Chapter 4: Spherical!!

This semester, Thursdays are my BUSY DAY! Just because of the way my schedule worked out, my first class begins at 8:30 am and my last class ends at 8:15 pm. But, it’s okay because, a, I love the classes and, b, the rest of my week is not busy at all. Since I’ve already written about my French class, which is Tuesdays and Thursdays, I thought this week I’d focus on the Earth Science class.

Since Champlain requires its students to take one Lab Science course, I thought Earth Science in Montreal would be a good chance to get that Lab done. I’d heard that it was a fun class and, well, my sources were right. Some of the content is review for me, but the experiences are certainly one of a kind!

The first Thursday, we couldn’t do a lab because it was the first day, but the week after that and this past Thursday have been very fun AND educational. (Go edutainment.) For our first Lab, which takes place after the Lecture, we hiked on up to Mount Royal (sound familiar…?) to do some tree identification. We were up there for a few hours, talking trees, leaves, and squirrel population. I saw a strange caterpillar covered in long white hair, but I didn’t lean in too close to look because he (she?) was about a foot from the biggest spider I’ve seen in Montreal thus far. (Blegh.) We took some new routes that day and we discovered a picturesque little path that leads to a nice park (the one we were TRYING to find the Sunday before). Carter, Roman, and I (half the class!) got lost temporarily because we fell behind while identifying a tree, and we ended up walking to the big, metal, light-up cross they have up there rather than the parking lot. Jules came running to find us, though, so no harm done.



On our next Lab adventure, we adventurous six went to the Biodome! The ‘dome is a spiffy place because even though a lot of it is geared toward children, there’s still a lot of information to be had about wildlife.



They have a tropical forest, a temperate forest, an arctic climate, and the Atlantic Ocean. There was also a temporary ‘Madagascar’ exhibit with a trio of ever-grooming lemurs. There was a very formidable anaconda in one tank as well as some four-foot sturgeon in the ocean exhibit. In fact, most of the fish there were, well, quite large, to say the least, and as my friend Keith put it, ‘Where are these guys when I go fishing?’.



For next week, it looks like we’re taking a break from our schedule of outings to do some pH and acidification experiments. But, that’s fine with me, since in a couple weeks we’re going to the BioSphere.

Chapter 3: En Francais, s’il vous plait.

I thought today I’d start to talk about some of my classes. I haven’t said much about them yet because until around the three-week mark I haven’t attended enough classes to know enough about them.

So, I thought I’d start with the French class, mostly since that’s my largest class, with about 16 students from the different majors. The first two days the class was taught entirely in French, but the third included a fair amount of English because I think there were a few students who were flat-out lost. Those of us who had taken Spanish in high school were the most lost because, as I’m told, in Spanish you pronounce all words in their entirety, whereas in French you drop off the last letter of more or less every word. You can see how there might be some confusion.

Before coming to Montreal, there had been a sort of general understanding amongst my friends and I that learning French wouldn’t really be necessary because everyone here spoke English. NOT TRUE. Montreal is basically French on the east half and English on the west half, and we’re located just inside the border of the French half. Most of the people you hear on the street are speaking French, and at many of the business the employees speak English only as a second language. All the lessons at UQAM are taught in French, as opposed to McGill or Concordia, where the lessons are in English. Our ‘Conversational French’ class, though a little bit of a crash-course in the beginning, is so far proving a good way to learn basic interaction in French.

We’ve already learned several useful phases, like ‘I’m cold’ or ‘I’m hungry’ and we’re in the process of leaning all the numbers, how to say the date, tell time, ask the time, and say ‘Do you speak English?’, which will probably be the most useful of them all! (Parlez-vous l’anglais?). This class is particularly useful for me because I live with two girls from Southern France who speak only very basic English, and many of their friends who come to hang out in our apartment speak only French. Some of my friends from Champlain who live on the 5^th floor have started hanging out with Francophone students, so knowing at least a little bit French can go a long way. I had to help a kid out with the washing and drying machines in the Laundry room, and just knowing how to say ‘put this there and put that there’ can be super explanatory if you point to all the right things.

I hope to eventually become more or less bilingual, though not in just one semester- it takes many years to pull that off. To work in a retail-type Montreal you need to be able to speak either French or English fluently, and then have a basic grasp of your second language. For a more specialized job like teaching or office-based work, you need to speak both languages well, as far as I can tell.

And next week, I think I’ll speak of the advantages of taking Advanced Seminar or Earth Science while abroad in Montreal!

Chapter 2: Out And About (Not Aboot)

Mini Journal 2

The other day we accidentally hiked up Mount Royal. We wanted to go see a drum festival, but somehow we missed the park and started walking up the mountain instead! Turns out it’s a very nice public area with big trails, stairs, and a big park and visitor’s center with food and such at the top, so it’s not like we were about to get attacked by bears or anything. We did almost get attacked by squirrels, though, when they surrounded us on our picnic blanket and eyed our sandwiches. I later learned that the park has a bad overpopulation of squirrels because visitors feed them. WE did not feed the squirrels, we just got them to stand on their hind legs, as my friend Dan here demonstrates:


