explorers of mont royal

I woke up to the loud sounds of shouting in the dead of the night.  It was the patrons at the African bar below the apartment where I was staying in Verdun. I'm not sure whether they were cheering or arguing - with French being spoken this fast with this strong a Congolese accent, there was no way I'd be able to follow along the conversation. Especially since a lot of the conversation involved yelling "heyyyyyyyyyyyy" in the streets.

In the morning, I felt a little groggy but ready to spend the morning exploring Montreal. I asked M, my host generously putting me up for the weekend, if he wanted to go for breakfast. He suggested instead that I join him on a hike up Mont Royal, where he was meeting a friend.

As it turned out, the "friend" that M was meeting was a woman that he'd been chatting with on an online dating website, and the mountain hike that he was inviting me to join was their first date.  As everyone know, I love adventures but this was an unusual one.

It was a hot morning. The night had been hot too; M had been kind enough to lend me his fan for the evening, but I hadn't used it.  That conversation more or less went like this:

Host: "Here, you can use my fan! You can leave it on if you get too hot while you sleep."

Gloria: "Thanks!" (Pause) "Did you know that Koreans believe that you'll die if you leave the fan on while you sleep? Not me though, ha ha! That's silly!"

Host: "Ha ha!" 

(Host leaves)

(Gloria turns off the fan)

Turning off the fan was probably a stupid idea. It would also turn out to be a stupid idea to drink a big carton of warm chocolate milk while climbing up a mountain, but the thing about adventure-seeking is that sometimes it's very fun, like crashing your friend's first date with a woman he met online, and sometimes it results in a weird form of heatstroke where you spend a lot of time wondering who came up with the idea of Fan Death in the first place. 

We met up with M's date or non-date J, who, to her absolute credit, did not raise an eyebrow at all at my presence and instead decided to just roll with it.  We headed for the mountain.

Mont Royal is located right in the middle of the city of Montreal, sort of the green-nature-in-the-urban-setting theme that Central Park is to New York, except, you know, with a mountain.  A good leisurely hike through the carefully marked gravel trails will take you about half an hour to forty-five minutes to get to the top of the mountain.  But both M and I are not really the type of people to follow something so mundane as "marked trails", so soon enough we wandered off the path and began cutting through the trees to make our own way up the steep cliff.

To be fair, we clearly weren't the only ones who had ever had the idea, as indicated by the litter along the riverbed.  Every once in a while, sure that we were deep in the woods and far from the path, we would come across the remains of a campfire and broken beer bottles, where other less environmentally-minded adventures had trailblazed and hung out some time before.  J did her best to keep up with us scrambling up the side of the mountain, although I am pretty sure every few dozen steps she was wondering how exactly she had gotten here, with us. Specifically, with me.

Eventually we made it to a clearing with a wonderful view.  It reminded me of the hills in Barcelona.

Turning away from the lookout point, I found myself face to face for the first time with that blue neon cross I've always seen lit at night on the hill. I had never seen it up close before.  It wasn't lit, possibly because it was daytime, or possibly because the Quebecois no longer feel a religious compulsion to light up this neon cross like a store sign, what with the rest of the city preoccupied with students that have been protesting for over a hundred days now. For us, it was time to hike back down the mountain, this time following the proper path.

Later on, once I recovered from the effects that inevitably come from chugging warm chocolate milk on a hot summer hike, I went for brunch in the trendy Mile End neighbourhood with my friends Stephanie and Eunice. Eunice was visiting from Waterloo. By day, Steph conducts research on fertility by working on white mice, a task that is only slightly hampered by her phobia of mice.  By night, Steph plays violin for a Haitian hiphop band. Doesn't everybody in Mile End?

The restaurant Steph took us to was called Lawrence, one of those hip brunch places where the barristas are white girls with random braids and visible bra straps who draw intricate flowers in your coffee, but that's only if you make it past the handsome man in a v-cut shirt looking an awful lot like Ryan Gosling who takes your name at the front door and tells you that there are ten pages of tables ahead of you. But it's okay, because this is Montreal, where you have to wait for everything that is good, and usually the food is worth the ten-page wait.

you can order a mimosa to make the waiting not so bad

or you can have bagels as an aperatif over at the Fairmount Bagels around the corner. except that place also has a line up out the door, down the stairs, and wrapped around the building.

my meal: pancakes, goat cheese, blueberries, syrup, and bacon as thick as a longshoreman's arm, but more delicious than a longshoreman's arm. Notice the mimosa is now empty

By the time I finished my pancakes, which were so thick they were more like scones, I had sweated through my whole shirt.  It was as hot here as anywhere else in the city.  I'd seen a Bikram Yoga studio down the street, and I had no idea who would do hot yoga here. The entire city was like a hot yoga session.  But I was feeling good, mainly because my stomach was full, full of bacon and not warm milk.

