Anyway: two sets of dancing that I saw today. I went for a long ride up and over the mountain, to the far side of the Mount Royal park. There is a statue of winged Liberty on the northeast side of the mountain, beside which, on Sundays in clement weather, the Tams happen. This is a big drumming circle, with what seems a core set of drummers, and a ton of other people who can bring their own hand drums and tambourines and bells and they just play together, with different beats as the afternoon progresses. They go for hours. In the middle of the circle, people who are so inclined dance – and dance and dance, cooking in the sun or not, shod or barefoot (as today were all), swallowed by the regularity of the beat and moving slowly or quickly to the rhythm. Nearby, on the hillside, are the jugglers and acrobats practicing, people tucked up under the trees having sword fights with foam swords and shields, people kicking around hacky sacks and a light to moderate cloud of marijuana smoke hovering over it all. I watched for a while, then sat in the sun and read a book of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez short stories – somewhat of a surreal experience.

[Here I have discovered why my videos experience technical difficulties. It is because wordpress.com now charges for a subscription permitting video uploads. I am at least temporarily going to sulk in protest, and will post a photo or two instead.]{I have now been reminded how I figured the circumvention of this in the fall, with thanks to Yaron’s blog. Herewith – emended.}

Movie of the dancing at the Tams

The other dancing was to be found several avenues over (Montreal is less gridded than Manhattan, but there are several main avenues going loosely north-south and several going east-west in the central part of the city), in Parc la Fontaine. I came up into the park  across from a cafe which also houses a center for bicycling information in the city – La Maison de Cyclistes. On a semi-shaded section of a  footpath, there were a half-dozen couples, in all shapes and dress (although the women all wore at least 1″ heels, and 3″ in some cases), with a couple of speakers calling out music in a slightly tinny fashion that permitted the couples to tango. They cut and stepped across each other, some deep in concentration and some smiling and playing together. I rode around the park and retired to the cafe at La Maison, taking a cup of coffee out onto the terrace (the patio) and watching cyclists, skateboarders and pedestrians go past as the strains of the tango floated through the trees.

Movie of the dancing at the fountain

Anyway – two sets of dancing. Made for a nice day. Then I biked home, back up over the mountain, and danced with the washing machine.

A couple of weeks ago, I drove out to Ste. (with an e because she’s a she) Anne de Bellevue with my bike in the car, parked in the free municipal lot (!!) and suited up for a ride. The town itself is a cute little neighbo(u)rhood, but my goal was not the town (especially after realizing how little, howsoever cute, it is), but rather the Cap St-Jacques park. I don’t know – it was a pretty day, I wanted someplace semi-exotic but not too far (vis the trip to Magog, back in February), and it seems like biking is a good way to see the area.

 Once you get out of the city of Ste. A-de-B, past the canal lock, it gets very quickly estate-y and semi-rural as you slip into the town of Senneville. Just past the power station and the gas depot, I was completely surprised to see  that there was not only ar-able farmland but ar-ed farmland ON THE ISLAND. I don’t think Manhattan’s had that since the late 1800s. The first farm I saw was an organic farm whose barn was a big silver semi-buckyball, which was pretty cool. The fields begin on the right side of the road, with horses standing patiently in pastures, and the occasional flock of sheep; while on the left side of the road (the side with properties that front onto the water) begins a series of enormous, in most cases really beautiful mansions. Not Potomac or even Bel Air McMansions, but big graceful houses set far back from the road across broad green lawns, sometimes with high walls surrounding, and with swaths of unobstructed water access. [Mmph - sorry, I was drooling again.] What makes it nice for biking as well is that there are speed bumps every kilometer or so, so that bikers doing 15-20 mph don’t get driven off the side of the road by freely-flowing cars. Eventually, I got out to the Parc CStJ, which is well worth another visit. There are roads and paved bike/hike-only paths, which was nice. There are several places to access the water: a sandy swimming beach in a wooded cove, a water-access place for canoes etc., and various waterfront accesses to just sit and watch the waves coming in.

 Of course, I had a brilliant idea to load up a movie with sound and everything of the waves coming in but we are temporarily experiencing technical difficulties.

There are some pretty buildings in the park as well, including a small castle and something that looks like a gingerbread house out on a promontory, which would be a most excellent place to have a party, in my humble opinion. But a party for people you like, you know? They have bigger party spaces, too. Next to the organic farm. Sort of like my sister’s recent wedding, but also really  not. Hm.

