Montreal!

you want people to avoid coming to your city with all of the fervor of someone who has lived here for approximately 4 years. it is impressive

can't believe people are now building their own artisan-quality tent-like structures instead of just buying tents

googling "north of the tracks" "montreal", looking for airbnbs in villeray

thinking about sour beers

the best part is that fields of salmon posts like an angry old man and we’re youth wandering around doing youthful distasteful things and he’s like a year older than me at most

Fields, which part of Montreal you from?

I have never heard anyone refering to any place as ‘north of the train tracks’ in my 20 years here. Which train tracks? There are 3 tracks that go east-west across the island.

Maybe this whole time Fields was a senior living in VMR who sure hates the sight of youngsters hanging around Canora station.

I assume he's referring to Mile Ex.

xp

"do you have any sour beers" is usually my first question on entering any soi-disant craft beer pub. i won't come to montreal

Ask if they have 'de la bière sûre' and fields of salmon will have no choice but to relent.

having read his posts itt i'm genuinely concerned fields of salmon might be a member of gy!be

I doubt a member of gy!be would live in the plateau during the peak horribleness years.

going to be wandering progressively north on the plateau next week hollering about sour beers fyi

i had a sour beer when i was in montreal.

doing the thing i do where i think about moving to montreal after visiting it but then definitely not doing that

relatable

you both live in p terrible cities, should probably do it imho

Which sour beer, Jim?

was at dieu du ciel, was a wheat, sour cherry type deal iirc.

xp. flopson you were liking vancouver a year ago lol

Ha dope! Dieu du Ciel is still undefeated after all these years imo.

i'm back to liking it again actually. but i feel like i'm always one friendship/relationship away from the threshold of being unbearably lonely and socially alienated. it's one of the worst places imaginable to be depressed in

other than nature and east asian restaurants (which admittedly i place a large weight on) vancouver is pretty terrible on the merits. people are boring and dumb (ON AVERAGE... but east coasters' stereotype of west coast is not entirely inaccurate imho), have bad fashion sense, not outgoing at all, very little communal public social life, the music scenes are mostly collections of isolated groups of friends with 9-to-5s, cool underground parties instantly get discovered by irish and australian bros on work visas, no good grocery stores, no good museums or galleries, super weird layout where the few good neighbourhoods are really far apart, zoning is way too sparse and residential, bizarre pervasive local ideology that's a mix of dumb mystical bullshit like astrology and these confusing rhetorical references to indigenous politics (everyone here loves to preempt everything they say with 'i recognize that i am a white-supremacist genocidal colonizer') that have no actual political substance and are more like a new-age self-help thing(?), housing crisis that no one is doing anything to fix and even many leftists/progressive blame on 'chinese foreign money' or 'developers'

if i weren't doing my phd here i wouldn't stay. having said that, it's a lovely place to do a phd in; a cozy, small, quiet city that's not too full of distraction. ubc and my department especially are fantastic. and i actually get the appeal for a glaswegian bc my great-grandfather moved here from there (after getting destroyed by winters in montreal and winnipeg) in like the 1910s or whatever because he liked the weather

I'm a big fan of Station Ho.st.

bizarre pervasive local ideology that's a mix of dumb mystical bullshit like astrology and these confusing rhetorical references to indigenous politics (everyone here loves to preempt everything they say with 'i recognize that i am a white-supremacist genocidal colonizer') that have no actual political substance and are more like a new-age self-help thing(?)

It’s the same in the anglo community in Petite Patrie/Mile End/Parc Ex/PSC/St Henri too, fwiw.