Osheaga Music Festival: the music - Saturday and Sunday

Looking back at the music on Day 2 and 3 of Osheaga Music Festival on the island of Parc Jean Drapeau in Montreal 
see my post about Day 1 of Osheaga
see my post about the non-musical, survival-related aspects of Osheaga

Memoryhouse
Memoryhouse made great morning music, the kind of music you can listen to while sipping your coffee staring blankly ahead, trying to motivate yourself to face the rest of your day.  Memoryhouse was dreamy and perfect to listen to while I lay under a tree, trying to understand what made me drink a carton of chocolate milk before climbing Mont Royal the morning. Maybe I wasn't thinking right because I'd been abruptly awoken in the dead hours of the morning by shouts and cheers from the Congolese bar below the room where I was sleeping. Either way, my stomach was feeling curious and I was happy to lie down and listen to the mellow music of this Toronto indie band.

I like this move towards a band arrangement that involves just ambient synths, an electric guitar processed with heavy reverb, and a drum machine (or a drummer playing along to a drum machine), in the style of Beach House, Coco et Co, or the Secret Love Parade. It's a simpler band arrangement, and yet the sound still remains quite full. It's also an arrangement that my own band has been experimenting with lately, so maybe that's my bias.

Karim Ouellet
Karim's bio described his music style as including reggae, so I was going to skip this act. I have a mild allergy to reggae music. However, I caught some of the Senegalese musician's show on my way back from the other stage and found myself drawn to his sound, which was full of some mad conga playing and didn't sound all that much like reggae. It was a million times more pleasant than the shouting from the Congolese bar downstairs that I had woken up to at the crack of dawn.

Calexico
I like Calexico.  I fell in love with their Feast of Wire album, and I also particularly like the EP that Calexico put out with Iron and Wine, In the Reins - as you might imagine, that's a fantastic musical combo.  Their performance that day seemed somewhat underwhelming however.  Calexico has a wide range of musical styles that they skilfully blend together in their records, a odd mix of country, Mexican mariachi, rock, experimental indie - but it seemed like their performance only consisted of the Mexican side of it. I enjoyed the trumpets ornamenting the melodies, but I felt like there was so much more that I wanted to hear from Calexico, whom I'd never seen live before.

Or maybe it was just the heatstroke that I was feeling at the point. I found myself lying in the dirt again, humming along to the horns, watching the wind create little tornadoes with the garbage on the ground.

The Black Lips
The Black Lips may have been one of the most underrated bands of the festival. They clearly could have used a larger stage than the Tree Stage and a longer set than the half hour allotted, given the reception that they got from the audience.  The crowd was too big for the stage area to hold - people spilled out past the lawn, on to the bridge, and behind the vendors' tents just to be able to listen to the band rocking out. People were crowd-surfing in the middle of the day.  There is something amazing about watching a band start up a moshpit at four in the afternoon. My sister and I squatted in the dirt, enjoying the sounds, because with that crowd, there was no chance we were going to be able to see the band on stage.

The Raveonettes
The Raveonettes were one of the bands that I was looking forward to the most at Osheaga, but like Calexico, I was personally less enthusiastic about their choice of set list.  It being a sunny summer festival, I was looking forward to hearing a number of tracks off their last album Raven in the Grave that fight each other for a spot on my "Best Song of the Summer" list, including "Recharge and Revolt", "Forget That You're Young", "Ignite", or, off their older album In and Out of Control, "Bang!" or why not even "Boys Who Rape", which, despite its dark content calling for the destruction of perpetrators of sexual assault, still has a catchy pop feel to it.  And that's what I like about Raveonettes.  They have dark lyrics in songs like "Suicide" and "DRUGS", but they execute it with a bright melodic touch with wonderful musical throwbacks to bands from the 60s and 70s.

Unfortunately, instead of playing these particular tunes that I liked, they performed the tracks that were more grungey noise rock than catchy.  It's not that I didn't like those tunes, but a more balanced mix would have been nice, since they do other styles so well.  But again, it was really hot - the Green Stage somehow felt like a stuffy furnace, despite being out in an open field.  The bright summer sun made the dark gothy stuff seem all the more out of place.

The Raveonettes' set time seemed to work well as a prelude to the main event that would be headlining later that night at the same stage - the Jesus and Mary Chain, whom the Raveonettes openly admit to having as a major influence.  But more on that later.

Dumas
Dumas is one of my favourite Francophone discoveries, and I wish I could have caught more of his act. His album Fixer le temps is phenomenal, full of melodies that will stay in your head for ages.  Sort of a Quebecois version of Bon Ivers, but not always quiet, he put on a great show that had the crowd responding with more enthusiasm than I expected, given the anglophone majority of festival goers.