One thing that I do enjoy tremendously in this land of hypothetically-multiple-language-signage is when I find curious signs that allow funny interpretation. I’ll ask you to contribute your suggestions for captions for these:

And next post: Iles de Boucherville.

That’s what was going on when I got home this balmy afternoon, having thought that I could get to the Jewish bookstore this afternoon and then discovering at 5:45 that they closed at 6. Sigh. Still, it was gorjour (my made-up French for “beautiful day”), so I suited up and biked up the hill.

To get to the mountain, I have to go through a residential area, past the Oratoire (see the post from the fall), and past a couple of cemeteries. Then I go up, up, up the hill. In the fall, I saw a fox trotting along the side of the road. Today, I saw a skunk that is larger than any I’ve ever seen before, albeit in this case at much less of a distance than I have ever before seen one and than I hope ever to see again.

Up at the top, past Beaver Lake (see a different earlier post – with the ice-skating strollers), I went off-road (because the wildlife made it seem like such a good idea) and found a part of the mountain I’d never managed to get to before. The park has a large lodge called the Belvedere eponymously overlooking the city with a gorgeous view of the whole southern wedge of the Island. Up the mountain behind the lodge is a CBC transmission tower and another tv/cell tower, with hard-pack road-wide trails going all the way – great for bikers and runners. When I was exploring around the cell tower, which is itself not far from an enormous, neon/light-bulbed cross situated on the mountain’s crest (in celebration of Montreal’s European Catholic heritage, post-colonization), a police minivan came whipping up the service road, only to come to a screeching halt where the road ends at a dirt foot/bike trail. The police officer looked at me and said something in French that I interpreted to mean, “How do I get to the cross?” While it was comforting that he asked directions, I was disturbed that a police officer was asking directions. I answered him in English and gestures, and he gingerly ten-point-turned. I whipped down the trail, wondering voyeuristically what was going on at the cross. It turned out that a handful of teenage boys had hopped the really high fence around the cross, and presumable set off the electric eye alarms; they were sheepishly explaining something to another police officer while their friend tried to climb back out of the cross compound.

Beautiful evening for getting out – and then coming home and having a beer or an iced tea on your front porch, so long as you remembered to put one in the fridge before leaving for your ride. Slowly, slowly….

http://www.lemontroyal.qc.ca/carte/en/index.sn

[I especially like the first slide for the Kondiarunk lookout, near the southern edge of the park. Imaginative how they put the whale into the St Lawrence river JUST because it was 10 000 years ago!]

Staking out my spot

Tugboat - but also frozen in

Ship's propellor

One "performer" and assistant

I’m going to try to attach here both a video with sound, and a smaller sound file (TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE – ask me directly if you want the file). Somewhere between minutes 6 and 7, the Notre Dame churchbells kicked in, but they were hard to hear in the live performance, and may not come out on the recording. I might need to go back next weekend and reposition myself closer to the bells, but will probably not ask for sanctuary. The train was sort of my ambushing the performer at the stage door (although it was not as exciting as Matthew Broderick in the late 1980s), after the symphony. And just a suggestion: if you have babies sleeping in the house, now is the time preemptively to turn down your speaker volume.

If you’re not fast enough off the draw to get yourself down to Florida, it’s the Townships for you. But only if you decide to. And I decided.

The first stop was the little town of Knowlton, just below Lake Brome (i.e., Lac Brome). It’s a nice-looking lake, although a little cold and uninviting for swimmers this time of year. Apparently in French, Knowlton is pronounced “Lac Brome.”  The town itself has a river runs through it with a mill pond (but no mill) and a small and inviting chocolaterie. Sadly, the invitation of the chocolaterie was unfulfilled, as no one answered the bell on the counter. It seems like the town caters to the summer life of the lake – although given the number of fully vacant storefronts (vs. the closed-for-the-season ones), it is no more secure from our economic world than anywhere else.

Lake Brome

Town hall - Lake Brome

Antiques store sign (3D!)

Lake Brome millpond outflow

Knowlton municipal ice rink

Local winter economy

Store window - that's original 1970s packaging! Luke's frozen in time!