Chapter 2 – Out and About

Maybe I’m just not used to the big city, but it seems to me that there’s always something interesting happening in Montreal. There was a launch party for a video game at a local bar, one we all recognize now because it has a GIANT spider with an eyeball on the end of each foot hanging over the entrance. (I didn’t go because I didn’t have much interest, and I really didn’t want to walk under the spider.) I could give you a big list of all the different kinds of things you can do around here, but if you were really that interested you’d just Google it. There’s always a museum exhibit, a concert, a festival, a something happening in this city. Yes, there’s a possibility it may be presented in French, but that’s why we bake cookies for the Francophone kids, isn’t it?
And speaking of presented in French, this past weekend was extended an extra day for Labor Day, so all the schools had classes off and many of the business (far more than in the US) were closed. At the same time, September 7th was the final day of the Montreal World Film Festival. The Film Festival had been going on since we arrived and every night it offered a free out-doors movie about a five minute walk from the dorm. The overarching goal of the festival is to ‘to encourage cultural diversity and understanding among nations’ through the medium of film. But, apparently showing movies wasn’t helping people understand each others cultural difference enough, so to end the festival they threw a giant outdoor Electro-Techno-Fireworks-and-Parade Thing.
I’ve honestly never heard music quite like this before. My friends and I are still trying to find out who this band is because we were so blown away by their sound. There’s no good way to describe it, but to give you an idea, there were four guys on the stage with different kinds of guitars, one guy behind a sound board, and one guy singing (and singing well). And the music they created can only be described as some sort of Techno-Rock hybrid; similar to techno, but with the sounds (including the percussion) produced almost entirely by the guitars, and with lyrics. On top of that, they had a mesmerizing assortment of abstract images pulsing in sync to the music, and a camera crew recording and editing together live the whole performance into a music video that was being projected on to the outdoor movie screen. And not to mention the stunt person from Cirque du Soleil who was running vertically up and down the side of a building on guide wires since, you know, a massive techno-rock concert where everyone has a noise-maker after a parade just rolled through isn’t quite fascinating enough. (Sorry for the double dose of light sarcasm in the same paragraph.) At the finale of the concert, they set off fireworks (in time to the music, of course) on the roof of a building right above the crowd. I’ve never been this close to a big fireworks display; I could literally see the cardboard casing flying through the air.


And then we all settled down and watched a documentary called ‘Imagine John Lennon’, which was basically the story of his life as told by him and those close to him with the help of some very clever editing. It might have been a little long-winded for someone not deeply interested in the Beatles, specifically the John component, but I’ve been a fan of his since I was 12 years old, so I found it very interesting and entertaining. (Spoiler Alert: This movie has a sad ending.)
Future Montreal-bound Champlainers will be happy to know that this is all happening again next year, same place, same time.

Bienvenu a Montreal!

Welcome to the Champlain at Montreal student blog for the Fall Semester of 2009. I’m Emilie and for the next 15 weeks I will be posting an account of my life and adventures here in the city of Montreal, Quebec.

I’ve decided to break this blog down into Chapters, each one on a specific topic concerning the city and my experiences with the Champlain Abroad program. Each Chapter will be proceeded by an entry of undoubtedly varying length that is more or less a Mini Journal on interesting things that have happened to me recently. So, without further ado, I give you Mini Journal 1 and Chapter One, the Residence.

Mini Journal 1: I saw a van with the 'Awesome Face' on the spare tire cover the other day. It was awesome. My friends and I all whipped out our cell phones to take a picture of it.

Yesterday, we had our first 'Intro to French Class', and I was very proud of myself because even though the teacher spoke entirely in French, I understood almost everything he said. Thank You, Dr. Ladd! (My high school French teacher.)

Chapter One -- The Residence

We, the Study Abroad students from Champlain, are 25 in number. We happy few live at one of the UQAM (University du Quebec a Montreal) residences. It's an eight floor building, but we only occupy a total of eight rooms. I myself live on the first floor, though I was originally destined for the 5th, but there was some mix up in the kind of

roommates I was looking for. Here on the first floor, I live with two very nice girls, my age, who are majoring in International Business at UQAM. They are from Southern France and between the two of them they speak only basic English. My room is bilingual now, since I want to learn French from them and they want to learn English from me. Every day is a continued effort to communicate effectively, but we seem to get better at it all the time. I should note, of course, that I've been living here for less than a week.

We have a dry erase board on the fridge on which all messages are written either in my broken French or their not-half-bad English. We have sheets of printer paper taped to the wall above the dining table that display a somewhat random collection of French phrases and their corresponding English translation. I've heard more than a few Disney songs performed in French, and I've had the honor of learning how to use the keyboard on a French laptop. (The 'M' is moved up next to the 'L', the exclamation point is where the comma is, and you have to press shift to type a period. Don't ask, I don't know.) Every once in a while, my roommates friends from France will come to the apartment to chill and drink a beer, but since I neither drink, smoke, nor speak fluent French, I like to sit back and listen to the sing-song banter. From what I can understand of their conversations and based on basic body language, they're really not any different from any other college students I've met. Significantly less rowdy, perhaps, but otherwise they talk about the same things and make the same jokes as American students. Many of them smoke cigarettes (smoking is not looked down upon in France the way it is in the US), but they all unfailingly sit in the window to do it, so the room doesn't smell like cigs, which is nice.

I could go on all day and night about my roommates, because they're so nice and extremely courteous, as are all their friends, but I'll try to curtail my enthusiasm about my person living situation. The rest of the UQAM dorm is quite nice, too, the ground floor with a help desk, a couple of student lounge areas, snack machines, washers and dryers, the mail room, recycling and trash behind little refrigerated hatches, and don't forget the bank of weirdly retro green-glass windows that make the UQAM dorms visible from quite a distance. The suites we live in are for 3 or 4 people, and are all uniformly white but with plenty of room and a nice view of the little green courtyard. And, as several of my fellow Champlain Abroad buddies have pointed out, it's incredibly quiet. "There are college kids here??"

In summary, life in UQAM has been pretty benign thus far. I look forward to the remainder of my stay and I'm enjoying the city immensely. (And I am not the sort of person who normally enjoys cities.)