One of the many reasons I struggle in 100% anglo settings tbh.

xp i mean that ideology transcends space but it's nowhere near as bad in mtl as in vancouver

the mtl music scene is more "pc" perhaps but also has way more queer and poc people, and also way better bands and parties. the vancouver music scene is either unpolitical weird bougie shit like house djs pairing up with overpriced tapas restaurants to cater a 30$ party that sells out in advance, or like a weird high school dynamics version of pc/call-out culture, like this one person who runs a popular underground venue space banned their ex from the venue (and his whole band had to leave their jamspace!) bc he started seeing someone else a couple months after they broke up

Yeah, I trust it is more pervasive in Vancouver, in Montreal you can still have many english speaking friends who don't subscribe to these ideologies.

I was going to say that IME the ideology you described above is mainly the one of white people with fine art degrees/musicians. Montreal is large and diverse enough that you can have a great social life in media/art while almost being able to ignore those type of people.

it's every demographic here. i went to church once and the minister started his lecture by acknowledging that he was a genocidal colonizer and asked everyone to say it back lmao. and then the sermon was some vague shit abt how we should listen to indigenous stories but not tell them to each other

i think indigenous sov is super impt and there are good things about the way they're foregrounded here, and i even like some of the more symbolic stuff like land acknowledgements. but a lot of the discourse around it is v weird and often avoids political subtance & is kinda otherizing or wtv

i once pressed a friend who is particularly egregious w this stuff and they told me that canada should cede all power to indigenous leaders so that they can implement eco-socialism. which, i mean that sounds fine to me if it were to happen, but just goes to show how little that ideology thinks through the political tensions involved (incl within indigenous communities)

oh sure, make the indigenous people do all the governing for you, as if their lives haven't been negatively affected enough already

Not the biggest fan of pulling on the first come first serve land sovereignty thread; but really yes, dealing with those white progressive communities is often navigating signal virtuousness waters.

Also I have a problem with calling yourself a genocidal colonizers when you never participated in institutions that programmed and executed the colonial genocide.

ya i have a bit of weird feelings about like, calling my grandmother, who moved here fleeing the holocaust and lived as a poor immigrant for decades, a genocidal colonizer

bizarre pervasive local ideology that's a mix of dumb mystical bullshit like astrology and these confusing rhetorical references to indigenous politics (everyone here loves to preempt everything they say with 'i recognize that i am a white-supremacist genocidal colonizer') that have no actual political substance and are more like a new-age self-help thing(?)

ha, this is so true.

lot of people playing "I'm a bougie white person with vaguely "left" neoliberal identity politics how do i express my political beliefs in a the most woo woo way in a manner that conforms to what i imagine POC and indigenous people's interests are?" (oh btw my friend group is 100% white - barring the odd rich canadian of east asian descent)

i used to be vegan and i would get criticized for this being racist and classist by rich white people

oh yeah sorry for derailing the montreal thread obv.

back to montreal: that gnocchi place next to fairmount bagels is so fucking good

I wish I could afford restaurants seriously.

sending jim out to scout locations a few weeks before I visit somewhere next time instead of a couple months after

I mean, I don't regret the multiple portuguese chicken and poutine meals I ate on the cheap, but..

the gnocchi place is called drogheria fine and it sells one thing - gnocchi in calabrian tomato sauce - it costs $5 and is filling enough to have for lunch. it is $1 extra if you want extra pecorino romano on it

worth the drive from Toronto? (i love gnocchi)

that's one hell of a drive but if you generally like montreal and spending time there then why not

the train is an option but spoiler: you can't really see the lake, it's mostly trees the whole way

yeah it's not a very picturesque journey

i think it is! taken it there and back a few times.

isn’t the gnocchi place on beaubien better? or is that the same business that moved?

imo it's not a real montreal recommendation if someone doesn't immediately tell you about the better place that's a few blocks away

I've sometimes, after having a meal I really liked, mumbled "oh I had a sandwich nbd" if someone has asked me where I ate lunch, so as to not get sidetracked into where I should have eaten

xp. iirc this place has been there for years (like i think it was there last time i visited like 5 years or so ago)

Van Horn Street
Posted: October 3, 2019 at 15:10:57
I wish I could afford restaurants seriously.

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