Montreal!

shameful

although I visited one or the other multiple times and kept saying "oh yeah, I should go to both, it's like a two hour bus trip" and never did

i have a hare-brained notion to move to montreal but i have no idea how i would make ends meet speaking zero french

get a corporate office job

When we were just there, most people spoke English, or at least enough. If you live there, I assume you will approach it from the reverse, and learn a little French.

Amusingly, we met a couple of French immigrants, and they said they struggled with Montreal French.

get a corporate office job

― flopson, Tuesday, September 19, 2017 3:22 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i do nonsense low-level office clerk work would that be an option?

9-5 job prospects for unilingual anglophones is definitely poor. this is a city where 90% of the industry is in french.
it is why most unilingual anglos who stick around do freelancey kind of work.

there are jobs - keep your eye on job boards for McGill and Concordia, Reader's Digest, Bookmark, etc, or i guess for big pharma or something - but this is definitely not a great place to be a unilingual professional seeking work at a large company/org

mile end near st laurent & bernard iirc

― mh, Tuesday, September 19, 2017 8:43 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ok yes this checks out. i remember
that the pharmacie esperanza i mentioned here was a couple of blocks away from r's place.

now drinking at dieu de ciel! A+

*du

xposts. ah, thanks sean. i thought as much. ah, well, i can always visit.

have drank at dieu du ciel, very good, would drink again

i do nonsense low-level office clerk work would that be an option?

― -_- (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, September 19, 2017 6:34 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yup

sean is talking literary/media jobs i believe. if u just want to work in an anglophone office in an industrial park in Ville St-Laurent there are a dozen-or-so of those

not to mention if you do move there and only speak english you're essentially moving to a small town

nah that's not true. i am bilingual but only hung out with anglos, didn't feel small relative to vancouver where i live now that is entirely english. actually vancouver feels smaller, in terms of like social scene. the thing is that bilingual people don't mind speaking the language a unilingual speaks, so the real two solitudes is unilingual anglos and francos, each of which are very very small minorities

i would be planning to learn french obv btw. i am good at languages and so i think i could learn enough idiomatic french to "get by" but obviously to reach the kind of fluency and literacy that are required in the clerical jobs i do would take me years and i wouldn't have that long to become employable.

anyway thank you for your input and i will stop my derail of the thread now :)

You can actually get paid about $550/month to learn French here:
https://www.immigration-quebec.gouv.qc.ca/en/french-language/learning-quebec/full-time/index.html

i mention this because montreal is the best and more people should move here! it's so much cheaper than toronto or vancouver. yes, it's hard to scale the corporate ladder - but there are still lots of opportunities, especially if you put in effort.

there are jobs - keep your eye on job boards for McGill and Concordia, Reader's Digest, Bookmark, etc, or i guess for big pharma or something - but this is definitely not a great place to be a unilingual professional seeking work at a large company/org

Maybe, but it's more complicated than that. In a certain segment of large companies (tech, financial, services) there are a significant number of unilingual anglophones above a certain seniority threshold. I've met many unilingual anglophone senior manager and corporate executive types, some are the flown-in-from-Toronto variety, some are the married-a-local variety, and some are the I'm-still-here variety (chiefly older West Island types). There are also significant numbers of unilingual West Island types in sales (often Montreal companies sell mainly into the US, so French is a non-issue for their sales reps) as well as various technical, back-office, and admin/clerical jobs. But yeah, there's a big chunk of middle-earners for whom bilingualism is absolutely necessary (this goes for native French-speakers as well).

In the tech sector the percentage of unilingual anglophones is significantly higher at all levels. Anyone who is new to Montreal and doesn't speak French would do well to try to get a job at a tech company. (If you have tech skills, all the better, if you don't you can still aim for sales, customer service, or various administrative roles). Some companies will have an ostensible glass ceiling as the language of management is French, but there's not much you can do about that.

Of course now that I think about it "unilingual anglophone" is a bit of a red herring in this context since the majority of workers at Montreal companies I'm familiar with who speak English and not French tend to also speak one or two other languages... but only have minimal French fluency. I've met tons of Concordia graduates who stayed on and other recently immigrated folks who speak Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish, Punjabi, Romanian, Ukrainian, or Korean... and in many cases several languages. Mexican, Chilean, and Colombian colleagues have tended to take to French quite easily, as have the Romanians (where I believe Romania still has Francophonie status and French is a primary language of instruction), but not everybody finds it so easy or has the time to make it a priority. In the end I've been in many meetings where functional, okay-ish English is the basic standard everyone tries to meet, almost nobody speaks French, and you're more likely to hear colleagues have a side conversation in some third language than either of the so-called "Canadian" languages.