Brand New
I never really listened to much of Brand New when I was younger, so I felt like this whole show was someone else's nostalgia.  Someone else older, or younger? I'm not sure. The Emo Game is now ten years old, so certainly emo bands like Brand New should fall right within my timeline. But a lot of people were happy to be able to catch this band after all these years.  I was personally impressed that the frontman can still sing/screech like that.  The last time I saw Pavement, Stephen Malkmus had hired out his screaming parts to another singer in an attempt to preserve his voice.

Garbage
Garbage! I was excited to see Garbage! I was also interested in seeing the kinds of people that would line up hours beforehand to see Garbage. Besides me, I mean. The answer was interesting. A lot of girls with silly tattoos and home hair dye jobs that they maybe should have sprung the extra cash get done at the salon.  Who were all these men? Who was that big Asian guy with glasses that looks like my friend Jonathan Park, but with a Canadian cannabis flag draped over his back and girls' signatures all over it?


The band came on stage all looking a little bit older and weathered, but enthusiastic as ever.  Shirley Manson was as awesome as I’d remembered her. She greeted the crowd in French, apologizing for her French.  I love that musicians at Osheaga try their best to conduct their stage banter in French, even though the majority of the crowd are actually anglophones commuting from Ottawa.  Shirley Manson probably speaks better French than a lot of Canadians.

Although Shirley Manson played a different style of music than mine, I have always been grateful that she was one of the few women in rock that was there in my adolescence. As a teen, I listened to Garbage and loved it even though none of my hip friends disdaining radio did. I was so glad that she was there to balance out the one-sided bullshit images of femininity in the media, on the covers of magazines and in Britney Spears music videos.   Shirley Manson was confirmation in my eyes that a girl can wear a lot of dark eyeliner and attitude instead of platform heels, and still rock out looking amazing.

I love Garbage.  I love their unabashed attitude, unpretentious sincerity, their industrial rock sound, and Shirley's positive enthusiasm on stage that acts as an interesting contrast to her sulky teen girl lyrics. If music history represents a pendulum between bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain, who stand with their backs to the audience and mumble inaudibly between songs, and bands like Justice, who put on a big light show to distract and entertain the crowd, I like where Garbage stands the most.  They don't do the shoegazer's disengagement from the audience: they openly appreciate their fans. They don't do the hipster irony thing either, which serves as a different kind of mask to hide from the fans. They just put on a good show.

Both Shirley and I were amazed and then immediately suspicious of the drone copter hovering at the back of the festival, watching us all with its little camera.


Yeasayer
Guys...why didn't you tell me about this awesome Brooklyn band before? Why have I been living so long without "Middle Eastern psych snap gospel" music?  Also, why were there so many groups of men with coordinated outfits at this concert? Is this a thing now?

Jesus and Mary Chain

By this point, due to the long lines to the portapotty, I had not peed in 8 hours. This was potentially problematic because of my anticipation for the Jesus and Mary Chain show, but luckily I'm pretty sure I'd sweated out all of the liquids in my body, what with all the hot sun and dancing.

I find it interesting to watch shoegaze bands that have gotten older. When you're young, your sulky facial expression and lack of stage banter and lack of body movement during songs is seen as cool - nihilist, angsty, and cool. When you're fifty years old, that sort of stage presence comes across more in the style of grumpy old men. With Jim Reid's Scottish accent, all I can understand in his mumbling is the occasional "fuck". The best portion of the night, though was:

Drunk Happy Guy: "You guys are sick! You guys are killing it right now!"
Jim Reid: "I'm what?"
Drunk Happy Guy: "You guys are sick! You're killing it-"
Jim Reid: "What?"
Me: "Stop telling him he's sick and that he's killing it. That means something else in the normal English language. Can't you just tell him he's good?"

It somewhat reminds me of the inability of my friends in their mid-thirties to distinguish the important difference between something being "shit" (bad) and something being "the shit" (awesome).

Still, the crowd was riveted by the band's performance, which is always nice to see given that the young girls at the front were not even born when the band's best albums came out. Actress Jessica Paré joined the band to sing the female vocal parts for "Just like Honey" (which is also on my Songs of the Summer list).  This meant nothing to me, because I don't watch Mad Men, but everyone else was really excited about this. It was also really neat to see the Jesus and Mary Chain perform "Happy When It Rains" when Garbage had earlier that night performed "Only Happy When It Rains". How often does that happen in one night?

There was no encore. Jim announced it was going to be his last song. Obviously everybody, including Drunk Happy Guy, begged for ten more songs.  Jim looked longingly in the direction of his tour bus and I knew that there would be no encore.

