Category: Countries

There will be a blog post ruminating on Acadieman, Brayons, and “weekend Acadians”. After I got taken to the woodshed at the pub Friday by a friend who’s spent a lot of time in Quebec, there will also be some flailing about on civic nationalism, and whether defence of a language is enough to rally […]

My confused researches on Acadia have continued, and this is what I further report back. I remember a decade back that Joe Canadian rant ad campaign from Molson, which turned into a surprising assertion of Canadian nationalism, though it was mostly an assertion of what Canada was not (i.e. the U.S.):It’s a cool ad, which […]

Knowing nothing at all about Canada, I assumed there was a well defined Franco-Canada set up in opposition to Anglo-Canada; and I was surprised (as I’ve already blogged) that Quebec is not particularly losing sleep over the Francos outside Quebec. It turns out that, after a shortlived surge of westward colonisation, Quebec had decided by […]

Now that Quebecois have noticed my blog, I’m going to have to post eventually about what I don’t think they should secede. That’s going to be a hard post to write, given that (a) it’s none of my maudite business; (b) the ideal that I defend in my head, like Ramsay Cook does, inherited from […]

I’m back in an implausibly cold Melbourne Town, and I haven’t been blogging my experiences in Canada live as they were happening. That’s always a high risk venture: on the one hand, I’m far enough from the actual experience to smudge it round the edges, and come up with something less accurate and more entertaining. […]

I think I’m starting to get Montréal enough to get my anti-seccesionist resentment on again. Not by talking to the locals: I don’t much, and when I do, they are perfectly courteous and pleasant. Like the guy I just bought my replacement camera from. I did stampede the conversation into English, because I was buying […]

Une notice bref à vous informer that I am still zombified from my travel to the other side of the world—although decreasingly so: I managed to wake up at 6:30 AM today without also having woken up at 5:30. The weakness of the unexpectedly North American coffee here (you mean I’m not in Lyon?) is […]

Montreal, you are multitudinous like the sea—or like your weather. Every five minutes’ walk, you turn into a different streetscape, with quirks its own, with charms its own, with colours its own. Most of which work for me, especially because this time of year there’s no snow to burrow under, and no black ice to […]

It’s been 200 photos on Sunday, and I’m daunted about how many I’ll actually end up posting. Last time I went photo-berserk, in Berlin, I left it so long I lost interest. So I need to be posting the quirky photos and quirky mistaken observations on Montreal language politics close to the source. But I’m […]

It’s now close to 4 PM, and I’m in a brasserie next to Notre Dame, about to start my third walking tour of Montreal for the day, following the prescriptions of the Lonely Planet guide. I like this town. I’ve barely spoken to anyone; and le switch that the local francos make to English, when […]