Canadian, Baked In - Part One
When I started this blog I came up with a list of ideas for posts. After just making a list of a bunch of different stuff I'm working on and/or interested in, I went through a load of my old photos and added groups of them to the list. I started off keeping track of what they were photos of and what I could talk about alongside them, but I got bored of that and started just listing the file names (so now a lot of my list looks something like:
34. Photos: 120974555_91f607886a_o 120977377_05f3ab0b9a_o 120977378_7ca7d5dff1_o 120977379_2bc5ff4cd9_o 120977380_3fd4125e15_o120977381_d10137912b_o
35. Photos:120977381_d10137912b_o 120983107_260ce23da3_o 120983108_17754df2bb_o 120983109_1007589089_o 120984527_32132244f6_o
which is, obviously, super helpful!). I decided to just pick one at random and see what I got.
After uni I spent a year in Canada (it's ace, go there!) and I lived in Montreal for the first couple of months. (I had a whole plan, I was going to work in the Montreal theatre scene and, in 5 months, earn enough money to buy a laptop, buy/rent a car and spend months 6 and 7 on a road trip to Toronto via New York, Boston, Chicago, Fargo, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Vancouver, but actually...) I couldn't speak French (mostly still can't) so the best work I could get was bussing glasses in a bar owned by a guy called Tony, who claimed he had been a session guitarist for WHAM! in the 80s. I never could verify that, but on Friday nights they did karaoke in the pub with a live band (his band) and he was capable of playing guitar. Needless to say the pay was shite and it was just enough to cover my rent and keep me in food, drink and drugs. But I did have a couple of good pals to show me around, and they liked their food so we ate a lot (highlights were Schwartz's Montreal Smoked Meat, Wilensky's Specials, the glory that is poutine, and 24 hour bakeries selling fresh Montreal bagels at a very drunken 4am).
I took these photos from the top of Mount Royal (a big hill that gave the city its name) when I went exploring with my flatmates. I seem to remember we walked up there to try and distract from the hangover, but there was definitely some chucking of snowballs, admiring tiny frozen waterfalls and a big cross that lights up at night (obviously I could add a load of interesting facts about Mount Royal, like it's made of Early Cretaceous rock, it's part of the Monteregian Hills or how it was used for a fire beacon by First Nations people in the area, but I'm not your Geography teacher, do your own fucking research!).