After Knowlton, I drove eastwards until I found the Benedictine Abbye de St-Benoit du Lac. I don’t know what’s going on with me and monasteries lately. I find the phenomenon of an eremitic religious commune to be fascinating. Sort of like seminary, but with cows. My visit overlapped with the monks’ afternoon prayers, which they still chant using the Gregorian modality. The moments after the prayer bells rang brought an influx of monks dressed in coarse brown habits, like pouring oil into a funnel: the center of the church waxed and waned with a flow of genuflecting brown, purposeful and focused. After the prayers, they all disappeared, with one last monk, the right side of his body apparently still drawn after a stroke, slowly making his own rhythm out. The church itself is only about 10 years old, while the abbey traces its lineage back to France in the 1300s.

Abbey from the road

Abbey church narthex

Abbey church with monks' stalls

Abbey hallway

The area of the Townships feels kind of like the Virginia Piedmont area (go Charlottesville!) – it is at the far northern end of the same Appalachians, although it is not particularly IN the mountains, per se. There are a few here and there – and there are a small handful of ski resorts with the (apparently directly) corresponding spas (i.e., sauna, whirlpool, & massage) in the area – but a lot of it is rolling countryside, rather proverbially.

Headed Eastern to Townships

Cool barn - buried up to the eaves - near St Benoit

I made a short stop over in Magog, which is apparently much more of a scene for swimming and biking during the non-snowbound months (although it looked, though I couldn’t be sure over the shoulder-high snowbanks, that there was an ice-skating path that had been cultivated around the outside of the lake – it was either that or a wicked-cook cold-terrain roller-blade bath). There was a grocery store there which I interpreted by its name to be a VEGETARIAN grocery. I am sure that the boutique pork and beef came from animals that had only been fed vegetables. Maybe the name was French for Whole Foods. But – I didn’t stay long in Magog. 

I did zip up to the Mont-Orford National Park for a little bit, and hovered around the edges (looks like a good place to come camping when I’m more prepared), and then stopped in a cool consignment antiques shop (Antiquites Autre Temps) on the edge of Magog near the highway and had a chat with its two proprietors about schools and economies and teenagers. 

The last stop of the day was in the university town of Sherbrooke. It was very definitely a university town – and sadly, I don’t have a lot more to say on it than that. It was late in the day, and between my mild fatigue and its real grittiness (not the least because of the use of cinders to increase traction on icy surfaces as part of the spectrum of ice-negotiation that includes sometimes salt to prevent ice formation), there may have been a lot there to see but I only scratched its surface. I did find a good bookstore – all French books, and which followed what I recently learned is the standard European method of ordering books in bookstores: according to publisher. They had a good selection of Tintin and Asterix, and a honking huge section of Catholic religious books. I wasn’t sure if it was a religious bookstore or if that is somehow typical of bookstores here. I snapped a shot of an apartment complex parking lot: many, many people (also in my area) have these parking shelters over their driveways to reduce getting their cars snowed in. This is the first time I’d seen this on a surface lot like this. Kind of fun image.

Parking shelters in an apartment complex

Former Bank of Montreal - now fertility clinic

Sherbrooke memorial

Night-skiing near the highway

My electric bill for the prior three months was $172.55 combined, or somewhere below 1/5 my current electric bill on per diem.

I’m going to put on a jacket and turn down the thermostat until I can see my breath well enough to catch it. It’s good. Hyperventilation raises core body temperature. Eeps.

I decided to go off-Island to the north, and stopped in the little town of St-Eustache. (Its French identity is so important that it’s difficult to find the English on the town web site!) Actually, it was apparently a French stronghold in resisting the British repression of French loyalists in the 1830s, and the church facade still shows the unrepaired cannonball damage from the British fusillade against the people sheltering inside. On the day of my visit, there wasn’t much going on, except for people out snowmobiling on the river and some vigorous preparation of the municipal skating rink down at the boat launch behind the church.

Out on the Ottawa river - snowmobile tracks

The church from the Ottawa river

Bridge over the (frozen) river through town

Frozen rose blossoms

After St. Eustache, I drove along a little further to Oka. You may remember a few years back, in 1990, when the local Mohawk community came to an armed standoff with the provincial police over an attempt to expand the municipal golf course onto the tribe’s burial grounds. Oka is also known for a couple of other things: one, a Cistercian abbey that is famous for its (one-a) Oka cheese (now made by a large Agropur factory beside the abbey) and two, a most excellent provincial park that looks like (in this winter season) a h(e)aven for snowshoers and nordic skiers. I walked into the abbey, which had a pretty, modern sanctuary space with nicely-designed lights for the monks; the only monk there was one receiving confession, but he walked out right about when I walked in (“back in 15 minutes”), so it’s just as well I didn’t need anything. Okay, I maybe needed something, but the bathrooms were locked, so that was no go.

