Sassiest-kids-in-America, part two.

Sassiest-kids-in-America, part one.

Meg, it was your birthday.

My housemate is from the Prairies; a land of very hot summers and ridiculously cold winters. As a result, she enjoys extremes. The weather in Montreal had been kind of temperate as of late, hovering around zero, spiking up to ten and then back down again, bringing us blustery evenings that were somehow often followed by milder days that tended to melt the snow away... Against my stronger desires, my housemate got her birthday wish of extreme cold and snow this year. Meg, you are now a year older, and winter is finally here. To celebrate, we devoured a Beetlejuice cake, played Nintendo, and Jack Frost had a party on my window...

These are not fall colours.

October 22 and snowing in Montreal?
'Fraid so, blue planet...
The melting kind!

Medieval People

Wooh, it's been a while! No time for blogging when a girl's school is not on strike and no fun trips are being taken! That said, i did find the time to procrastinate long enough to put together this shoddy lil' video filled with winter-road-trip-idleness from last February.

It all began when i missed the last metro home on the eve of our departure. Tired, I opted for taking a 10 Euro cab ride from Concorde to Montmartre (that's expensive!), so i thought i should try to catch some footage along the way. 4 measly hours of sleep later, i met a friend for breakfast, which required taking the metro something like 9 times. Finally, it got to be road trip time. Over 4 days (that's slow!), we drove along the Loire, to Rennes and up to the coast to see Mont Saint-Michel, and then through the fields of Normandy on the road (to Rouen) and back to Paris. E. missed her flight home due to CRAZY outskirts of Paris traffic (horrible!) so we decided to console her over crème brûlée from "Les Deux Moulins." Proof:

My town's got a chinatown too!

Yes, it's true. I've left the Chinatown of Paris. No more 13th arrondissement for me. But it's okay, because that means I get to walk around the Chinatown of the world's second largest French speaking city, my hometown, Montreal! After a little under a year away and the longest chunk of time I've ever spent outside of Canada, I've learned to view the familiar through the eyes of a tourist, and by jove, it's kinda fun! The best part is, there are plenty of weird and beautiful things here too. Who knew?

Magic Gloves

One year on Christmas morning sometime in the late 80s, my stocking was stuffed with a pair of black magic gloves (most likely from Zellers or some place equally thrifty), that also happened to be sort of sparkly... Though magic gloves tend to be lost and replaced quite easily and frequently in the great white north, I saved my sparkly gloves (which I always called my Michael Jackson gloves) for my weekend figure skating classes and wore them without ever losing them until they fell to pieces. How magical is THAT? Other precious memories include spinning around on all fours as a toddler on my neighbours' slick parquet floor monotonously chanting: breakdancing, breakdancing, breakdancing...

I snapped this photo at the Jeff Koons exhibit at the Château de Versailles last December. Michael Jackson lives!

The lifestyle or the language.

There is a store in the Marais called Ben Simon. It's kind of like a tinier, more expensive version of Urban Oufitters. Or maybe Urban Outfitters is globalization's answer to stores like Ben Simon in the Parises of the world. In a word? Unaffordable. But cute! I used to live pretty close to it, and I enjoyed walking inside for a splash of eye candy and colour to contrast the beautiful but very grey architecture of the neighbourhood and beyond. Knit plush toys, prepare to be hugged in photographs forever. You want to go to Ben Simon but you can't afford the trip to Paree? I have just the post for your poverty stricken itchy feet. This is not Paris. This is Ben's basement.