Quick highlights of my new digs

What a funny little city I’ve found myself in. A smorgasbord of villages where eating pizza with fork and knife, dragging infants across the ground on plastic trays and having a city-wide festival during the coldest days of winter just seems to happen without the flutter of an eyelid. Rules function differently here, specifically in French and not the French that you or me or the French are used to… It’s coming up to my fifth month in this intriguing city that I moved into during the pandemic, the Canadian pandemic mind you! Been some ups and downs but so far so good.

Where to begin?… I careened into this city one fateful night post Hurricane Ida in a UHaul filled to the brim with empty space. I packed super light - all my life belongings fit into a total of three bags at this point. The UHaul was a little adventure I had driving my sister’s and my friend’s apartments from Chicago to New York. I’m a sucker for road trips and of all the ways to transport my life northward, this turned out to be the most cost-effective way for me and my sister who needed her new swanky digs in NYC furnished. Border crossing was a hellhole that involved me being sent back to the US with an expired US visa and my passport and cell phone stuck at the Canadian border crossing office (long story). But I smashed through this mild hiccup and reached the land where the maple syrup flows free (does not) and the moose are public transport (are not).

The first week was a goofy one where I was physically and mentally drained from the whole move. Eventually I got off my butt and resumed jogging hither and tither. Skateboarded with a dude called Vinny who invited me to a game of hack-volley (volley ball with a hacky sack). Turns out it’s MAD hard but my team partner who was fully clad in biker leather during this searingly hot day and took breaks by doing hand stands reassured me that I’d get better with time. My french was super poor at the time and I was getting tripped up on this strange dialect and stranger accent. I already spoke the language and even prided myself on teaching SCUBA diving courses in it back in Havelock Island, India, but this?… ceci n’est pas le francais.

I wouldn’t say my french is stellar right now but it’s coming in. Back when I came in, I realized that I had to optimize my drinking strategy on a night out. A couple drinks were ideal - tore down that linguistic inhibitive barrier and let out this barrage of french I had been hoarding this entire time. But one drink too many and the focus begins to waver. Attention slips and even though you’re entirely there (because face it, 3 beers is nothing), your french, like the French, gives up. My first semester here amusingly involved a weekly 3 hour discussion class in French with 2 other Quebecois students. I bizarrely had the exact reverse experience as the other 2, as all the reading was in English, which I absolutely crushed, but the discussion was brutal. My thoughts were wonderfully constructed tendrils of knowledge that were followed up by blabbering babyspeak. Once you factor in the time lag it took for me to understand what the others were saying, formulate my thoughts and get it out for the world to be embarrassed by… oof. The worst was when I was on my last legs of putting together a grant application very last minute, my mind refused to cooperate and I seem to have dropped my language count by a total of French.

But linguistic hiccups always make for fun misunderstandings. Sandrine from Tinder thought I had a very poetic disposition when I wrote to her, “Il pleurait aujourd’hui (it cried today)” instead of “Il pleuvait aujourd’hui (it was raining today)”. I didn’t know (and still don’t) why my housemate was unvaccinated after I asked her on two consecutive days why, fully reacting as though I completely understood where she was coming from (salut Janny!). Don’t even get me started on my hour-long attempt to converse with a fisher from Côte-Nord as we sat in the boat waiting for our dive team to surface.

Faking it till I’m making it aside, it’s been fascinating being here especially during winter. I thought I had seen winter in Chicago but oh boy this one hits different. These people are unhinged. The moment the first snow hits, people are outside skating, playing ice-hockey, praying for more snow to open up the ski slopes (which happen to be 30 minutes away). The moment the snow sticks, the rules of life seem to transform. The city’s prams are banished, only to be replaced by wee plastic trays in which a wee pink nose peeks through a wee mound of clothes. A remarkable sight as parents without a shudder of worry drag their severely unbalanced kids behind on zero-suspension toboggans. The city’s cars have their summer tires replaced with thicc treaded winter ones - where do you store your tires? That’s a you problem. And there’s finally the denéigement: an unsuspecting SMS from 511 followed by an army’s worth of trucks descending onto your street bellowing while separating snow from tarmac. Terrifyingly glorious, a ghostly beam over a white waterfall hovers above the street as one big truck machine-guns snow into a parade of lorries slowly moving in ominous procession behind it. All this snow + street dirt + salt is dropped into a single site where once spring hits it all sloshes into the river. What a funny place.

Quebec also operates on a different mental playing field. I’ve been a part of conversations with anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers out here and never have I felt even an ounce of proselytizing or aggression at an opposing viewpoint. Views seem to be (at least outwardly) respected which is a welcome relief from the conversational colosseum that was the US. Plenty of work seems to be getting done here but surprisingly not at the wee hours of 3am or during a sunny weekend where I would self-isolate from fun in Chicago for the sake of getting over another deadline. The emphasis out here has shifted from what you do, to who you are. Not had to grapple with that question in more than 5 years and I’ve been taking time snowboarding, rock climbing, yoga-ing, playing my guitar and organ (old and new toys!) to slowly figure it out. Life is challenging but exciting. Zero complaints here!

Ciao!

Also you are probably wondering why I’m in Quebec in the first place - it’s for my PhD.! I’m doing it in Oceanography at Université Laval with the eventual goal of working with the Inuit in Nunavik on the future of their food resources given climate change. Naturally, that’s a pretty loaded sentence so I might go into it in my next post to give it the spotlight it deserves.