by maliajaffrani
Ô Canada!
Terre de nos aïeux,
Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux!
Just kidding, I don’t know shit about French; Google Translate is my holy grail. My friends and I decided to go to Montreal for our wonderful friend’s 20th birthday–but we were in for a treat. I personally think that Canada is out to get me.
I have always had a problem grasping that Canada exists. Canadian bacon? Canadian Geese? Poutine? Canadians? What is that? I thought it was like Italy–purely fiction.
Little did I realize I was wrong. Canada had a brutal karmic awakening.
Starting off driving into Montreal, it’s about 15°F and snowing. We were mesmerized by the fact that a man was smiling as he jogged down the icy road. We found a parking garage and walked out into the snow. BOY, there was snow. I was then-years-old when I realized Canadians like to live dangerously on edge. They don’t clear the pavement–there’s not even salt!
We spent five minutes outside the car, standing by the edge of a crosswalk only to get splashed by the most rancid black snow. It even got into our mouths–a taste I will never forget. JellyBelly Bean Boozled should start taking notes. We tried to get back into the parking garage but couldn’t get in without a code. We were locked out. We walked around the icy building twice to go inside and down into the Parking garage floor to get lost again. Finally stressed, we found a security guard who made a slightly misogynistic joke and scanned his card to contact us at the parking garage. We frolicked back to the car as we wiped off the slush.
After grabbing a chocolatine and waiting an hour for food, we finally had a lovely brunch. Then we strolled into a liquor store to stock up–tonight, we were going to party! We stopped to grab Lactaids because we didn’t trust ourselves. The cashier started gossiping in French before realizing we didn’t understand and were just nodding, smiling, and waving (like the Penguins of Madagascar).
Finally, we checked into the hotel and changed from our tired traveling clothes to stylish dinner/clubbing clothes and drove to L’Usine de Spaghetti. I had the worst time walking because of the cobblestone ground being slippery as fuck–I had to hold onto my friend as we both slipped and slid into the restaurant. I hit it off with a fantastic gin martini and the best pasta and chocolate cake of my life.
We Uber-ed to a speakeasy, unaware of how to get in until I saw a woman come out of a random door on the side of a building–that’s when I knew we were in the right place. We stayed for a while before finding a club. As we got there, we were lectured on staying together as we strolled into the bathroom and lost my friend as she walked outside. We raced up to her stall, yelling her name as a man came out and sassily yelled, “I’m not so-and-so!” with a hand on his hip. Come to find out, we were in a random gay bar with about 25 30-year-old men awkwardly shimmying and staring. I found out that my sister can shake her ass a little too much.
The overall experience was quite engaging as we got stuck in the snow, stalked by old men at a club, my sister woke up drunk and lost her phone, and finished the trip visiting the Barbie museum. We didn’t even have to stop for my sister to yak out the window!