Austra

Austra was an interesting morning dance party.  They were actually playing at four in the afternoon, but it still felt like the morning for most of us.  There were girls dancing with hula hoops and playing with poi, arms in the crowd raised and bouncing in unison, all pretty impressive for the Furnace Green Stage in the middle of the day.

Austra is a symbol of the direction that music is moving toward. There's less of an emphasis on live performances, and more backtracks - it's just easier to get a machine to play your parts than a live human (which is why we need to watch out for the rise of Red Robot). There's less guitar solos and distinguishable instruments and more synths, especially expensive synths.  There's less of a focus on poetic lyrical story-telling in the style of Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, and more repeated catchy lines that form part of the beat.  There's less literal shoegazing and more showmanship, flashing lights, smoke, and bizarre costumes. You see it in shows like Rich Aucoin, who plays videos and throws parachutes and silly string into the audience, or Justice, who played the first night of the festival.  

There are pros and cons in my view - I like the blended instrument sound which emphasizes the collective rather than the individualist style of blaring guitar solos. As a pianist, I am loving the revival of the synthesizer, which was pretty much absent during the grungey 90s, and I really just like the electro-pop sound. But I could also do without the flash and smoke, because really, I came here to enjoy the music, not to be baby-sat like a child with ADD that has to be entertained constantly (I love Sigur Ros after all, which is slow as heck). And while I understand the practicality issues of backtracks, I want to see how the sounds are made, which you can't with a laptop. But you know, I might just be an old fuddy-duddy. Either way, I really enjoyed the Austra set, not because the girls were dressed like bizarre fairies, but because I really love their sound.

M83

The M83 show felt like a thousand wet open-mouthed bisous (kisses) from a lovely Frenchman. My French Canadian friends know that I hate being greeted with a kiss (Asians, you know, are used to bowing from a respectful, non-germy distance), but this display of love and affection at the show I actually appreciated.  Every couple of songs, the guys would step to the microphone and gush in their beautiful France-French-not-Quebecois-French about how much they loved us and how much they loved being here with us in Montreal. It was like spending the night being spooned by M83, except instead of strong loving manly arms I received kicks in the head from crowd surgers, who really did look like they were floating on the surface of the sea that was the crowd, a look on their face so serene they seemed like monks at a temple in prayer. We own the sky!

Osheaga Music Festival: the music - Friday

Continued from yesterday's post: I went to Osheaga Music Festival on the island of Parc Jean Drapeau in Montreal. Today, I attempt to review the bands I saw on Day 1.

Radio Radio
I arrived at the festival just in time to see these rappers from Nova Scotia who rap in Acadian French. Yep. You heard me right. I love Radio Radio. One of the items on my bucket list may or may not be to rap in Acadian French one day. I particularly love their song Jacuzzi, which more or less has every line ending with "dans mon Jacuzzi".  Sometimes I find myself narrating every detail of my every day life to the tune and format of the song under my breath:

j'achète du thé dans mon Jacuzzi
je lis des documents dans mon Jacuzzi
j'attends l'autobus dans mon Jacuzzi
(and then inevitably I switch to English)
I fight with Rogers dans mon Jacuzzi
I notarize copies dans mon Jacuzzi

And so on. Voulez-vous venir dans mon Jacuzzi?

Dum Dum Girls
I love watching girl bands, due to the fact that I was completely deprived of female rock role models as a child. It was not cool for girls to be in bands when I was a kid. Girls wanted to be pop stars like the Spice Girls so they weren't interested in starting a band with you, and boys didn't want to be in a band with you because, they would patiently explain, nobody likes the sound of a female voice in rock because girls are pop stars like the Spice Girls. My adolescence would have been a completely different experience if this noisy dream pop girl band from Los Angeles had been big in my time. It was great to see the Dum Dum Girls play, even if their set was devastatingly short due to them starting late because of technical complications.  Please come back to Canada. Please perform in Ottawa and show a new generation of little girls how women can rock out awesomely.  And please play your Smiths cover of "There is a Light That Never Goes Out."

Franz Ferdinand
I can only name one song by Franz Ferdinand, albeit one really awesome song, so I hadn't intended on catching these guys. But I was hungry for dinner and the lines to the food vendors were so long they took me right into the stage areas where I could have a pretty good view of the band while waiting in line.  I ran into my friend Dean, a guy that despite us never making plans to party together, always seems to be in the mood to spontaneously party with me.  We waited in line for pizza cones together while listening to Franz Ferdinand.  They played Take Me Out, the only song of theirs that I knew because it was an anthem from my undergrad years.  Dean and I danced.   Then Franz Ferdinand played a Donna Summers cover.  Dean and I danced a memorial dance.  Franz Ferdinand made for an excellent dance soundtrack while we waited in line for dinner.

Random note: I went to middle school with a guy whose great-uncle was rumoured to have shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The pizza cones were delicious, although almost too much cheese, and I never complain about too much cheese.

