Hey kids, we’re heading back to Montréal next month, and we’ll be living in a new arrondisement (borough) called Rosemont-La Petite Patrie (“the little homeland“). According to one source, it acquired the second half of its name from a novel that was adapted into a popular TV show:
The name of this district comes from a soap opera, broadcast in the 1970s, created by Claude Jasmin: La Petite Patrie. He recalled the memories of young people in Montreal living in this neighborhood. The name was then adopted for good in the 1980s.
It will be a very different experience from The Village, which we hope will be a good thing. We regret that we won’t be living near any of the summer pedestrian streets, but hopefully that also means we won’t experience the screaming, excreting, and indecent exposure we witnessed behind our building most every weekend in The Village.
RPP is a gentrifying neighborhood with a mix of upscale and mom&pop businesses, and home to the bustling Jean Talon Market, one of the three famous open-air markets of Montréal and one of the largest in North America.
Bummer that we won’t be able to see the fireworks this year from our ground floor apartment, but we hope there are compensating boons. We’ll be monitoring the Facebook page for RPP for local things to do (the City of Montréal very smartly provides for each neighborhood with a Facebook page so people can easily find city-sponsored events) and taking long exploratory walks once we’re settled in.
One thing that will be challenging: RPP is an almost entirely francophone neighborhood, so we’ll have to communicate in French a lot more than we did in the touristy Village. I’m a little anxious that we’ll be subject to scorn just for existing as anglophones, something we experienced a few times last year as anti-anglophone campaigns intensified through the provincial elections (and are now taking the federal stage). Most Montréalais are very sweet and welcoming but, just as in the U.S., lots of people have jumped on the xenophobic anti-everybody-who-isn’t-white-and-straight bandwagon. I may just stay home and test more maple products for your reading enjoyment.
We are planning to restart French classes, but it will take some time to find one with openings that are compatible with our schedule.
If it all becomes too much, we may be able to console ourselves at some of the local microbreweries, enjoy the neighborhood’s many Italian, Vietnamese, Caribbean, and Latin American eateries, or toodle around the bike paths and ruelles vertes. I’m psyched that we’ll be literally a block from a grocery store–we’ll be living in MTL car-free again, so finding an apartment in a walkable neighborhood was a top priority–and schlepping a week’s groceries a half-mile each way was not something I wanted to do again. We’re farther away from the Metro, but once again there’s a Bixi bike station at the end of the block and this year Sylvain has decided to helmet up and join me on the bike path.
So I guess wheel see, ha ha.
A very nice perk this year: a former client from L.A. reached out last year when she saw me on a Montreal Facebook page, and we met up a couple times last summer to chat. She lives close by, just on the other side of the arrondisement, so perhaps I won’t feel as isolated this time around. It’s hard to be away from one’s core social circle of family and friends, so as we start peeking our heads out of our pandemic hidey-holes and reconnecting with other humans IRL, it’s a big gift to have a familiar face (and someone who speaks a familiar language) so close to chez nous.
So it’s all very exciting and anxiety-making and there’s so much to do before we depart for NoBo (north of the border), but we’ll update you with all our discoveries and challenges once we land, again. À bientôt!