Uneasy Rhetoric

Since I just quoted a Montréal blog, and list now three in my sidebar, I thought I should post a little something as to why. In June I went to Montréal for a wedding and fell in love with the city for several reasons.

First, I am bilingual, more or less. In California, this is supposed to mean I speak English and Spanish, but it doesn’t. I speak French (haltingly), which, if it weren’t for the Alliance Française de Sacramento, I would never use at all. In Montréal I enjoyed using my French, and even found the Quebecois accent fairly easy to wade through. It was nice to know that I did have the safety net of English to back me up should I need it, and I frequently did.

Second, the “feel”of the city – which I consider to be a combination of its architecture, its cultural institutions, and its people – is a bizarre combination of North American and European, sort of a Boston meets Paris by way of Minneapolis or something like that. Maybe it was just all of the French signs and French speakers I saw at the very middle-American mall where I rented my tuxedo, I don’t know. Miami is sometimes described as a “bilingual/bi-cultural” city in the U.S., and I wonder if perhaps Montréal was the same way, right down to the simmering linguistic tension.

Finally, it’s just a beautiful city full of beautiful people. They could use better street signs, at least as far as directing people onto the freeways, but that’s a minor complaint.