Emilie's Montreal Journal

Chapter 10: Location x

2009-12-01T16:44:00.000-08:00

Location, Location, Location

I’ve never been to the Montreal International Game Summit before this year, so MIGS was an all-new experience for me this year.

For those of you who may be wondering, MIGS is just what its name implies: influential people from the electronic game industry from all over the world come to Montreal to attend keynote speeches, round table discussions, and other kinds of conferences all about game art, design, programming, marketing, and the industry in general. The big names like Ubisoft, Eidos, Artificial Mind and Movement, Adobe, Autodesk, Wacom, and many others congregate at MIGS to pitch, teach, and network.

Students, also, attend MIGS in large numbers, as do tech schools that offer game-design programs. It’s a good place for graduating students to potentially make some important connections and get up-to-date on what companies and employers are looking for in their new employees. What’s more, students get a discounted rate for attendance, and it just so happens that every year Champlain College offers an even MORE discounted rate, which includes a hotel room.

This year, Champlain boasted a whopping 130 students at MIGS, which is considerable if you note that the total attendance for MIGS was 1,300. Yes, we were one tenth of MIGS. Go us. There is also the option to be a volunteer at the convention, which means you help out with the event half the day, and then you’re free to attend meetings, etc, the other half of the day. So, that’s what I did!

This is a Champlain Blog, though, and not a MIGS blog, so I’ll focus it in a little. Last year, MIGS was much closer to the Residence hall, but it’s under new management this year, so they had a new location. The new place was a little bit farther from the Res, but still perfectly within walking distance. It was fun to reconnect with all the Champlain students that I hadn’t seen since last spring, which is one of the huge pluses of Montreal: Burlington is just a couple-hour drive away! It made me sort of nostalgic…

MIGS only lasts two days, but it was packed with events. I’m afraid I can’t provide any photos for now because the only person in the whole place taking photos was the official photographer, and I don’t know when or where her photos will go up. I’m interested in returning to MIGS next year, but I think I’ll pay my way in 2010, since I want to be able to attend more sessions. It’ll only be a short distance to travel, I’ll already know the city, and I’m hoping it will be extra helpful to me as a Senior in the game design major.

Chapter 9: Ottawaahaa!

2009-11-12T18:29:00.000-08:00

Chapter 9

This past weekend, the 6^th to the 8^th, was the Ottawa City trip! Fewer of us went along for the ride this time for a number of reasons, but having a smaller group made it possible to do different kinds of activities. While having a big group last time was a lot of fun, this smaller group was a lot of fun, too!

We left Friday morning at 10:00 for the bus station and arrived in Ottawa around 1:30. The ride to Ottawa was actually about an hour shorter than the one to Quebec city. We checked into the Novotel and after a brief rest we went to the Royal Canadian Mint, which was just down the road from the hotel. At the Mint we took a short tour of the facility, where all the machines and workers were behind thick glass. They were in the process of making Investment Coins when we arrived, and we learned that the RCM of Ottawa hold the Guinness World Record for the largest gold coin, 220 pounds, 7 ounces, and a foot and a half across.

Our first evening, the capital city was a little chilly, but that didn’t stop us from frolicking around a giant, modern-style spider sculpture and running up to look-out points just in time for a fantastic sun set. The city has several nice parks as well as monuments and statues representing historic Canadian figures, events, and its roots with the British royal family. We eventually found our way to the Hard Rock Café of Ottawa for dinner, and later that evening we got to jump in the hotel’s pool and revel in the glory of the jacuzzi hot tub.

The next two days we had fantastic weather, sunny and without a breeze, probably in the mid to high fifties. Saturday morning we had a buffet breakfast in the hotel, then took two taxis to the Museum of Science and Technology. It was a both fun and interesting place, with three of the largest steam train engines I’ve ever seen, and exhibits on everything from the Canadian space program to the Titanic to the history of transportation as explained by LEGOs.

After that, we scooped up lunch and made our way to Parliament, where we had a reserved tour all to ourselves. I still don’t completely understand how the Canadian government works, but I did learn that their senate is comprised not of politicians but of people from all different professions, which sounds like a cool concept to me!

