The French Flip

After six months in California laboring to reduce our load of possessions and make an all-encompassing list of them for the Canadian government (required for settling in Canada), weeks of getting our new tenant installed and repairing newly-discovered defects in the ADU, and days of cleaning, schlepping, and shuffling all our household and personal items around to pack and make way for the caretaker, we finally got to sit still for five hours on the plane flying us to Montreal for the summer.

You would think all those months and chores in L.A. would make a dent in one’s memory. Instead, as the taxi to our hotel crept along the expressway in rush hour traffic, I had the bizarre sensation of having left Montreal just the week before. The MTL cityscape felt not only familiar, but recent, as if we hadn’t been elsewhere at all, as if time had folded in on itself like an origami accordion and I just stepped over our six+ months away and arrived almost exactly back where and when I was before. It was a truly uncanny feeling.

Maybe it was the exhaustion of travel, or maybe this was my brain locking back into Montréal Mode: ready to bear the consequences for my fumbling French (which surely must have eroded during our time back in L.A.), apologizing and scraping to those who scowled at my cruel abuse of their language; hunkering down when strangers on the street mocked my face mask, or when one of the ubiquitous grey-etched street tribe veered closer to bum cigarettes or ask whether I’d like to buy stolen meat from a stained and stinking shopping bag.

I was also bracing for more blood-pressure spikes due to incessant and impossible no-notice mandates from the government, the bank, the phone company (et al), which last year caused panics of hustling for minimal or no results.

But surprisingly, despite all my fears and apprehensions, my French came back almost immediately, practically from the first time I spoke to the concierge at the hotel. Even more weirdly, rather than being rusty, it seemed even better than before–more fluid, more easily understood.

Maybe something had gelled during the time away; however it came about, I can now ask questions and converse much more readily than last year (though I confess I can still only pick out a few words of the responses I receive, partly due to my bad hearing but mostly because my oral comprehension, like that of most language learners, remains the weakest of my skills).

Part of this improvement may be due to our new neighborhood. Vieux Rosemont is much more family-oriented than The Village, and it’s also much more French–80% of residents are francophones, and there is no tourist trade in this part of town to necessitate bilingual clerks and service providers. It’s soooo francophone in fact, that the City of Montréal’s website doesn’t even have an English version of the neighborhood’s webpage, as it does for other areas (if you click the “English” link at the upper right, it just takes you to the Montréal home page).

Therefore, when I speak French around here, I am answered in French, no helpsies, no do-overs, and I just have to parse what is said back to me as best I can. In The Village everyone would switch to English immediately upon hearing my accent or if I struggled to remember a word, which, though polite and efficient, didn’t help my French skills at all.

In Vieux Rosemont, linguistically speaking, it’s sink or swim (and no, I don’t know the French for that). This requires me to get my French together if I want to buy food, ride the bus, mail a letter, or tell m’gar who showed up at my door that the rental ad he had seen was a scam and that our apartment was not for rent by some guy in Dubai.

But people are also nicer and friendlier about my broken French here in the RPP (as locals refer to Rosement-La-Petite-Patrie, our arrondissement), and just more pleasant in general–which helps. Living in The Village was really stressful, with all the late-night drunken parties (and peeing) behind our building, drug addicts and sans-abri hunkered in every doorway and niche, and the edgy defensive vibe that permeated the neighborhood. Oh, and you may remember it was Ground Zero for Québec’s monkeypox outbreak, that was special for a while.

…and stress impedes one’s cognitive abilities, including the intense focus needed to speak a new second language. So less stress = better recall and retention, and that’s what getting-to-fluency is all about.

(Don’t get me wrong, The Village is a neighborhood under stress with many marginalized people living there: a rapidly shrinking 2SLGBTQI+ demographic, numerous drug-addicted and mentally-ill unhoused people, and lower-income elderly and disabled, all being pushed out by gentrification. The frustration and hostility were palpable in the streets–which wears on a person, especially on top of the many challenges of emigration and a pandemic.)

For all its strife, The Village is funky and arts-oriented, not bougie like the RPP, and I already miss the open-air drag shows and circus acts on the flower-adorned Ste-Catherine East.

However, the RPP feels much safer to walk around in, more peaceful; as yet, no one has offered me stolen goods or hollered in my face that I’m evil because I believe COVID is real and won’t be converted by some quack virus-denier on YouTube. Not having to stand on guard for me all the time is a tremendous and welcome relief, and the lower cortisol level makes it easier for me to formulate my next questions in French, and to remember words when I need them.

So it seems my French flip, my transition back into French-speaking life, has been successful so far–tigidou! The friendly faces and responses have given me a tad of confidence, so I’m hoping my language skills will grow even more this spring and summer (with perhaps a little snow flurry and flooding this weekend to kick it off, yay).

We’ve only been here in the RPP two weeks now, so I’m sure there are defects and difficulties yet to be discovered. We’ve already had one power outage (though to be fair it wasn’t confined to RPP); we do get constant and significant traffic noise and light pollution from nearby Rosemont Blvd; our narrow one-way street is often blocked by trucks with their blaring safety beeps right outside our window; we’re much farther away from the nearest Metro station so it’s not as easy to get around; and there doesn’t appear to be a store within walking distance that carries the fantastic not-too-sweet raspberry sorbet we got addicted to last year (dammit).

But never fear, I’m sure there will be lots of sunny things to report soon–like THE MAPLE REPORT, returning shortly! I know you’re excited!!

We’re excited too, and are ready to have a better year than last year. There have already been encouraging signs. We’re hopeful.

So attache ta tuque and come along with us as we flip through our latest adventures in La Belle Province! Hope you enjoy all our cheery and chafing NoBo* news, and please stay in touch and tell us all your tales too. À bientôt, mes amis!

*my trendy reduction of “North of the Border”