3. But it was really cool to be checking out the museum at 2 in the morning with a huge crowd and drinks.
Some details:
The Organ Show
The organ show was called Orgue et Couleurs and it took place in the St. James United Church right downtown on St. Catherines. It's just a beautiful building, with a curved balcony and pews that match the curves. It also has these crazy hanging arches (I don't know the architectural term) that look impossible, but I suspect play a crucial support role. It lacks the detail and iconography that dominates the catholic churchs in Quebec and I sort of preferred that (most of my church time as a youth took place in an anglican chapel).
The show was awesome! The organ really gets me in a hynotic state. I felt like I was capable of turning around and insanely strangling the person to my left (who happened to be my girlfriend so thank goodness 39 years of social conditioning held me in check). The horror movie themes were improvisations, so they would start off with the theme and then go off into all kinds of crazy directions. It must be a very specific path in life to become a master organist and it must be a weird existence, controlling such a clearly satanic instrument (and being a little insane yourself) while always doing it in holy places. I watched the entire performance of Mélanie Barney who did Jaws and Psycho (the great Bernard Herrmann). But what really kicked ass was her rendition of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in Ré mineur (I think that means R minor, I have no idea). That's the classic horror movie sound (you know when you see the castle on the hill in lightning silhouette) but it was the really Bachian parts where there is such a complex rhythm and interchanging of melodies that blew my mind. I'd definitely pay to see her perform. My only regret was that I didn't get to hear Halloween.
The BelgoThis is a large, old industrial building right downtown that is filled with art galleries from top to bottom. It's fun for a visit because you can just pop into one art gallery after another and often see some engaging stuff. But on the night of Nuit Blanche, this place was clearly young hipster artist scene central. It made Mile End look like a quaint old portuguese neighborhood and brought out the fascist in me (when I see all those kids running around in their little outfits and scarves, forced public service Mao-style starts to seem like a very good idea to me). We saw something that was cool, which I can't remember, and we got out fast. Some guy was writing bad poetry on the wall with chocolate sauce.
Musée d'Art Contemporain
This place is a favorite of ours anyways. They had a dj at the central point between the galleries on the 2nd floor with dry ice making a cool atmosphere. There was a québécois artist who did amazing things with antique chairs. There was a tape boundary around the giant round chair that everyone was ignoring. You just had to lean over to see inside and the poor, beleagured security guard who had to keep asking people to "respetez les lignes, s'il vous plait!" must have had the worst Nuit Blanche of anyone. There also was a really cool world of tiny cut out pictures from magazines, really large and detailed. I bumped into the tallest tower (like 11') and it wobbled and almost fell! It would have been a serious disaster. Man, that was a close one. My girlfriend saw me come out from behind it, looking guiltily and nervously at it as it wobbled back and forth and knew immediately that it was my clumsy ass that had bumped it.
Place des Arts, Hall des Pas Perdus
Finally, in the extensive guidebook, I saw this piece which intrigued me, a sculpture installation in the hallway of the Place des Arts. I'm so glad I made the effort to find it because it was the coolest piece of art I have seen in a long time. It's called All You Can Eat by Karine Giboulo. It's an interlocking series of pillars with windows looking into a little world where little people in jumpsuits live and raise pigs, which are then used in the production of fake chicken foods which are then consumed by these obese squirrels, the whole thing overseen by wealthy people receiving plate loads of cash. It was inspired by her visit to one of those massive factories in China where the workers live. I found it an amazingly detailed little world, where everything is connected. You get lost trying to put it all together and then too late you realize what a powerful message about consumption and our modern industrial capitalist society it is delivering. Absolutely fantastic. She's a local artist and I guess just starting out on her career (she's working on her bachelor's!?). Keep an eye out for Karine Giboulo because she kicks ass.
For those of you who live in Montreal, I strongly recommend you check it out. I heard it was there on Tuesday but I don't know how long it will last. It's in the Place des Arts, just outside the entrance to the concert hall.
One final thought about Montreal
As we came out of the church the first time, I passed a group of young people (probably high school, maybe CEGEP) sharing a bottle of wine. No bag, no effort at hiding it, drinking from the bottle and being a bit party-hardy. There were families all around. It surprised me pleasantly to see that because you would never see that in Vancouver. Not just the choice of libation, but young people drinking publicly without the cops showing up with a righteous attitude. We in the west really need to take a lesson from Quebec. Having fun is good!
I'm putting the rest of the All You Can Eat photos here, but you really do have to see it in person:
le presbytère où je travaille
When you learn a new language in the land of that language, you also learn a lot of other stuff. For instance, the building where I work is the presbytère of the catholic church next door. I now know that a presbytère is the place where the nuns and priests live. I don't know what the word is in english and I think the protestant faith probably has a different system (don't they have a "close" or something? All I know about that is what I learned in passing from certain Michael Gilbert books).
With the decline of the importance of the catholic church in social affairs in Quebec also comes an economic decline. The churches, whose pews are nearly empty these days, also lack funding and personnel. There are fewer priests and nuns entering the fold and less demand for the ones already there. At some point, the paroisse (the parish?), which I guess is the organizing body for each specific church, decided to use their presbytère for profit and they now rent it to several environment non-governmental organizations (NGO's). I guess they still wanted to be community-minded, which is cool.
So that is how I ended up working in a presbytère. Since one of the previous comments had mentioned that it must be nice to work in such an environment, I thought I would share it with you. Because it is nice. The interior of this building has certainly seen more glorious days. It went through some minor periods of renovation, leaving the hideous stamp of the 70s (though compared to the cheapshit renos that are done today, even the tackiest of the 70s looks kind of well-built) and has some general disrepair. The insulation sucks and the roof is barely hanging on (we had a nice inundation last spring). But it retains high ceilings, lots of tall windows, beautiful wood floors, solid oak doors and a very non-corporate feel that makes it very much a joy to come to work (it also helps to have a good job for an organization that is trying to do good in the world).
My personal favorite architectural touches here are the built-in closets (all but one of which are unfortunately painted white) made up of I believe solid oak, though it could be maple and the radiators. The large radiator in the hall really kicks ass.
I'll post some pictures below with captions. Enjoy!
Here's the building from the outside. Quite the stone block!
This is the whole "compound." It looks like the presbytère is attached, because of the tree, but they are separate buildings, though pretty close. The church itself is worth a separate post at least, because there is a lot of cool stuff going on there. One day, I'll get around to photographing the interior and the gold jesus on the front lawn.
The closet in a side hallway that is dedicated to closet space. Needs to be better organized!
The bannisters. Look at that wood glow! Is this all oak? Any ebenistes out there?
The stairs to the attic. Scary! (the attic is actually awesome, with a little trap door that keeps getting blown off. It's just way too cluttered to be able to take a picture.)
My pride and joy, the radiator. It reads "Safford Patent" and underneath "RD 1898". That thing is 110 years old!
Finally, one of the hideous lamps. It's that unholy alliance between organized religion and the 70s that left such frightening images in my young psyche. I sure would love to have seen the lamps that were here originally.
I've been working here for just under 2 years and in the first 6 months, there was one priest living in the building. I never saw him. His apartment was accessed by a separate entrance and though there was an adjoining door between our hallway and his place, it was never opened. I didn't see the space until after he had left and they rented the space out to another organization. It had a very '70s lonely old man look to it.
le givre
my window at work
the window down the hall
the icicles you can see through the window
Quite beautiful, eh? They look like light little feathers dancing in two dimensions on the glass. They melt away when the sun hits them. All this icey beauty is the result of poor insulation, unfortunately.
