According to the late linguist Michel Thomas, 60% of all English words are derived from French. Now, that should make learning French rather “easy,” but a week after commencing intensive French classes here in Montréal, I still find myself mangling and mispronouncing words worse than a first-grader overdosed on candy.

Part of my problem is that French vowels and letter combinations are often pronounced much differently than a recalcitrant Anglophone would expect them to be, and that some words have completely different meanings than you’d suspect. Here are some examples ma professeur gave today. Continue reading »

“No, not ‘tom-toms,’” corrected my French teacher, who thought at first that (in my typical mangled French) I was referring to GPS devices. “Tam-tams!”

I first heard about the tam-tams from my friend Kathleen, who used to live in Montréal. I wasn’t exactly sure where one could find them in Parc Mont-Royal, but it wasn’t hard — one could hear them a kilometer away with dozens of people (both residents and visitors) banging on leather and wood drums and even the bottoms of overturned five-gallon plastic paint cans. Meanwhile, others played hackey sack or flapped their arms wildly in the air while hopping around on the ground like a spring in an improvised dance. I merely watched, thank you. Continue reading »

I had not been in Montréal for even twelve hours when I started hearing about it. What? Poutine.

“Don’t forget to try poutine!” wrote a friend who used to live here.

“Last night I ate pizza and poutine,” said an American from San Francisco in my French language school.

“As-tu essayé poutine?” a French-speaking Dutchman asked me later that day.

So the second night here I went out for a 10:00pm snack of this mysterious poutine. I didn’t even have to resort to Mickey Dees. Instead, I went to an A&W-like joint called Le Belle Province and had a regular-sized cup of poutine. Just one of them, thank you. The above photo has two because one of the Indian subletters I went out with also had a serving of poutine, so no, I did not gorge and pretend I was in some food eating contest by having what might have constituted a McDonald’s super-sized poutine. Continue reading »

“Wow, I didn’t realize that in this day and age there are still some new street cars that have perfectly legal-but-LOUD exhausts,” I thought as a bright yellow Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder positively roared down a busy street in downtown Montréal on a Friday night.

I could get used to seeing all the eye candy here in Montréal. In this city where seemingly everyone is impeccably dressed and the women are (in the words of several friends who were right!) “totally hot,” it comes as no surprise that many of the cars people drive are gorgeous too. Continue reading »

Well, it seemed like a brilliant idea at the time: renting a bicycle after class with some friends from the Point-3 Language School in Montréal and work out the quadriceps. But if I had any illusions that this would constitute some much-needed “training,” they vanished within 10 minutes when a couple of our girls were already a whole province off the back of the group despite the rest of us rolling at a speed of maybe two kilometers per hour (ok I’m exaggerating) on the bike trail adjacent to Le Canal de Lachine. Something about “not having ridden a bicycle in 15 years.”

No worries; we waited and still had fun. It turned out to be a good scouting mission for the question of “where in the city does one go running or biking for fun anyway?” In fact, four days later, I’d run on the same trail (which was adorned with banners proclaiming its 30th anniversary) to the port of Lachine and back for a distance of, oh, 30 kilometers. Continue reading »