Oka abbey church hall

Window silhouettes

The light fixtures illuminate both rows of lecterns

Today (which is January 25th), I did a bunch of household errands, did some school stuff, and decided I needed to get out for a bracing walk. So I loaded up with polypro, a wind fleece, and my Navy bridge coat, and went up to Mount Royal to hike around. Unfortunately, I failed to do my morning transfusion of anti-freeze fluid to replace my blood cells. The Montreal English newspaper web site said it was only going to be -14 Celsius today (about 7 degrees Fahrenheit) – so 25 degrees below water freezing – but personally, I think it felt somewhere more like -20 (about -4 Fahrenheit). All I know is that MY fingers were pretty well freezing inside my thermal gloves within five minutes, despite the fact that parents and kids were out with their sleds and cross-country skis and ice-skates, having a merry old time. Maybe something in the water. I saw a 5-year-old dragging a sled with what looked like a rigid doll until I realized that it was probably a 2- or 3-year-old kid bundled up in a snowsuit (leaving only a strip of forehead above the eyes showing) asleep. I did not film it for fear that it would have been too obvious, and that I would then have had to turn over my camera to child protective services. The park on Mount Royal has excellent tubing and sledding runs, with high snow Jersey-barriers to keep the sledders from colliding on the downhill. The Beaver Pond (artificial – no beavers ever lived here) is frozen solid and carefully made skatable. Lots of cross-country skiers were skating across the park. It’s a great, in-town place to go skiing, it seems.

Skiers in MR park

Tubing hill in MR park

Sledding hill - from the bottom

There was also, on Lac aux Castors (Beaver Lake) an interesting phenomenon that I had not seen before, and which seems slightly intense, howsoever not child-endangering it might be. Several sets of parents were happily ice-skating with their stroller-age (and -bound) children in their strollers. On the ice. I mean, yeah, they had snow tires. But still. Rolling objects on near-frictionless surfaces, with infants inside. Um. . . . I suppose it’s more polite to be impressed than to be freaked out, but, you know, I’m a foreigner here. I am allowed to think the local customs are quaint. At least until I adopt them.

And then it’s back home, to finish schoolwork and to enjoy working in my living room. The walls are slowly being decorated….

I mean. . . Let me begin from just after the last blog post.

First: there was exploring MontreFall. It was pretty – I went down near the Botanical Gardens, which is at the Biodome (which I did NOT enter this time) and the Olympic Stadium (which helped me to understand why everyone thinks it looks a bit like a big toilet bowl, since they put the cover on it). After walking about there for a little bit, I somehow inadvertently ended up on Montreal’s Formula I race track. I was just driving along, minding my own business, when all of a sudden – whammo! – I’m in my cute little Honda Fit on what feels like a very, very bad neighbo(u)rhood. Fortunately, I managed to pull the car over into a convenient pit area, just near the beginning of the rowing course that was built for the 1976 Montreal Olympics. With only a slight trespassing into private property (it wasn’t THAT well secured), I got to see a little space of family history, behind what is now the corporate boxes for the car race (that is, incidentally, also now a piece of Montreal history).

Olympic Stadium

Durn Turrists

Olympic rowing course

Olympic rowing course - head

That was, of course, in the autumn. Probably round about mid October, maybe late, the neighbo(u)rhood started to get ready for winter. On the one hand, this meant cleaning and grading the snow-dump site (which is across the circle from my school, and which apparently last year towered higher than the school building). Snow, in this area, is plowed roughly to the side of the street during and after a snowfall; once the snow has finished falling, it gets picked up with huge snowthrowers and piled into dump trucks, which take the snow to the dump lot and pile it into a mountain with the use of bulldozers. There’s just too much snow to salt, and it doesn’t warm up enough during the winter, apparently, to melt a substantial-enough amount of it. Stay tuned for pictures of cool snow machines. In the meantime, the gardens are prepared for winter: bushes are tied up with twine (I still don’t understand why), or wrapped, and statuary is dismantled. It’s gonna be a loooooooooong winter. The reflective whippy post things also get put out, so that the sidewalk ploughs (which are SO cool) know where not to utterly destroy the shrubbery.