We had some time to ourselves to explore the city after Parliament, and later we went to the Cornerstone Bar & Grill for dinner. It was probably the most chic and trendy ‘bar or grill’ I’d ever seen, and it had great food! That night we had another reserved spot, this time at the comedy club ‘Yuk Yuks’, where we enjoyed a couple hours of professional stand up.

Finally, on Sunday we had our morning buffet once more and were sad to check out of rooms with the fantastically comfortable beds. Our final activity was the trip to the Museum of Civilization, which houses a massive collection of First Nations totem poles and objects. I could probably write a whole blog just on that one Museum! A must-see for any trip to Ottawa.

Alas, our trip came to an end after we went for lunch and retuned to the bus station. The ride home went smoothly and we all had a great time. I would absolutely recommend both the Quebec and Ottawa city trips to all future Champlain Montrealers.

Special Thanks To: Dan for all his awesome and thorough photos

and

Stefi, for two great trips across Canada!! Thank you Stefi!

Chapter 8: HalloWIN

2009-11-02T21:02:00.000-08:00

Halloweeny Fun

In my PERSONAL opinion, Halloween is just about the best holiday of there is. Sure it has its downsides, but no one’s perfect, right? Some people are in it for the candy, some people for the parties, but I’m in it for the costumes. I love Halloween for the chance to make a REALLY COOL costume and walk around in public wearing it. Yes, I’m one of ‘those people’ who puts a lot of work into her costume months, sometimes years, in advance and shows up feeling almost overdressed. Which is what I did this year, too.

I’ve gathered that Halloween is pretty popular in Montreal, what with all the availability of night clubs for the partiers and ghost tours for others. What’s interesting in the UQAM dorm is that many of the students, at least the ones I knew, had never had a Halloween. According to my roommates, in France it’s looked down upon as a silly holiday for American children. Well, after the 31^st, maybe some of these students will bring Halloween back to Europe and spread the popularity.

While it’s not popular in France, this French-speaking residence still had a costume party on the night of the 30^th. I went to check it out and got unknowingly pulled into a costume/dance competition. Literally, I walked in with my costume on, they asked me my name (in French) and then we were all given some instructions which I didn’t realize were basically: “This is a costume contest and a dance off. Go for it!”

It was good in the end, though, because I won a gift card. I’m assuming it was for the costume and not my dancing skills (or lack thereof…). I’ve never associated Halloween with dance contests before, but then again it made for a new and fun combination.

Along with the Halloween party, Champlain took its students to the ‘Extreme Halloween Labyrinth’, which I actually didn’t get to go to because I was in the costume/dance contest. I’ll have to get a report about he labyrinth to post because it sounded like a good time. I just couldn’t be in two places at once.

All in all, Halloween was a good time here. I carved a pumpkin for my roommates and some of their friends from France, a process I don’t think they’d ever seen before, and after I baked the seeds with salt and cinnamon. Within about 12 hours they’d eaten all the seeds, which made me proud. I put up a “Happy Halloween” banner on the wall and some of those fake cobwebs. We bought candy and I brought various costume pieces for them, since I knew they didn’t have any of their own. There were some parties around the dorm, and I went to the one with the other Champlain students, who were sporting X-Men, Firefly, Secret Agent, and what I call ‘novelty’ costumes (i.e. one guy dressed up just like his roommate). It was a fun time!

Chapter 7: Midway Point

2009-10-21T18:35:00.000-07:00

Mini Journal

I haven’t written a mini journal in a little while. To review, I write these ‘Mini Journals’ when I have little tidbits of information to share but couldn’t fit them into the main ‘chapter’.

Last week we got a tour of the EA Games and Bioware headquarters here in Montreal. It was very interesting and even a little bit fun, but I can’t tell you what I saw in there! The reasoning behind the secrecy is basically that these companies exert a lot of time and money into their ideas, so a very idea becomes a commodity, and if a competing company learns about their inner workings, all sorts of copyright infringement battles could go down and it wouldn’t be pretty. So, I can’t say what games I saw in progress, but I can say we were assured that the game industry in Montreal is doing well right now.

