Monday, January 23, 2012

Montreal Bucket List

You will have to excuse this post's silliness, as I am a bit punch due to the combination of head cold and the joys of getting my daughter's passport renewed (not everything went awry but enough).  Anyway, as we were walking to the car, I suddenly realized that I have pretty much completed the Montreal bucket list (also known as the le hunt Scavenger Montrealais).  What is this?  The set of acts/activities/events that one must accumulate in order to be a real Montrealer.  Glad I could complete most of the list before I leave town.
  1. Be embarrassed walking along St. Catherine Street with one's child, due to the many adult entertainment venues.
  2. Have your car or person damaged by a public vehicle of some sort (a school bus went through the corner of my car.  At least I have not been hit by a snow plow).
  3. Stop responding to "Bonjour/Hi" with "Bonjour."  I realized that the various salesfolks preferred their good English to my bad French, nationalism be damned.
  4. Get heckled at the "Nasty Show" at the Just For Laughs festival (actually, this happened when we lived in Vermont and visited the fest long before we moved here).
  5. Miss your stop on the train because you were sleeping.
  6. Have a police officer insist that he does not have to speak to you in English and then does so.
  7. Forget everything you learned about driving/walking in snow for the first big snowfall each winter.  Then remember and do quite well the rest of the winter.
  8. Lose track of which festival you missed in a summer, given how many are crammed in a short period of time.
  9. At least once take a different route into the country since your vacation coincides with the end of the construction holiday.
  10. Be stunned by the ability of folks to speak in both official langauges not just from paragraph to paragraph but sentence to sentence and beyond.
  11. Understand that the big curse words come from various Catholic church concepts.
  12. Get used to the whole kissing on both cheeks thing (still not there yet on this one).
  13. You start guessing people's last names: Tremblay, right?
  14. Understand that the main purpose of the Parti Quebecois is to entertain folks with its in-fighting.
What am I missing?  Again, I have a head cold so forgive me if I omitted some of the better "must experience" things about Montreal (and no, my omissions of Montreal bagels and smoked meat are not head-cold-induced).

1 comment:

JR said...

you forgot "walking through strikers/protesters against the McGill admin or the Quebec govt"