Holidays Here and There

As I mentioned in a couple of posts, I went to Montreal a couple weekends ago, just on a whim. Although I actually posted trip photos last weekend, I haven’t yet had the opportunity to highlight them here on the front page. So, I’ll take this American holiday weekend to make some observations on my Canadian adventure, and wrap up with a couple notes from my Virginia Fourth of July.

First, even defining my destination as Canada rather than specifically Québec (with the accent in French, but not in English) could get me in a bit of trouble. Although Montreal’s outlook is probably the most pan-Canadian of any city in the province save the Hull-Gatineau (Ottawa suburbs) area, Québécois separatism is very much alive and well. I’ll talk more about the political/linguistic elements of separatism in another entry (including the infamous Bill 101), but for now, I’ll note that one interesting indicator was the selection of flag(s) flown outside any particular building.

• The Canadian flag only wasn’t seen terribly often. When it was, though, that place was generally a large Canadian corporation, with just an office in Montreal for form’s sake.
• Two flags (Canada and Quebec) was the most common selection, recognizing the superiority of the federal government, but also giving Quebec’s distinct nature a nod.
• The Quebec flag only was a pretty solid “Anglos go home (or away)” sign.
• Four flags, finally, indicated a primary allegiance to tourist dollars above any sort of political affiliation. What four flags, you ask? Canada, Quebec, Montreal, and… the USA. We may not have done so well invading the country 191 years ago, but if our soldiers didn’t turn Canada into a full-fledged part of the USA, our tourists and the strength of our dollar have certainly made it a partial economic dependency.

One side effect of American dominance of the tourism industry is that while it’s good to have Canadian money on hand, most places will be perfectly happy to accept your U.S. currency and give you Canadian change. Even Burger Kings have US dollar exchange rates posted, in a format indicating the bonus amount in Canadian dollars. (Ex.: “30%” == they treat US$10 as C$13 going into the till. I watched a kid buy a C$5 combo meal with a US$20 bill and get C$21 in change.) Of course, these places don’t provide the best exchange rate (as usual, go to ATMs for that), but it’s certainly convenient if you only need small amounts of cash.

Separatism issues aside, the tourist industry is entirely bilingual — it seemed to me that customer-service types really didn’t care what language they spoke. This was great for me — I could work on my French as desired, and switch to English when lazy or when I reached the limit of my French skills. It’s said that immersion is the best way to learn a language, but all-bilingual all-the-time (even the vendors at the Expos game shouted “Bière frais/cold beer!” and “Chiens-chauds/hot dogs!” as they walked the aisles) did pretty well for me.

The biggest language problem was that my French is tuned to a Parisian accent, both by teaching and by (brief) experience. Quebec French was comprehensible to me, but different enough that I had more problems communicating at first in Quebec than I did in France itself. Part of me wonders why Parisian French is the dominant form taught in U.S. schools; Spanish teachers here don’t teach Castilian Spanish, but a semi-generic Latin American version (each country has its accent/dialect variations, but most of them share common distinctions versus castellano) more immediately usable to the student. One might think similar practicality considerations would suggest Quebec French over its Continental relative, but then again, one of the first lessons in my 8th grade French book was how to get around in Paris by métro, and quite a few other class assignments related to wandering the streets of the City of Lights. It’s almost as if portions of my French schooling contained product placements from the Maison de la France.

One neat part was that, completely by luck, I showed up on the weekend before St-Jean-Baptiste Day, Quebec’s national holiday (the official, non-Catholic name is la Fête Nationale). The big fireworks display over the St. Lawrence River took place on Saturday night; although I missed the Expos’ eighth-inning rally by leaving early, I timed it just right to get off at Papineau and reach the shoreline area near the Pont Jacques Cartier in time for the show to start. I had actually planned to head a couple Metro stops further west, but when 70% of the people in the packed car got off, an old Blacksburg Transit reflex of mine kicked in. If, on a Saturday F-shift, I had a heavy outbound load that mysteriously lightened at a random stop, there were pretty good odds that there was a party there. That instinct served me well in Montreal.

By comparison, my Fourth of July was quite a bit more sedate, if not exactly quieter. I caught a baseball game again, the Orioles visiting the Blue Jays — the Bluefield Orioles and the Pulaski Blue Jays, that is. Heidi and I took advantage of free general admission for that afternoon game on the Fourth (although they made their money off me when I bought yet another new cap), then headed over to Blacksburg for the town’s fireworks display. After a couple of false starts, we wound up watching from the back parking lot of Blacksburg High School, almost directly under the fireworks’ explosion (thus “not exactly quieter”). B’burg seemed absolutely dead on the morning of the Fourth, as most of the summer students had left town, but the north end of town was jammed that night for what was a pretty impressive display.

Later this week: the politics of language in Quebec.