I'm sure it can be discouraging to hunt for a job and I've seen several "unilingual anglophones" (in this context I think we just say it means "people from elsewhere in Canada") stagnate in Montreal, burning themselves out on low-paying jobs beneath their ability simply because they feared another job hunt. But it's not impossible by any stretch of the imagination. Once you got a line on your CV that says you've worked at a Montreal company, your second job search gets easier. And chances are you'll have made some friends. Montreal is tremendously informal in the sense that small to medium companies often hire their friends instead of going through a formal process (although later on, this tends to have an altogether different effect on the workplace, more on which another time).

It's the West Islanders who don't speak French that give me the creeps.

PS, my advice is to forget applying at the English universities. They are the most "closed" shops in the city.

Cool

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DSGL8YoW4AEaZT5.jpg

Extreme Cold Warning for Quebec
Active for next 11 hours · Environment Canada
This alert has been updated.
Posted 5 hours ago
Cold Arctic air has arrived over the province of Quebec. This very cold air mass combined with brisk winds will give extreme wind chill of minus 38 to minus 44 over western and Central Quebec tonight and Thursday morning.

###

Extreme cold warnings are issued when very cold temperatures or wind chill creates an elevated risk to health such as frost bite and hypothermia.

It ain't good.

On the origins and consequences of the destruction of architecture and urbanism, the suburban sprawl in Montreal:

https://watch.cbc.ca/media/media/absolutely-canadian/cities-held-hostage/38e815a-00ce3ab4178

Unavailable to those outside Canada

only one solution. I've gotta go to Canada to watch it!

It’s super interesting + depressing. Definitely worth coming to Montreal to watch in a Mutek-hangover haze in yr plateau airbnb as the gentrification implodes around you.

Please don't come to Montreal. If you do, stay in a properly zoned hotel downtown. Please don't come to my local and ask for sangria by the glass or ask "do you have any sour beers." Don't go to Mutek, don't come near me, stay the fuck away from the Jean-Talon market or I'll fucking hit you.

someone hasn't been reading any of my posts ever

I was the one who introduced sour beers to montreal

You fucking parasite, you must leave

i'm in des moines

you can sleep peacefully for now, although my recent decision to concentrate on a different destination... well, spite is a motivator, salmon person

Fields of salmon speaks for himself/herself.

yeah heck that dude you can stay in my roommates room he's on vacation and hasn't paid me rent in 3 months

I'll be visiting for Labor Day weekend!!! It's been way too long.

I thought about going for the aforementioned festival again but opted against it because, idk, I just need some unstructured time to do absolutely nothing and loaf away from town. How long's your roommate on vacay, Will? :)

Unstructured time to do absolutely nothing should be guaranteed by society.

Please don't come to Montreal. If you do, stay in a properly zoned hotel downtown. Please don't come to my local and ask for sangria by the glass or ask "do you have any sour beers." Don't go to Mutek, don't come near me, stay the fuck away from the Jean-Talon market or I'll fucking hit you.

― fields of salmon, Thursday, August 9, 2018 7:39 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uh

spent almost 2 months in mtl this summer and had the time of my life. best city i've ever been to or lived in hands down

i still like vancouver but i would give anything to move back, except for dropping out of my program lol

You are always welcome back!

Especially right before the elections to make sure nationalist identitarian can’t win!

thanks. i'll do my best to return :)

I thought about going for the aforementioned festival again but opted against it because, idk, I just need some unstructured time to do absolutely nothing and loaf away from town. How long's your roommate on vacay, Will? :)

― mh, Friday, August 10, 2018 3:45 PM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha i think until the end of august? idk he's been cagey about it (this is the thread where i complain about my roomie now apparently lol, v montreal)

Please continue to avoid Montreal during peak times. For booking your visits, consider November, a month in which your visit will be considered respectful, rather than simply being another piece of clutter in a world already dying because of plastic that can't break down in the ocean. Don't like dolphins? Got it.

Someone other than fields of salmon : what's the earliest in the year I can go to Montreal and it be pleasant out? Wikipedia seems to suggest June

The end of May is usually quite pleasant, though two years ago it snowed on May 6 so June makes sense as an absolutely safe bet.

yeah june is the safe bet

Thank you

Have you tried a sour beer? Have you trieeeed a soooooour beeeer? You should look for them. They're apparently really critical recently, so you should ask people who are working to earn university degrees that you already have or are earning about sour beers! Good luck!

Do you have any sour beers

I'm more a natural wine guy