‘Allo ‘Allo

We continued our French odyssey, travelling to Montreal, and relying again on the grace and mercy of the Quebecois in order to communicate. It seems that they reserve a special type of scorn for English speaking Canadians, and are more sympathetic to tourists – “at least you have an excuse” said one waitress. The only signs in English are emergency signs, other than that it’s French through and through.  The translations that we did see (in tourist brochures) used curiously awkward and flamboyant English – you’d think that in Canada they could find some English speakers to do the translating. Non.

We reached the heights of our linguistic expertise by attending an outdoor film screening as part of Montreal’s World Film Festival. The first film we accidently saw was in Italian, with French subtitles – a comedy about the Pope. Go figure. It’s surprising what you can understand while not understanding anything. We googled the film later and found to our surprise that we had actually figured out what was going on. Mind you, the finer points of dialogue were lost on us. Well, actually ALL the points of dialogue were lost on us! The next night we did better with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window – in English. By now we found the program, and discovered that the 3^rd night’s film was in Chinese with French subtitles. We laughed, and gave it a miss.  

Montreal was this year’s host of the Mosaiculture Internationale event, an extraordinary exhibition of plant sculptures at the Botanical Gardens. You have never seen topiaries like these! Totally amazing! I’ll let the pictures do the talking…… Mike is now inspired to create a topiary King Air – life size of course.

Montreal is located on the banks of the St Lawrence River, which at this point has many rapids. This makes life difficult for shipping – can you imagine white-water rafting in your cruise ship? The Lachine Canal was created way back to allow a go-around – this has been superseded by much larger canals, and remains a historic waterway for tourists to explore. Our first exploration was along a very pleasant path via the canal then the main river for about 40 km of riding. We stopped along the river to watch people surfing the rapids – there’s a set of standing waves that are popular with surfers, white-water kayakers and stand-up paddle boarders. Fun to watch, but we didn’t try.

The next day we hired a kayak for 2 hours and attempted to paddle. The problem is that there are locks in the canal that you’re not allowed to go through in a kayak, so we only had a couple of km’s of water to paddle in. We ended up doing laps of the short section of canal we could access, which was not super interesting. At least we had a chance to burn off some of the High Fructose Corn Syrup that we have been force-fed in Nth America.    

Montreal has an “Old City” with cobbled streets and grand buildings, which was interesting to wander around. Quebec City still wins our vote for best Canadian Medieval City though.

And so we say ‘adieu’ to Montreal, which marks the end of our time in French Canada. Now we can happily go back to speaking our brand of English – which is sometimes unintelligible to Americans. Struth!