Montréal - 45° 51' 34" N 73° 33' 54" W

By -
An uneventful half-day of travel has brought us here to Le Plateau, an upscale neighborhood in Montréal.  The whole purpose of this trip is to improve on our baseline spoken french.  We have signed up for an intensive, three-and-a-half-hour-a-day immersion class here in la belle provence.

After arriving at the airport, we bought a monthly transit pass and made our way (via the airport bus) to our rented apartment on Papineau Avenue.  It is in a tired, 1960's era building on the 24th floor, with a stunning view east towards the Olympic Stadium and the St. Lawrence Seaway.  Patrick, our host, met us at the building and gave us a walk-through and the door keys.  We don't expect to see him again unless something goes terribly wrong.  There is a full kitchen, dishwasher, clothes washer/dryer.  We feel as though we've relocated here instead of being through-travelers.  There is a large park across the street; local grocer, many depanneurs, an ATM and two metro stops nearby.  We've realized that this four weeks is going to be the longest we've slept in one place since September of last year.

the view from our balcony

In two days we start the language classes.  Having french all around us will help us (hopefully) to soak in the new pronouns and verb conjugations, forcing us to adapt it into regular use.

After we had unpacked, a quick walk to the local market for breakfast supplies revealed row upon row of three-story walkups.  Sean loves the look of the iron staircases curving up to the first-above-ground-level floor.  There is a grittiness about this city famed for its crumbling concrete and deteriorating infrastructure.  Potholes are obvious.  Patches upon patches dot the sidewalk. A slight residue of litter tucked into the edges and corners of buildings gives the whole place a mature, non-nonchalant feel.  The fact that the skies are grey right now and the warmish spring days are about to give way to a colder week will add to the bleak ambiance of our surroundings.  This doesn't make Montreal a bad place to be - it just makes you want to be able break through its cold facade and discover the warm, jovial Quebecois party that *must* be happening behind doors that you haven't learned to open yet.

Ok, Montréal, we are here.  Show us what you've got.



By the way, this is our hundreth blog post.  We're not quite a year into our adventures.  Wonder what is next?

Comments

Post a Comment

Check out our most popular posts!

Moving Aboard - 49° 38' 27" N 01° 37' 00" E

By Kate and Sean -
Image
Wow, that was a big week.  We are exhausted. ... and smitten! Monday was a paperwork day, but aboard Chinook.  We went over the contract, item by item, to ensure that everything the contract stated would be delivered.  There were a few things missing or incomplete (mixups in ordering, vendor delivery timing issues) but they were noted with written assurances that they would be delivered, changed out or corrected.  This all needed to be clearly stated before we transfer the lion's share of the purchase amount to Garcia. Signing and double-checking the contract Anything that wasn't in place, was incomplete or not working properly would be dealt with by the warranty team.   There was no refuting that they had delivered A boat. We had no idea how she sailed and there was no way that a single day of inspection would allow anyone to check every bit of the more-than-5000-person-hours of labour that went into this sleek looking vessel. The "Grin and Grab" p
Read more

Leaving Chinook and heading back to Canada - 49° 38' 27" N 01° 37' 00" E

By Kate and Sean -
Image
 Yep, you read correctly.  Our plans have changed, as plans often do and our 2024 is looking somewhat different from what we wrote in a previous post - A Rough Plan for 2024 .  Chinook will be left safe and sound at Port Chantereyne Marina - with her Garcia friends! We still plan to head to the UK and Ireland after Easter and will spend until mid-June cruising around, exploring the area and putting Chinook through her paces.  Our plan is to sail to Alderney, just off the coast of Normandy, on Easter Monday or Tuesday.  It is a short hop but has some major tides that can run up to 10kn so we need to time our departure well.  We bought the "Aurigny' (Alderney to the English-speakers) courtesy flag from the local chandlers here in Cherbourg We will then cross the English Channel to Portsmouth and work our way west along the coast of England to Wales and Scotland before heading south along the eastern Irish coast.  We need to be back in Cherbourg by mid-June for the 3-month warran
Read more

Garcia Boatyard - 49° 38' 48" N 01 35' 47" E

By -
Image
When we rocked up to the Garcia office for our Monday morning meeting, we couldn't help but notice that a mast-less Exploration 45 was parked outside the shed door where we had previously seen our hull parked.  Could this be o-u-r boat? Nice boat.  Could it be ours??? Marie, our project manager, confirmed that it was our boat!  Although we had come to the yard to put the Boat Show goodies that we had acquired into Garcia-provided storage, we were meeting with Christophe, the after-sales guy to go over spare parts and after-delivery emergency equipment that we were putting on our order.  We would not be getting a look ON BOARD this marvellous aluminium creature.  We would just be admiring through the meeting room window.  Our boat tour was tomorrow. The next day, we had mistakenly thought that the meeting was at 11 am, rather than the scheduled 10 am.  at 10:15 we received a text message from a puzzled Marie.  "Are you coming for the meeting?  Don't you want to
Read more