I am very impressed with Montréal. The oldest daughter and I decided to rendezvous here after my original train trip through the Rockies with my husband plan fell through. I remembered a French lesson a while ago when I had to study a brief tourism video on Montréal, and it seemed really cute (although clearly it wasn’t as memorable as I thought, because when I rewatched it yesterday, it was actually about Québec City). Spent the day exploring the port and the old town. It’s hot – got up to 27 degrees today and is going to hit 31 the next two days before finishing the week with a couple of days of thunderstorms. I only ever think of Canada as being deep in snow so this seems really weird.
The majority of people are fluently bilingual so it’s not actually been great for practicing my French, although almost everyone has been happy to meet me half way and indulge me without judgement. The exception was at dinner this evening. We finally decided we must try harder on our French and not give in just because it’s easier. So, we gave our dinner order to our beautiful young waitress in the best French we could muster. Well, it was awful. She got that frozen, superior look that I’ve seen so often in the past “I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean”. It only got worse after that. She got so bored and distracted when my daughter was ordering, rolling her eyes and smirking with the people at the table behind us that she completely missed everything and my daughter had to start again. I was mortified.
Things got better after that, though. Gradually the restaurant emptied out, and as the time for our bill (and the tip) grew nearer, she got chattier and friendlier. “Your French is really good!” – too late for that now, my dear! She asked us where we were from “Oh New Zealand is so beautiful! I definitely want to go there!” And then she explained her story: she’s from France! She’s over here on a working holiday! So, that explained her sneering earlier – she couldn’t help it, it’s a congenital thing. Anyway it left me much happier that my earlier positive impression of Canadians was likely still true.
