Newsletter

French Debutante Fail-Barber

I know it wasn't Fukuyama's point and I don't care, he was still wrong and it's still funny.

B R

B R

— 3 min read
French Debutante Fail-Barber
Only true french simps will get this.

My first week of French class - Debutant 1 (beginner 1) - are done and the material changes are:

  1. Slightly greater confidence actually speaking to people
  2. Pronouncing things slightly more correctly
  3. The fake French accent I use for a character playing a game with friends is getting much worse

The class itself is lovely and quite the throwback mentally. Both because the actual content is review - I’m familiar with virtually every word and the grammar being taught - and because it has been quite a while since I have taken a class. And even longer for the kind of class where you get these kinds of worksheets:

Tag yourself I’m the barber (coiffeur) that appears to think their job is to actually cut their own comb?? Also WHY THE LONG FACE etc.

The highlight of the class is the group work and games - though I didn’t get a lucky pull when cards were handed out for charades:

Even if I wanted to, I feel like it would be hard to use charades to play act being a cop. What would I do? Stand outside an unlocked door like a coward for an hour, ignoring an active mass shooting of children occurring behind it?

In other news, there is almost 2ft of snow on the ground and it happened in one night.

The government liquor store is on the left and the government cannabis store is on the right.

Or rather, there was. A little less than 48 hours after the storm, the monstrously expensive1 and terribly effective mass snow plowing operation has rendered essentially every road and bike lane clear. Everyone else (including us) pitches in to shovel sidewalks.

Mural I walk past coming home in Villeray. Not even the most wild one within two long-blocks of us. Oh yeah, blocks are much longer than wide in a lot of the city - part of an ancient French land parcel system that tries to maximize the number of landowners with river access.

The class is downtown, but its only 10 minutes in the cold weather, the other 20-25 minutes are in the relatively-crowded-at-rush-hour2 and very well heated subway.

Last weekend we did a lovely walking tour of the old city and learned some cool ass stuff about Montreal:

  1. The plurality of people in the city speak at least three languages. This is certainly the case in my French class, where I am a novelty both for (1) being from the US and (2) for only knowing one other language.

  2. When they de-Catholicized quite a bit during the Silent Revolution of the 1960s, they made some artificial islands for the Expo 67 World Fair using excess fill from the subways expanding and some ground up church masonry.3

  3. The Silent Revolution was tied up in Quebec nationalism. When the first independence vote started looking pretty close, the financial district basically moved en masse to Toronto. The old bank buildings have since been reappropriated

    This, the former Banque Royale du Canada building, is now a coworking/cafe/nightclub space with delightfully transparent pricing.

  4. Much of the famed Underground City doesn’t feel very underground:

This section was built in 1994 and, as a sign of the times, a chunk of the Berlin Wall. How many readers are old enough to remember when history ended? It was weird right? But I’m glad we don’t have history anymore.

  1. 8% of the city’s $6.26B ($4.67 USD) budget goes to snow removal. ↩

  2. Especially the day after the snow hit, when digging out your car is a less pleasant option comparatively. ↩

  3. This is a pretty moderate form of de-Catholicization, given how deep the hooks were into the population for much of the last 300 years. Especially compared to say revolutionary Mexico, Spain, or even (but more temporally spread out) England. ↩

Read more