On leaving town

The view from my window - my international tour of Hackney continues...

Waking up in the morning and realising that today is the day that you pack your life into a handful of bags and move to a foreign country is a fairly odd experience.

Months of talking about it, referring to it, explaining it to others using the same stock phrases and expressions, the same practised nuanced shrugs, gives way suddenly to actually doing it; actually packing, actually printing boarding cards, actually hurrying to the airport and actually panicking a little as what you’ve done seeps in.

Having to run from Liverpool Street station to London Bridge carrying three heavy bags while wearing para boots and a parka on a warm day because of traffic didn’t help.

Things looked up when I found myself sitting next to an attractive young francophone lady on the plane, but after starting a conversation with her she then said something in French to the stewardess and was promptly moved to a spare seat over the way. I tried not to take it to heart, and instead chatted to Jules, a 20-something photographer, snowboarder and chef from Montreal who had been visiting his girlfriend in Brighton. Would he be staying in Montreal for a while? “Hell no, it’s freezing. I’m heading to Vancouver in October,” he said. I tried not to take it to heart.

The flight passed without incident, apart from a beautiful view of Greenland through gaps in the clouds which the captain was kind enough to point out to all of us engrossed in watching Thor, the film showing at the time. I can safely say that I believe I enjoyed Thor much more because I couldn’t hear the dialogue. Greenland was a vast sea of white, with mountainous peaks jutting up through the ice sheet. What you expected to see, in other words, but impressive nonetheless. You could see the snowboarder in Jules thinking, “Whoah, great fresh powder, man”, or whatever it is boarders say.

Banking in low over the city, Montreal spreads a long way out. I haven’t been to North America since 1998, when I flew to and from Los Angeles en route to Mexico. There are similarities – you get the same grid of streets that are everywhere in the new world, and always look alien to my European eyes. You get the street blocks of flats, familiar to us only from countless scenes in crime films or The Wire, and reminiscent of our tower blocks until you see them up close. There’s the remnants of the Olympic stadium from the 1960s, which looks so deliberately space-agey and ’60s that it looks like a prop from Barbarella.

The immigration officer at Montreal airport (IATA code: YUL. Obviously they’d run out of relevant letters) gives me one of the grim stoney-faced looks as all border guards around the world are trained to do. He asks a lot of questions about where I’m going, who I am, what I do and why I don’t have a return ticket. He writes down things on a pad of paper. He taps on a computer and looks at a screen I can’t see. Is he checking I work for The Big Issue? Is he looking for previous articles I have written? Or is he just playing solitaire? Eventually my tale of visiting relatives across the continent in Michigan and British Columbia and a print out of my bank balance is enough to convince him to let me in. A few cubicles down, an elderly Indian gent is getting obstreperous about being made to wait, shouting “I’m a senior citizen, don’t harass me”, while harassing the immigration officers.

There’s a shuttle bus to the centre of town for a mere $8, which gets you a day-pass around town like a London travelcard. From the outskirts of town to the west, the bus cruises past insane North American style road mega-junctions, with a dozen freeways on 50ft stilts arcing through air under and over each other. Birmingham’s spaghetti junction has nothing on this. We run past decaying factories smeared in graffiti and youf statements (‘fuck tha police’), through to former factories now converted to warehouse apartments, and onto main streets lined with little wooden-fronted Victorian town houses. We cross intersections inhabited by either vast, glass and steel downtown skyscrapers or old colonial churches, carrying copper-green domes. Montreal and Quebec City are among the oldest cities on the continent.

My hotel is at the end of the line – the bus station. My hotel reminds me of the scenes set in New Orleans in the film Angelheart – all darkly painted wood and twisting stairs, over-the-top plasterwork around the ceilings and wonky floors. It’s 7pm local time, midnight UK time. I’ve been up for about 17 hours since 6am. I’m speaking French to people who apparently understand me, because they speak French back – more than I get in France.

Time for a shower, an explore, and to find out what piss passes for beer around these parts.

Tagged in: arriving, canada, leaving, quebec, travel, weekone


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