Getting ready for wrappage

Twiney bushes

Air conditioners get cold, too

Don't plow on me

This about brings us to where it first starts to get – you know – wintry. Which began ever so slightly earlier with the frost, and went on to the first snow that stuck. And after a brief interlude, the first snow that stuck and is still under there somewhere. My kitchen balcony, amusingly enough, is semipermanently under a snow drift that is climbing up the glass doors. I’m curious how high it will actually get. Less amusingly, although I have double windows in every window, the one in the dining room had snow drifts in between the sets of windows, which – although not as bad as having snow inside the house – seems to me somehow to be Not The Best Demonstration Of Weatherproofness. 

Frost on the windshield

Snow in the back yard

Sunrise, frost inside the window

Snowly climbing...

And with that, I’m going to call myself updated for now. I have a bit more to do so as to be caught-up, including today’s adventure (which was not, in the end all so adventurous as that) out to the western mainland suburbs. But – keep tuned for that. And I’ll get a note from my study partner’s friend’s mom about the assignment….

It was nevertheless a lot to consider in terms of seeing others’ sukkot and thinking for next year. Many people here have hard-sided sukkot, which are much nicer to experience (on anything other than a pretty day, one of which was the one day of Sukkot on which I had guests), but which consequently are pretty storage-intensive. The people directly behind me had a pair of heat-blowers in their sukkah, although during the day, they simply put them outside (presumably the sukkah was getting warm). It also seems that people are big on the mat s’chach/roofing, which again is lower-environmental impact, but at the same time, pretty storage intensive. Maybe someday….

Balcony sukkah

I was riding back this morning on the big yellow school bus, after the third overnight retreat with high school students in a month. The first one, just a month ago, saw me going up into the Laurentian mountains for the first time – not as awesome as the Rockies, nor as imposing as the Adirondacks or Appalachians, but mountains nonetheless, and so somewhat familiar. Over the last month, I’ve got to see the leaves change (on a fourth trip “up north”, for that purpose, when they were really in just-post-crimson gloriosity), walk through frost enough for Tony the Tiger if not for the grass to snap protest under my shoes, and see the yellow Tishrei moon rise waning above a lake over which a lone heron had earlier described a long, slow, graceful line. And all of those visits, oddly enough, involved interactions with teens.

I work at a high school, although not as much with the students (albeit enough to have R., today, who decided that it was fine to drop his pants in the hallway to change for football because “everyone does it”, tell me that it wasn’t fair for me to ask him to come to the HS vice principal’s office since I hadn’t previously warned him, and wasn’t Judaism all about getting a second chance?), and the force of accepting this job has begun to hit me hard. I had a much easier time with my little brother in his “difficult years” by telling people that he had been kidnapped by aliens and replaced with one of their own, although I was pleasantly surprised when they returned him a few years earlier than I had expected they would. And I watch my friends who have “older” children (i.e., teenage ones, some of whom I’ve known long enough to also know that I have stories that I will never tell about them in public) refrain with great forbearance from throttling them in their little green alien states, howsoever deserving I might believe them to be.

But the majesty of a forest woven like a brilliant carpet is not the right comparison with a room of 120 ninth graders – or even, for that matter, 25 of them, or a dorm full of them who are (supposed to be) “sleeping”. Maybe a hurricane. Or, more innocuously, a snowstorm, with ever-jumping spinning whorls of sharp icy moments that, taken individually, are marvels of crystalline beauty. It’s hard for me to understand whether they are normal people who have short attention spans, or children in growing-up (and certainly generally tall) bodies, or aliens – but in a group, they are entirely new a thing. They are an orchard of white apple blossoms, ablazed with fuzzy honey bees, with no single space to rest your attention or direct a thought, so all ashift underfoot. Ask them to pay attention – you have ten seconds. Ask them to be quiet to watch a movie – and you have ten minutes. Bladder control seems to be on a one-minute clock, so that for my crotchety grup teacher mind, I have to remember that just because fifteen kids want to go to the bathroom during a ten-minute program, they’re not all one kid. And still, the sparks of future beings becoming are like the crocus greens piercing the sleepy brown, sometimes still white.

And I try to remember what it was to be 15, 14, 13: not just what I did, but what it felt like, how it was, and I am in awe of how much they have to teach me. In addition to my hope that the aliens will bring them all back some day, and that I’ll be here for them to come back to visit and say, “Hey, are you still here?” and that I will still be learning, while they have long left school.