Florence + the Machine
Florence was inexplicably dressed like a witch.  She was not, however, acting like one, as she was running around the stage urging everybody to hug each other and express themselves with love.  I thought that was nice.  It was at that point that I realized that the band was British.  I'm slow. I just realized last week that Call Me Maybe is a pop song and that is why people keep making references to "And this is crazy...". I thought everyone was just being weird.

I was exhausted, and while the band played, I fell asleep under a tree, a tree that incidentally turned out to be where all the gay men were sleeping. Perhaps they too wanted to save their energy for the next act: Sigur Rós.

Sigur Rós
Sigur Rós! My teenage dream come true. I was annoyed that I had to choose between seeing MGMT and Sigur Rós, but, like I said, seeing this Icelandic band live was something that I'd dreamed of since I was a teenager. In high school, while everyone else was listening to Korn and Rage Against the Machine and all sorts of high-energy loud rock stuff, I listened to quiet disturbingly mellow music that took at least six minutes just to build up, often based on a single phrase that swelled up into something huge and momentous. This was before Broken Social Scene came and popularized the big sound and brought a catchy pop feel to it.   You can't sing along to any Sigur Rós song, not just because you don't speak Jonsi's imaginary language, but because they weren't meant to be sung along to or danced to. They are meant to haunt you, to sink into your subconscious and profoundly unsettle you.

Sigur Rós performs with a full horns and strings section, bass, drums, organ, and Jonsi playing an electric guitar with a violin bow. It's not exactly a pleasant sound - electric guitars were not built to be played with violin bows, but it is a distinctive sound, a haunting drone that adds to the dream-like quality of the music. The music is weird, and many people don't like it because it's too long, too slow, too weird. I'd say it's an acquired taste, but really, you either love it or you make the trek to catch MGMT. It was strange for me to be able to see this band for the first time, in the bizarre lighting of the stage against the bizarre wall of dreamscape sounds, Jonsi casting giant shadows up against the back of the stage, like the childhood imagery of the monster you've believed lurked in your closet. Or maybe like aliens from the sky, or from the mythical land of Iceland.

The music was so moving that a girl passed out in front of me. Probably from standing in the sun all day long, but maybe she was overcome by the music like me.  I found myself giving away the water bottle I'd so carefully been saving all day - stupid mist tent.

Jonsi asked as how we were doing, possibly the only English he speaks, before switching back to his pseudo-Icelandic made-up language that become words I heard in my sleep sometimes.  There was no asking the crowd to hug their neighbour, or express themselves like Florence + the Machine.  Instead, they left us with an overwhelmingly fantastic finale that climaxed into something that was somehow both terrifying and orgasmic, punctuated with totally random fireworks that apparently were not planned for the show but were for a different event elsewhere in Montreal, being synched to Queen. It was incredible. It was the reason why I had come to this music festival and endured long lines, hot heat, and expensive food prices all day.

Despite being in the city, I could see the Big Dipper in the sky.

Justice

Justice, in contrast, gave us a dance party. The two deejays, looking like a superhero and his skinny little sidekick, set up their deejay booth behind of a bright fluorescent cross, and in front of a literal wall of Marshall stacks (eighteen of them, I counted), which lit up like coordinated pixels of joy. The crowd danced in a wild frenzy while the deejays, dressed in matching jumpsuits, coolly lit a cigarette on stage.  It was quite the show.

Les Breastfeeders


The surprise highlight of the night for me was Les Breastfeeders, an old school rock and roll band from Quebec, with an excessive number of guitars all playing the same thing, as a good rock and roll band should.

To be precise, however, what made the night for me was the creature Johnny Maldoror, who apparently is a real member of the band and not some crazy figure that they picked up off the street for fun.  Picture a petite sized man, pale and slightly balding, dressed inexplicably as a zombie in a suit jacket and skinny jeans with heavy eyeshadow, moving like he was strung out on several layers of heroin.  He was, in theory, the tambourine player, but every once in a while he seemed to slip into uncontrollable seizures, flailing around the stage, throwing up the tambourine and forgetting to catch it, and after buzzing around and jumping off stages, would invariably end up passed out on the ground for a few bars, before jumping back up and starting up the whole sweaty routine again.  It was a surreal sight.

It is also always a pleasure to watch a mosh pit start up.  The organic spontaneous manner in which a mosh pit begins is somewhat like making out with a new date, but amongst a group of young men.  The evening has gone well. You’re feeling the mood. You’re wondering if the other person(s) feels it too. The moment seems right.  Should I? Should I? Should you make the first move and hope the other(s) respond with the same enthusiasm? Or will you just end up looking like a callous idiot?