Also, last night I went to “Sunday Night Improv” (free for the Champlain group) and enjoyed an evening of hilarious made-up stuff! I also learned that any one can join their practices, for free, and partake in their improve workshops every Sunday night. Why did no one tell me this earlier? I love improv! I want to go now… In other words, if you’re interested in Theatre, here’s a spot for you!

Chapter 7

Midterms

I can’t believe we’re already at midterms! This always seems to happen; school starts and then the next day you’re taking your first midterm!

Actually, midterms haven’t quite begun yet. We’re just starting to study and/or prepare for them in my Earth Sci and Canadian Culture classes, and we don’t exactly have an actual ‘midterm’ in the 3D Animation class. In Concept Painting, we’ve been working on our midterm since last week- it’s one finished illustration of a scene of our choosing.

Then again, I shouldn’t be too surprised by the arrival of midterms. I am on blog number 7 after all, and if there are 15 weeks in the semester then as a matter of math we are almost halfway through the Fall. We’ve had a lot of work so far, but we’ve had a lot of fun, too.

In fact, just this weekend, we went to the botanical gardens for the Chinese lantern festival. We went at night so it was a tad nippy but the garden was all lit up with colorful lanterns shaped like zodiac creatures or dancing people. The insectarium was open, too, but I didn’t go in there.

Spiders and I… we don’t get along. I did hear exciting stories about said spiders, however, from my friend Dan (who often donates his photos to this blog). Apparently, one of displays had ‘these GIANT tarantulas’ in it which were up against the glass, and as people leaned down to look at nearby Black Widows, they didn’t even notice the tarantulas! He said they also had a display with those spiders that wait under ‘trap doors’ for prey to wander by, and the class bisected the spider’s den so you could see it waiting for a nearby cricket. Actually, I’m sorta glad I didn’t go…

Anyway, there were a lot of people at the garden that night, but I guess the lantern display was coming to an end soon, so the last-minute folks were coming to see it. There’s a pumpkin carving show or display of some kind coming up, too, on account of Halloween, which might be fun to go see, too.

Speaking of Halloween, the UQAM res hall is officially decked out as of last night. They put up paper skeletons and everything orange, black, and cob-webby all over the lobby, so it feels much more festive around here these days. I have my costume all ready, personally, and several of my friends are getting theirs together. I’m really looking forward to Halloween up here, so I hope it’s fun!

Then again, so far pretty much everything we’ve done up here has been fun, so I think I needn’t worry much. I guess I’m taking this blog to reflect on the past seven weeks (which have FLOWN by like a jet) as is often customary of events with both a midpoint and narrator. I’m looking forward to the remainder of my stay here, but I don’t want to even think about the end of it yet. Our next big excursion is the Ottawa City trip, so I’ll certainly have a lot to write then. For now, the leaves are changing and the weather’s getting colder and I have plenty of work to keep me busy.

Chapter 6: It’s “ka-BECK”

2009-10-06T17:16:00.001-07:00

This past weekend a group of 16 Champlain Students, plus one Activity Coordinator, took a trip to Quebec City!

The way I’ve described the part of the city to friends and family since visiting is ‘it’s like they sawed out a huge chunk of a piece of an old European city and dropped it in North America”. We spent our weekend in Old Quebec, which is still walled in the way it has been since the original French settlers set up camp generations ago.
The streets in this area are still almost entirely cobblestone, aside from some main roads, and almost all the buildings are stone, brick, or stucco. There are cobblestone courtyards with monuments in their centers, an old fort with a main building called the Citadel, the Chateau Frontenac, and out-of-commission cannons at every convenient location. Like I said, right out of Europe.

It’s about a three hour ride by bus from Montreal to Quebec city, but it felt like less than that to me. The bus ticket was included in the cost of attendance, which was $120 Canadian or $100 US, as was the cost of our room for two nights, all our meals, and the various tours in which we took part. However, we were definitely treated to much more than what we paid. We stayed at an amazingly nice youth hostel called “Auberge International de Jeunesse,” which was basic but very clean and accommodating. Our rooms included two good continental breakfasts (your choice of tea, coffee, juice, yogurt, toast, bagel, apple, hard boiled egg and/or cereal), and I don’t think there was a single complaint about the hostel. (We loved the showers!)

