Welcome to another week of life on the road. I’m Genie Leslie, a freelance writer working remotely and traveling the country with my husband.
This week, we’re in Montreal, enjoying chocolate croissants and Tim Horton’s coffee. Also, all our online ads are in French now.
We have made it into Montreal, QC, Canada. We’ve been here for just over two weeks now, and it’s lovely. If moving to Canada were a realistic option, and if being this far north wasn’t the total opposite of our moving-close-to-family goal, I think we’d seriously consider Montreal as a place to live.
It’s a gorgeous city, it’s very clean, and it’s fascinating to navigate a truly bilingual city. We love it.
But navigating a bilingual country (and a new country in general) is, at times, more overwhelming than we expected, with something new to figure out at every turn.
Crossing the border
When Aaron first mentioned adding Montreal to the list, I thought surely it was a step too far. Would we be allowed to do that? Would they be weirded out by how much stuff we have packed in the car? Would we run into issues with working?
I spent a lot of time googling everything about crossing the border. Yes, our Enhanced Drivers Licenses from Washington are still approved for crossing into Canada. No, we don’t need work visas because our employers are not Canadian and we’re not taking Canadian jobs. Everything was in order.
But I didn’t prepare for the questions we’d be asked at the border.
The French-Canadian officer at the border checked our licenses and asked how long it had been since we’d been at that Seattle address. Aaron answered honestly—more than a year. Then, he asked Aaron to roll down the back window, which revealed our packed-to-the-brim car.
“OK, you haven’t been back to this address in a year, and you have everything you own with you--“
“We have stuff in a storage unit in Seattle, too,” Aaron cut in.
“But, practically, everything with you. How do I know you’re going to leave Canada?”
We both sort of scrambled to answer. “Well, our families are in the US.” “We have two family weddings this fall we’d never miss.” “We’ve already got the next Airbnb booked in North Carolina.”
He didn’t fully buy it, or at least wanted to make sure someone else bought it, so he told us to pull up and over at a side section.
Here, two French-speaking officers asked us to step out of the car. They took the car keys from Aaron and began opening doors. I saw them checking my toiletry bag and I wondered if they always started there, looking for drugs or something, maybe. I wondered if they might unpack the whole car but they didn’t. Maybe they were overwhelmed by the amount of stuff (I often am, each time we pack back up).
One of the officers asked us the same questions as the first one had. She asked us about remote working and how long we’d been traveling. We gave the same answers.
“I just want you to go in and speak with immigration to make sure all is okay.”
Inside, we met with an officer who was likely American. He wanted to know more about our jobs—who we worked for, what kind of employment we had. When I mentioned that I was under contract, he pushed. “When does the contract end? What will you do when the contract ends?” I tried to emphasize both that I’d seek employment with other American companies, but also that my contract wouldn’t be ending before we left Canada. After a few minutes, he was satisfied, and we were free to go.
Even with all the questions and the brief peek into the car, the whole ordeal took 40 minutes or less. We felt so relieved when we pulled past the border, having made it through without incident.
Getting around
Until we saw our first road signs.
Kilometers per hour. French road signs.
Aaron squirmed for a minute before realizing that our car’s speedometer does have kilometers per hour on it, just in a smaller font below the miles.
We figured out stop signs very quickly. They are conveniently the same shape and color as every stop sign we’ve ever seen. And our Google Maps was still in English, of course, so we could continue to follow directions.
But it was anxiety inducing! On the highway, going 100kmh, you don’t want to make a driving mistake because of a language barrier.
Two weeks in, driving is (mostly) no big deal. We learned that a green flashing light means your side is the only one with the go-ahead. And other than that, things feel mostly the same. Also, we’re staying in the suburbs across the bridge from Montreal, but once you cross into the city, highway signs tends to have both languages printed on them, so that’s helpful.
Parking, however, continues to be difficult. It’s easy enough to spot a parking sign where the letter P is in a red circle with a red line over it. “Do not park” seems pretty clear. But if you’ve got the red P plus a bunch of text in French that’s explaining when you can and can’t park there, and you have to translate the language from French to English and also the time from the 24-hour clock to the 12-hour clock—it gets stressful. We’ve started just pulling over briefly (and safely) with our hazard lights on so we can get off the road and translate the signs instead of driving around forever.
Converting money
When we got here, I downloaded both a translating app and a currency converter. But I’ve barely used the currency converter at all. That’s because, right now, the Canadian dollar is worth about $0.73 of the American dollar. In other words, the conversion works in our favor.
More often than not, the prices on a menu seem very comparable to America. It doesn’t feel much more expensive at first glance. And we have the added bonus of knowing that whatever the final tally is, it’s actually only about 75% of that in US dollars.
Money, therefore, is not something we’ve had to worry about or figure out. We’re not carrying cash so we didn’t bother getting anything converted; our cards just take care of everything, paying now and converting on the bank side before the transaction hits our account. It’s very handy.
Communicating
Once we got here and made it past the border, I came up with something new to be anxious about—speaking the language. Obviously I do not speak French, and there is only so much I will learn in 4 weeks. But I was so afraid of looking like an American asshole who refused to learn the language. So Aaron and I started responding to “Bonjour” with “Bonjour.”
Which then led to more sentences in French that we do not understand. And then we’d awkwardly say, “Oh no sorry, we don’t speak French,” and the person had to reset.
Here’s the reality. Many (most?) people here speak both languages. And many servers, cashiers, and customer service agents will greet you with “Bonjour! Hello!” to see which one you respond back with. It really is about as low-stakes a situation as you can get for not knowing another language.
But occasionally, you get tripped up. We went to one restaurant that had their menu in both languages but the server only spoke French, so we did a lot of pointing. (We ate, we paid, it all ended well.) And our first attempt going through a drive-thru (Tim Horton’s) was also awkward, with Aaron slowly saying “chocolate croissant” three times in hopes it would finally click (it did).
And one day, I was taking a walk on the bike path near our Airbnb—there’s a lovely, long path and green space (la verte route) that stretches for miles. I’d been listening to a podcast but given up on it, now holding my headphones in my hand. Two people approached on bikes. The woman called out, and I had a little sense that she might be talking to me, but also, the man she was with was on a bike ahead of her so she could’ve been calling to him. I looked to him to see if he’d respond to her…and he was looking right at me with a pleasant smile on his face.
Uh-oh. The woman stopped her bike, speaking to me quickly.
“I’m so sorry, I don’t speak French.”
I hoped she’d switch languages but instead she said, “Ah, okay,” and she and the man went back to biking.
What did she want? What was she saying? Did she mistake me for someone else? Was she trying to tell me I had something embarrassing on my clothes or face?
I’ll never know. And in a country where you don’t speak the language, sometimes you just have to accept that.
What else is going on?
We spent an afternoon in the Montreal Museum of Art. I found a bronze bust from 1926 titled “The Bishop” that is the SPITTING image of the current bishop of Mississippi’s Episcopal Diocese. It’s uncanny.
Mount Royal Park is gorgeous. We spent an entire Sunday afternoon there, while I crocheted and Aaron read. We sat near a group of people with dogs, and then realized we were in the middle of a doodle meetup—within the hour there were about 50 people with dogs, all of varying doodle types, hanging around and getting their picture taken. It was delightful.
If you’re ever in the area, check out the restaurant The Greasy Spoon. It is not, in fact, a greasy spoon as I would define it, but a delicious restaurant. And if you end up talking to the owner and telling him about your travels, he might just treat you to some delicious tequila shots.