Eventually somebody goes for it and dives in, and all of a sudden everybody’s doing it, bashing each other in the shoulder with their shoulders and whooping with all the youthful energy that these people have, because everybody knows that scientifically you can’t physically feel pain in a mosh pit.  I was particularly impressed by the relatively equal gender representation in this mosh pit.  Apparently the fans of Les Breastfeeders believe in equal opportunity in moshing. In retrospect though, I probably should not have jumped in wearing flipflops.

Osheaga Music Festival: the experience

Last weekend, I went to Osheaga Music Festival, a three day indie music festival held in on Jean-Drapeau island in Montreal, featuring over a hundred bands and something like thirty thousand festival participants. As you can imagine, it was exciting and chaotic. People everywhere. Hour long lineups for everything, including for water, washrooms, and food.

 And it was hot. There were a lot of poor white guys getting sunburned. It got to the point where people were standing under the mist tent, trying to fill their water bottles with the water drops - as you might imagine, that took a while. It got to the point where people were filling up their water bottles from rubber hoses on the ground. It got to the point where I was jumping into the creek on the island, with no idea as to the source of the water.

filling up on water at the mist tent

filling up on water from the ground

A lot of us spent the time between band sets lying under the shade of trees to recover.

It was an interesting setting. Vendors were all over the place giving away free stuff. I like free stuff.  Out of my desperate thirst, I get some free Budweiser. Some free Vitamin Water, the vitamin drink mysteriously lacking in vitamins.   These are all things you generally couldnt' even pay me to consume, but festivals are different settings. Incidentally, the line for free booze was shorter than the line for free water. This is why I love Montreal.

The food was surprising, and not in a good way. There was poutine. Lots of poutine. And hot dogs and hamburgers. The Osheaga website also promised exotic ethnic food, but all I could find remotely ethnic was pizza and burritoes. So I went for poutine.

What I also found interesting was the lack of cell phone coverage. The entire island has only one cell phone tower, which is usually enough, but not for a festival this side, so people basically could not use their cell phones the entire time.  It was like we had somehow shifted back in time, to a time when people carried cash to pay for things, a time when it was normal to have only hamburgers as your dinner options because nobody had heard of pad thai or butter chicken, a time when people learned to function without cell phones, arranging plans in advance to meet with friends at a certain time and place, when time when you made friends with the people next to you to pas the time, rather than instagramming and tweeting and facebooking everything   Actually, that's what my teenage years was like, so it should have all felt nostalgically familiar, but instead it felt strange and scarily disconnected.  Also, I've discovered that 98% of other people's conversations are incredibly boring.

At one point, the sky broke loose and it began pouring. The ice cream man was suddenly no longer popular.  Some people screamed and tried to find cover. Some people cheered and started to dance in the rain. I decided it was a good time to find something to eat, while the lines were shorter. The heat remained; the festival ground just became dirtier, with mud splatters making curious patterns on the back of my calves like tattoos.

Getting off the island to go home after the festival was even more chaotic.  Despite the police officers guiding the crowd through the metro, you were quickly separated from your friends in the crowd.  Guys ran up the down escalators to get past the crowd. Every once in a while, the crowds would burst into spontaneous song and cheers, excited by the music they had experienced earlier that day.  Despite the heat, the exhaustion, and the thirst, you could feel the energy in the crowd, thicker than anything else.

Until the power went out in the only metro route off the island. I had to admit I started to panic a bit, predicting who on the metro would become the crazy one first, who would unexpectedly become my best friend, and who would we consider eating first.

But it still remained an amazing time.

Also see Oshagea Music Festival: the music - Day 1

eating meat in Montreal

old montreal. don't know why rob looks so angry.


"three hundred pounds of hongry
down to her house every Sunday
boil them taters and butter them buns
licking that grease right off the thumbs
three hundred pounds
tall as she round
and every pound of that body's so fine
i can hardly believe that it's mine.."
-Tony Joe White, "Three Hundred Pounds of Hongry"

On Wednesday morning, about 150 university students at Victoria Square in Montreal, and marched to the Eaton Centre in protest of the Quebec government's decision to increase tuition fees. According to news sources, when some demonstrators began throwing fire crackers at the police and vandalizing mall property, the police swooped in to declare the protest illegal and arrested over fifty students.

While this classic clash between political dissent and authority unfolded, I was about 800 metres away, getting fat. As much as I love freedom, I had gone to Montreal to indulge in the city`s dangerously delicious culinary scene.

Anthony Bourdain has a food show called the Layover. In his episode covering Montreal, he is the happiest that you will ever see him on TV. Every respected chef, my fiance included, knows that Montreal does food right. And after seven months in southern Africa, I was excited to get in on this.

