A typical Canadian McDonald’s.
(They pay a little more attention
to architecture up here.)

In the morning I pass through the hotel garage and see my car is still covered in salt and mud.

I approach the attendant. “Er, maybe you guys forgot to wash the car yesterday?”

“Yes,” says the attendant.

“Is there any chance you can you wash it today?”

“No.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“No, the guy, he cannot wash the car tomorrow.”

“And the day after?”

“Maybe.”

Wow, it really is like being in France.


Montreal’s touted “Underground City” is just a sprawling and extremely comprehensive shopping mall. The word “underground” makes it sound exciting, as if there will be C.H.U.D.s or hobbits or weapons of mass destruction, but in fact the word simply refers to the fact that it’s subterranean.

Lam, Tony and I descended into Montreal Sous-Terrain to beat the cold, but it simply isn’t much fun down there unless you’ve got someone else’s credit card or a bucket filled with cash and servants to carry your purchases. In twenty minutes we were back on the surface, freezing our asses off.

Remember what I was saying about New York, how it was cold in my apartment and all? Yeah forget that. My apartment is a fucking blast furnace compared to this place. Montreal is filled with penguins lying face-down in gutters, dead from overexposure. The plastic Christmas dioramas here all feature a frozen Santa, blue from hypothermia, clutching at his chest while Rudolph lies next to him with X’s for eyes.

I've been walking around and my face gets so frozen I can't talk right. You exhale and it feels as if your soul is leaving your body. I kept wishing Han Solo would come by and cut a taun-taun open and stuff me inside.

I see these people walking around with no hats and I, I just don't know how they do it.

These people wouldn’t last three minutes in Hell, I tell myself. You know, to make myself feel better.


Last night we were back at the hotel, gearing up to crash when I took the elevator down to the lobby in search of a sewing kit.

As the elevator doors opened I heard pumping bass coming from the back of the lobby. It was nearly 2am. Curious, I followed the sound down a hallway and discovered that it opened into a large bar, packed with people.

The bar was done up in hewn stone and dark woods and resembled a dungeon, or what a dungeon might look like in a Disneyland ride. Most of the people appeared to be ultra-conservative and in their 40s. I’d never seen a singles scene of 40somethings so it was kind of fascinating, anthropologically speaking.

I found a stairway at the back of the bar, and followed it downstairs. At the bottom was a tunnel. I walked along it for twenty feet and it opened up to an area filled with chairs lining a smallish, low-ceilinged dance floor, also in line with the dungeon theme. More older people were boogeying around and colliding while a DJ spun some spastic Latin dance music.

Of all the reasons you could possibly have to feel horrified in a dungeon, I felt this was the worst.

The guys all looked like they sold computers and most had cell phones clipped to their belts. I started to feel weird and bad so I went back upstairs.

At the other end of the bar I found another room with another dance floor. The DJ in here was blasting “Taking Care Of Business” while more people were jumping up and down in a pitch fever and singing along. I haven’t felt this alienated in a long time.

Well, hotel bar, what do you expect.

I sat down at the bar and had a slow cigarette and thought about mortality and interesting stories I might be able to tell my kids. I couldn’t think of anything.


Coin culture. Like in Japan, they’ve got dollar coins and even two-dollar coins in Canada, so with a handful of change you can actually buy something that isn’t gum. The two-dollar coins have a crunchy silver exterior and a creamy gold center.

In America we’ve got dollar coins but you only get them as change from the Metrocard machines and every hates using them because, well, I can’t remember why but we hate them. Americans hate things that are different, which is why my friends and I, all ethnic minorities, had hellish slants to our childhoods.


I’m impressed at how the locals here switch back and forth between French and English completely effortlessly. If I struggle I can remember bits and pieces from high school, nearly none of it substantial enough to communicate. Let’s see:

Interdit and defense de mean forbidden or that’s a no-no.

Combien ca coute means How much will that set me back.

A baloo is a bear.

A younker is a young man.

I think the check (in a restaurant) is called l’addition.

Sortie means to fly a bombing run against a helpless agrarian country on very thin intelligence.

Dangereuse means dangerous, obviously, and les liaisons dangereuses means period piece where John Malkovich tries to nail Uma Thurman.

Read signs, yes, shit-shoot, no.


I pick my brain up and shake it, hoping complete sentences of whatever French I once knew would fall out, but all I could come up with was Pouvez-vous me dire, ou se trouve la bibliotheque?

Fat chance I’d be looking for a library. American education sucks, and my years of instruction in French were no different. (I’m uncertain as to what role, if any, my being a horrible student played in all this.)

They train you to memorize stupid sentences like My aunt’s favorite sport is tennis but my uncle prefers swimming or The dog is outside the house, under the tree and behind the fence.

They never teach you useful stuff like You’re the snottiest waiter I ever had; how ‘bout a slap? or Don’t you look at me like that, I fucking voted for Gore or Your honor, I killed the clerk in self-defense and was merely helping to refill the cash drawer when the gendarmes happened upon me.

Hey, can anyone tell me this? Why is it that American colleges are some of the most sought-after in the world, and yet the lower education sucks so badly? How is it possible that we have such consistently shitty high schools and such lauded universities? And how do they get ketchup into those little sealed packages?


We went up and down Rue Saint-Laurent and Rue St. Denis, which reminded us of Queen Street in Toronto. Some of the shops were quirky and interesting, but I found myself wishing for the umpteenth time that we could find something to do here that wasn’t commercial. I guess if you go to a city where you don’t know anybody then that’s the trap you fall into.


The night before we’d tried to go to a jazz bar, hailed by my guidebook as “one of the city’s finest.” We showed up around midnight to find it had turned into some type of cheesy and completely jazz-free café populated by older people.

Always check the copyright date of a guidebook before you buy it.


The second night we found a jazz bar that was actually still there. It was called the Upstairs Jazz Bar but was located downstairs, and for some reason the sign was hung upside down. I’m guessing the owner came up with this idea in a drunken stupor but actually followed through with it after he’d sobered up. I don’t know, it seems like the kind of thing that would sound funny if you were drunk.

There were two trumpet players on stage at the same time, kind of rare, accompanied by a good pianist, a decent drummer and a middling bassist. The trumpet guy on the left was pretty damn good, even if he wasn’t exactly blowing the doors off the place. All in all it was pleasant, if unthrilling.

Sigh.