On the first day, some friends and I took a walk up to the old fort walls and climbed around up there for a couple hours. As we were all in the Game major, there was many a comment about whether or not the old fort would serve as a good level in a game, existing or potential. The general consensus was no, because, as one of the guys pointed out, game levels are designed to be balanced; this fort was designed so the people inside would win. After walking around on the walls, we found a look out point over the St. Lawrence Straight with a path of stairs that led down around the face of the fort. Harbored in the river were the two largest cruise ships I’ve ever seen. They were essentially floating city blocks. Later that night, we went on a ‘Ghost Tour’ of old Quebec, where we were led around the area by a costumed guide with a lantern who told us old tales of murder and ghosts in the city. There was already a strong ‘Halloween’ air in Quebec, so I’d love to come back for the 31st.

During our stay we visited the Museum of Civilization, le Chateau Frontenac, the old French Parliament, the monument to Samuel de Champlain, and went on many little ‘side-quests’ of our own devising. There were many shops, most of them for tourists but some unique, and a definite feeling of ‘European’ throughout. I’d love to return again some day and see more of the city, outside Old Quebec, even if it isn’t for Halloween.

PS: Many thanks to Stefi for organizing this trip and taking us on a fun weekend adventure!!

Chapter 5: It’s On Their Five Dollar Bill

2009-10-01T18:16:00.000-07:00

This Sunday, the 27^th, was the opening home game for the Montreal Juniors at the Verdun Auditorium. And to help us become more culturally immersed, Champlain bought us all tickets to the game. The hockey game, that is.

In America, football and baseball are pretty much the two big sports, depending on the time of year. In Canada, it’s hockey. Hockey is like football and baseball rolled into one; they sing the national anthem in the beginning like in baseball, but then the players beat each other up like in football. There’s an image of kids playing hockey on the Canadian 5$ bill for crying out loud. Although, as we learned in our Canadian Culture Through the Fine Arts class, the official national sport of Canada is actually the precursor to hockey, lacrosse. I betcha didn’t know that, did ya?

So, a whole bunch of us, if not all of us, went to the game on Sunday and I think it’s fair to say we all had a good time. I sat with some of my friends in one section, and others were assigned to a different section. Our teacher was in that other section and my friend Michaela said that during the game he explained about the history of the team, the players, and even what was going on in the game. The announcements were in French and English, but it was so loud in the auditorium that they could have all been in Greek. It really was loud in there, too. They passed out these inflatable noisemakers, music played whenever the game clock wasn’t running, and everyone was shouting or laughing or, when a fight broke out, hooting. Between periods (three periods in hockey) they entertained the audience with a brief game of what I called ‘Tiny Hockey’ where young players probably about eight years old came out onto the rink in over-sized jerseys and played a short game of their own. Very cute.

There were only two fights at our game since, as I was told, the college-level hockey community is trying to cut back on the amount of on-rink violence. The crowds love it, but it’s a matter of player safety. At our game, I almost couldn’t help but wonder if the fights weren’t somehow planned to liven things up.

The game had all the things one expects from a modern sports event. Young women with over-priced beer for sale, excited employees throwing rolled-up tee-shirts to equally excited spectators, blasts of catchy popular music and game music, a video projection on one wall, 1$ hotdogs, burgers, and poutine (fries in gravy with cheese – so good), and a big fuzzy mascot of a raccoon bouncing around the stands and posing for photos with little kids. I can’t help but wonder- did we learn this from them or did they learn it from us? I always thought sports events like this were an American tradition, but did it simultaneously develop in Canada? Or did they just learn it from us recently?

It was sort of an overcast day, but you’d never know it in the auditorium. The Montreal Juniors lost 3 – 1 to the visiting team, so the local fans were disappointed, but we Champlainers were just cheering for whoever had the puck.

Chapter 4: Spherical!!

2009-09-24T18:04:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-09-21T17:24:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-09-11T08:42:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-09-02T14:26:00.000-07:00

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.)