(Don`t get me wrong. Despite what my vegetarian friends claim, Namibia has great food, including the best game steaks you`ll ever have, and juicy biltong that you just find in (or bring to) Canada. But most days, to save costs I just cooked for myself, and after a while, one gets really sick of one`s own cooking, especially since I lived mostly on vegetables and cheese...and biltong.)



The first place that Rob wants to hit up is Joe Beef, which features prominently on the Montreal episode of the Layover. This is exactly the kind of restaurants we like: less stuffy pretentious attitude, more genuinely good food. The servers wore jeans and hipster beards. The dinner music played was Hank Williams and other great country gods. The menu is scrawled in chalk above the bar. The menu, by the way, is as creative and fascinating to read as a novel:


we like that.


With such an amazing menu, it was hard to pick what we wanted for dinner. We knew what we were getting as appetizers though. Four beautiful words: foie gras double down.


yes. yes. yes.


Two pieces of chicken-fried foie gras sandwiching cheddar cheese and bacon, drowned in maple syrup. Forget KFC. There was literally no ingredient in that concoction that I did not like.

As my main course, I decided on the smoked meat duck. No, it's not smoked duck meat. It is a giant pile of duck breast, sprinkled with smoked meat.


holy Atkins


That was the entire meal. Yes, it was on a very thin bed of rye and garnished with pickles, but the entire meal was more or less a pile of savoury tender meat from two different animals. I couldn't have felt happier.

Rob had the monsieur-size steak, which was a monstrous size. This also made him happy.




all washed down with locally brewed beer. I love Montreal's microbreweries.

For dessert, our server did shots of yummy scotch with us. This is why I like this place. The restaurant was packed, a testament to its no-nonsense-just-good-meat reputation. We were lucky to get a table in the first place. And now, stumbling out of the restaurant feeling like we needed a wheelbarrow to push our tummies in, it was time to meet up with my girlfriends Kerianne and Genevieve in the trendy Mont-Royal Plateau area.

We went for tapas at Baracca, although realistically at this point, I was so full I didn't have much room for food. The place had a great ambience though, and I particularly enjoyed the sign on the patio outside which said something along the lines of:

BIENVENUE SUR LA TERRASSE (welcome to the patio)
Les Règles: (the rules)
NE PAS CHANTER (do not sing)
NE PAS RIRE (do not laugh)

The rules also forbade gathering in groups of more than five.

Still, it was a fun place nevertheless, and it was great to catch up with my girls.




The next morning, we finally had room for breakfast. I had been to Beauty's, and a number of other breakfast places in the Bagel District, so Kerianne suggested we go for breakfast at Le Gros Jambon in old Montreal. This was a cute, old timey diner that seemed unlikely in the oldest part of Montreal, only a few blocks away from where the Quebec student protests had started. The diner did not seem to be really open, although nobody stopped us from going in. The server behind the counter told us that they only served one thing for breakfast: fried egg and bacon sandwiches. That suited me fine, especially since I haven't eaten North American-style bacon in seven months.







We sat at the counter while we ate, which gave us a good view of the kitchen staff busily preparing onion rings and donuts for the day. It was a lovely breakfast, and a great way to conclude our quick zip trip to foodie Montreal. But not before we stopped by Fairmount Bagels and Schwartz's to bring home bagels and smoked meat, of course. It may be cliche and touristy, but it still remains a Montreal-must.



rob trying to make his way through chinatown

island vacation

as i vaguely indicated in my last post, my band went down to Montreal for our last stop on our tour. i spent less than 12 hours in Montreal but loved it, as usual. every time i visit the city, i'm reminded of how much i need to live there at some point in my life. Montreal seems to have everything i want: good reasonably priced food, French things, cheap rent, amazing shopping, a thriving music culture...but also, the unbearable cold. i grew up in frosty Ottawa and i still don't think i can stomach the Montreal winters. oh well. as soon as i stop being a baby about the cold, i'll move there.

now it's Spring Break for me, and i'm spending it going on my own Island Vacation...the island in this case being Newfoundland. i fly in to St. John's tonight, and take the bus tomorrow morning to get to Shoal Harbour to visit the infamous Ryan Patey in his own hometown. our shenanigans were supposed to start yesterday, but then i got knocked over with a horrible bout of food poisoning (i'm write this while lying in bed). so. today is attempt #2 at gloria's immersion into newfie culture.

why newfoundland? many people have asked me this and i've given different answers every time:

-i don't feel like i am a true Canuck until i get screeched in

-it's so cliche to escape winter by going to Barbados or something. everyone knows that the trendy thing to do nowadays is embrace winter.

-ryan patey is there! therefore i must go there!

-after all my travels in europe, i'd like to explore the Canadian wilderness.

-it was too expensive to fly to france, so i intend to take a boat from the newfie coast to the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon.

