♥Montreal
Since I was able to travel on my own, I set out about Canada searching for the perfect city to call my home. For our one year anniversary, Shannon and I visited Montreal for the 25th anniversary of the jazz festival. We spent our time taking in the sights, enjoying the jazz festival and eating way too much gelato while feeding peanuts to squirrels. To us, just to be in Montreal was happiness. I felt more at home after a week in Montreal than where I had been born and raised my entire life.
We returned to Alberta, where the streets are paved with gold, battling with the idea of relocating to Quebec; away from our families, away from our friends and away from certain financial security. Everyone called us crazy – reasonably so as we couldn’t speak French and we didn’t have a real plan – but we just knew we had to get back there. After two years of deliberating, we sold everything we owned that didn’t fit inside our two suitcases and a carry-on and we hopped on a plane. The night we arrived, two years later, as we walked back up rue Prince Arthur and its crowded terraces, it was like we’d never left. We were home again. Permanently.
One of the many things that appealed to me is that Montreal is a food city – renowned for its bagels, smoked meat and poutine – though it is much, much more than that. It boasts a wide array of international cuisines with the second most restaurants per capita in the entire world. It covers the spectrum from mom and pop to complete pretentiousness. It has a fantastic farmer’s market. It has specialty import shops, some dedicated exclusively to everything from olive oil to mushrooms. The French culture is always apparent with local cheeses and local wine, the ability to buy rabbit, roux and duck confit in the supermarket.
Coming from a small town in northern Alberta, the seemingly endless choices of restaurants here was quite baffling at first. So was being able to buy a beer in a food court. The access to quality, fresh ingredients for affordable prices and not-so affordable specialty ingredients was like, to use a clichéd phrase, being a kid in a candy store. However, I quickly realized that not every restaurant would serve good food, that bad staff permeated even the most prestigious looking establishments and that finding the best produce would still be a never ending battle. But that’s part of the fun, the joie de vivre.