Bonjour-hi; or, Pat Sajak riding side-saddle on a dolphin.

A North American success story, the island city of Montréal was founded on the edge of a malarial fen, buttressed and fortified by Roman legionnaries conscripted to complete their military service on the fringe of empire in fabulously inhospitable chill and dampness and with incessantly hostile native populations slavering for the delicious opportunity to slash their bellies open with crude implements. Oh wait, that's London. Hmm. OK, Montréal was founded as a small, mostly agrarian community subsisting mainly on olives and unleavened bread, huddled around a massive limestone plateau which, according to legend, bore both an olive tree miraculously springing forth out of live stone and a cleft that inexplicably burbled saltwater and sighed with the ebbing tide in the distant harbor. Shit, that's Athens. Umm, here we go: Montréal, the size of Switzerland, was founded by men who believed that they were direct descendants of celestial beings on the fringe a shifting desert, imperiled constantly by horsemen raiders who would periodically sweep down and sack the city for giggles. Goddamn, that's Beijing.

Alright, I admit it: I don't know much about Montréal. I didn't know much about it before I left and I don't know much about it now, despite my apparent mutant power to absorb billions of points of informational minutiae about any conceivable topic. For some reason, I wanted Montréal to be a place unknown to me, a place I could feel out with my own senses and sensibilities. But my rendezvous with The City of Saints was to be a brief, truck-stop spankjob-in-the-commode kind of experience due to a) the sheer brevity of my stay, b) the fact that I was there solely to attend a professional development conference and c) I have a generalized proclivity to royally eff things up. And I mean "truckstop spankjob" in the best possible way, as you surely surmised. In the end, I'd resolved on the Chicago-Montréal flight to do but two things during my short stay. First and foremost, there was a Chinatown out there, and you'd better believe that I was going to loiter about in it, dodging lungers, mocking more insensitive tourists and allowing myself to become enamored yet again with the idea of having an apartment say, oh, over a dimly-lit, incense-filled shop selling unidentifiable pieces of dead animals in powder form. Second, I was bound both by my general eagerness to sample regional cuisine as well as my status as a hominid manatee to devour, whenever possible, Rhode Island-sized plates of poutine.

A word on poutine. In the opinion of a beloved friend and fellow 'blogger Garghoulee, poutine is "gravy potato crap". If by "gravy potato crap" she means "deleriously wonderful, albeit lethal dish which was, and we must be frank, sent to us directly from Heaven", then yes, she is quite correct. Composed of rough-cut french fries covered in a special curd cheese (made to withstand the heat without melting) and then basted in beef gravy, poutine literally takes your breath away as several key blood vessels clamp shut on mere principle. You have to admire it: an unholy triad of some of the most feared food products, unabashedly existing together, mixing secretions, appealing to the part of you that still likes cotton candy and cereal with marshmallows over apples and oat bran for your patronage. I, for one, wasn't about to deny the poor, wretched poutine the opportunity to be consumed utterly as had been its destiny. Now, I probably would have been assumed directly into the awaiting maw of the heavens had I been able to eat poutine IN Chinatown, but that was, as could be expected, a little too much to ask of the seventy year-old man basting air-bloated Peking ducks with hoisin and plum sauce at 11 AM.

I came away from Montréal wanting more, needing more, and wondering when I'd be back. Taking a moonlit stroll down Rue de la huh huh HUH*, gazing in wonder at the Eglise de la wuh wuh WUH*, taking my European-inspired supper by the Guh wuh HUH River*. One day, my pet, I shall return to thee.

In the spirit of bilingualism in Quebec, most people will greet you with a lovely all-purpose "Bonjour-hi", cleverly illustrating the power dynamic that is at the root of Quebequois nationalism: while acknowledging that Anglophones exist in Montréal and other cities in the province, they are relegated to second place both culturally and linguistically. I have to admit that I am sympathetic to their cause, for as much as I fear their language as my one, truest nemesis, I need to be sure of one thing:

That someone will be there to pour the gravy.

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic

PS: *That's what French sounds like to me.
PPS: Balthazar was diagnosed Friday night with asthma. Yes. An asthmatic cat. More later.
PPSS: Does anyone need a kidney? I have vet's bills to pay.