-i'm so tired of all this Olympics enthusiasm that i want to run to the exact opposite coast

-in keeping with the previous reasoning, my best friend Meg is in vancouver helping to cover the Olympics for CTV. when i go to the other end in Newfoundland, we are going to be making a big CANADA SANDWICH, with Canada as the middle spoon, if you will!

this is all assuming, of course, that i get the energy to get out of bed.

family trip to montreal

within a half hour of getting into montreal, i found myself trying to find ways to move here sometime in the future. hello mcgill! i've had this love affair with montreal ever since i was eighteen, and my friends and i spent a week here, exploring the city and hanging out. it was the first trip i had ever taken without my parents, not including school trips. some seven years later, after many more trips, i've found there is always so much more to discover in this city.

my parents have found the same thing. my dad just bought a new GPS for our car, and instead of using a map, we've been following that around the city. yesterday, my father accidentally hit BIODOME as our destination instead of our hotel, so we ended up driving all the way across the city instead. at least it was a nice view, even if it was in the middle of rush hour. i have missed my family.

why do the french hate me

while i write this, i am in my parents' backyard, facing clear blue skies over the cornfield, and the wonderful smell of home, which, in our case, tends to be manure fertilizer from the farmfield.

well, we were in montreal for about a total of half an hour before we got robbed. twice. both of our vans were broken into and stuff were taken. and then, while we waited for the police to arrive, heather's purse was also taken. welcome to montreal.

on the other hand, we played to one of the biggest crowds at Le Divan Orange. i couldn't believe how packed it was. the venue was nice and close to Schwartz's too, so that helped cheer me up quite a bit. plus some old friends came to the show like andie, tim, joe, phil (from ghettonuns!) and a mini reunion is always nice.

still, driving for fourteen hours all night through three or four provinces has started taking its toll. being in a small enclosed space with the same sleepy folks left me fairly carsick and tired. the rest of the band went back on the road after the show last night but i decided to stop off in ottawa for a few days so i could recuperate with family. and do some badly-needed laundry. also, i've been craving some good korean food like crazy and haven't yet come across any in the east coast.

by saturday hopefully i'll be feeling refuelled again and i'll be joining the band again in oshawa for our gig at the Last Schwaltz, which i've been looking forward to for a while. till then i'm going to sleep in a real bed. and wash my underwear. then i'll be back. i can't guarantee that i'll come back to school ever again though.

oh montreal

aleks and i took a mini-vacation from our law jobs (across the street from each other!) to take the train down to one of my favourite cities in Canada. her friend Erica came along for the ride.

Erica and Aleks had never been to montreal before, but i’ve had a mad love affair with the city ever since the first time i took the trip down with my friends at the tender age of eighteen. where else can you see swarms of French hippies, pink horse-drawn carriages, beautiful long strings of French swear words like poetry, danseuses-nues strip clubs standing proudly next to old historic stone churches, ninety-nine cents pizza, more neon shawarma-guy signs than you can shake a stick at, and the finest bottle of wine you can buy for eight dollars at a Mac’s convenience store (or pardon me, Couche-Tard)?

oh montreal. you are the beautifully strange antithesis to Toronto: a true sense of history, down-to-earthly romantic, classy yet coarse, and so so so French.

needless to say, we spent a lot of money there. there were many lessons learned.

things i love about the quebecois French:

St. Catherine Street. the gay Village, shopping heaven, strip club strip, and the church area, all rolled into one glorious street.

their insistence that non-words are words, like “resto”. everything is a resto-bar or a resto-grill or a resto-strip club. for that matter, apparently “danse teaseuse” is a word.

the strange way the nightlife doesn’t pick up until 1AM. this means that if you set your alarm for 9AM for an early start to your day, the streets will be empty. empty, of course, except for silly tourists like you.

Juste pour rire!

The fact that every street is called Saint something. Apparently Catholicism is big here.

the way they masterfully hide their traffic lights in the sidewalks so drivers feel like they have to play where’s waldo to figure out whether they have to stop at the intersections.

the cute dogs that belong to the homeless people.

the bar called “Les Foufounes Electriques” (the electric ass), and the funhouse of a club that is across the street from it, but i can’t tell you about that because my parents read this blog.

Educational cab drivers that teach you French swear words.

Rum with my crepes.

What the Quebecois conceive the “breakfast” in a “bed and breakfast” to be.

Footcorn.

so it was a good time, overall, and many lessons learned. like make sure a restaurant is still running before you travel off the island to get there, only to find it’s been closed for reservation, and there’s only creepy guys following you to help you. and remember how in France i swore that my French gets better when i drink? yeah, actually, it doesn’t.

homeless lady: “Excusez-moi, parlez-vous francais?”
me: “…no, sorry.”
“well, do you speak English?”
“uh….no. Djendobry!”