The tally:
Days in Montreal: 4
Bordellos spotted: 17 (conservative estimate)
Petitions to save the animals signed: 2
Bikes: enough to be comforting
Hippies: enough to be disconcerting in a good way
T-shirts that say "Harvard: The McGill of Canada": enough to be horribly, pretentiously annoying
Interesting people met: 100000000
Stupid people met: less than previous number but substantial
Times snubbed for being "anglo": about 3, so not too bad, and the bird is always an option
Beer: ever-present and absolutely unquantifiable
Times fought with McGill bureaucracy: about 678
Times beaten by McGill bureaucracy: about 678
Montreal is treating me well, on the whole. Entering a new social scene is always interesting - it's a bit like junior high, except without the horrible complexes. The city has a sort of vibe that I recognize from somewhere (probably home), and while frosh week has the vibe of silly-American-frat-drunken-sexual-debauchery that I always tended to avoid in my snobbery, the ebullience of youth is everpresent and thrilling. The joie de vivre is quite apparent - openair markets where the storeowners smoke blunts during cash transactions, the artsy types, the cafes, the film festivals... I have not yet managed to explore the whole city, clearly, but I'm looking forward to it. On the first night, I returned from a farewell dinner with family to a deserted dorm because everyone had gone to dinner as a house, so I found a girl in the same predicament and we grabbed a bottle of wine and wandered the streets in a sort of happy carefree mood.
The view of my dorm and Montreal from Mont Royal (not taken by me), which I ran up with a rather cool girl from Alaska.
