De Culturis
Mundi

Finally, and first time in my life, I’ve visited our “distinct society” or whatever they like to call Québec. Montréal and Québec City (which, btw, on all the highway signs is posted only as Quebec - no City -, to make you feel totally lost and confused).

Yes, it seems indeed quite different than the rest of Canada. As you get off the plane you notice the cab drivers don’t wear turban. Nor do they speak English, or very little. Our driver actually was a huge black guy with broken English, but he took us to the right place; but he got upset for having to accept payment by credit card. Then further on the highway toward the city I realized the “official bilingualism” is mandatory only for the other provinces. I remember driving once from Hamilton, ON to Vancouver, BC and back — the highway signs were always bilingual: English and French. Around Montréal — only French.

Later in the hotel room’s desk drawer there was a brochure stating that several millions of turists come every year to the city. I guess they are left to learn to drive by recognizing the shape of the traffic signs: if you don’t know what Arrêt is, at least you see the familiar hexagonal red stuff.

The pleasant surprise was that in every shop, store, restaurant they instantly switched to English as soon as they realized French wouldn’t work with us. (Not that I am not able to understand and answer simple questions, mais…)

On the street you can make amazing discoveries. For me, the first striking difference compared to other cities was the really low number of fat (a.k.a. obese) people. That’s a nice thing for the eyes… Next you discover that people are wearing shoes — as opposed to sneakers. Definitely much more real (read: leather) shoes on the streets than here in Winnipeg. Actually even the sport shoes, running shoes (whatever you call them) are more assorted with the rest of the clothing in Montréal. Later on, while driving back from Québec City to Montréal, I’ve also noticed the very small number of trucks. Even on the farms we could rarely see a truck parked in the front of the house, and it was a Sunday. Here, on the Prairies, everybody is crazy about trucks. I know even doctors driving trucks in the middle of the city:)

When I was trying to buy some cigarettes — they are much cheaper than at home — I had to remember again our cab driver’s reluctance to accept credit card: it seems they are more cash oriented, because in the Tabac shop the clerk (owner?) refused to accept my Visa, even though I was going to buy two cartons! Well, later I withdrew some cash from an ATM, but as a “punishment” for the first shop, I spent it in another place.

The hotel management probably thinks that everybody coming from the English-speaking Canada must be a right wing conservative, since the only newspaper (in English) they had was the National Post. I didn’t mind since I like that paper, but it was an interesting coincidence seeing a column by Andrew Coyne on that weekend exactly about the “assymetric federalism” discussing that the feds have never got anything in return for all the concessions made to Québec. (Unfortunately you cannot read the article online, since it is in the “subscriber exclusive” category; what’s even worse even having a ‘paper’ subscription wouldn’t be enough to get it online, you have to have an online subscription as well on the top of that. Now I think this is totally nonsensical.) Anyway, back to the belle province: yes, I have seen business signs in English that were half the size compared to the French text. Although to my great disappointment I couldn’t see the famous language police in action: measuring the size of the letters.

The whole idea is so grotesque. It reminds me of a (fictional?) story in the former Yugoslavia during the ethnic war of 1992-95. I used to live in the neighbourhood, and I even worked there for a while — as a humanitarian worker. So, here is the story: In the Eastern part of Croatia there is a region called Krajina which had predominantly Serb population. Somewhere inside this territory there was a village inhabited by Croatians. And in that village there was a house where lived a Serbian. (Actually you can freely replace, invert, change the nationalities…) So, according to the story, the guy put a barbed wire fence around his house and with a sign on it: “Fuck your war! Leave me alone.” On the bright side: there was no language police to check the size of the letters…

To add something positive: you can find pubs, restaurants, bars where you can smoke. Others are non-smokers, which is fine: I don’t go there, non-smokers don’t come where I smoke. In the meantime Manitoba though has been overtaken by anti-smoke zealots. Perhaps, I shouldn’t talk that much about smoking, otherwise I’ll be banned in Ontario.