Things are busy. Manon and I are both taking six hours of French classes per week, along with homework and the usual quotidian grind.
Summer is a glorious but brief season, so Montréalers are anxious to be out and about when the weather’s good.… [Read More]
This past week, I attended an activity with a local intercultural group: learning to kayak. Now, this group is big into canoe camping and white-water kayaking, but they have to entice us newbies into the sport a little more gently.… [Read More]
I just read today that one of the churches featured in the “Maintenance Problems” part of my post was damaged by a fire. It’s expensive keeping a building maintained, and according to the article, the timeline for permits and planning when repurposing a church takes years.
Montréal has many, many churches. So many that one of the city’s nicknames is “ville aux cent clochers” (city of a hundred bell towers). Images Montréal, a website dedicated to documenting architecture in the city, lists 437 buildings in the “Churches” category.… [Read More]
You’ve certainly heard about the massive wildfires in Canada–there have been over 160 in Québec alone. The drifting smoke is choking East Coast cities and causing airlines, baseball games, and Broadway shows to cancel.… [Read More]
Manon has already shown you the fluffy snows of June. But that’s not the only weird weather, what with the winds and the … rains?
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In 1982, just a few years after the children’s book “Masquerade” kicked off the first “armchair treasure hunt,” Byron Preiss released his own challenge to the treasurially-inclined: find twelve buried “casques” following the clues in his puzzle book “The Secret.”… [Read More]
It has been blazingly hot this week, and yet there’s snow:
No, Hell hasn’t frozen over. These floaty bits are part of the seed release strategy for the eastern cottonwood.
Each tree can release 40 million seeds per season, so even a few cottonwoods can create quite a show.… [Read More]
The Botanical Garden of Montréal is big and relatively expensive — $22.50 for adult admission, with a $5.50 discount if you live in the greater Montréal area. But if you get a $9 Accès Montréal card, you can have free access to the outdoor portions of the Botanical garden!… [Read More]
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.… [Read More]
