A couple of weeks ago I went to Montreal for a conference with the Canadian Association for Applied Linguistics. It was a fantastic opportunity to see what research is being done and visit a great city.
The conference was held at Concordia University - an English speaking university located right downtown. I attended a number of great seminars about vocabulary acquisition and corrective feedback. Don't worry, I won't bore you with the details. My colleaugue, Geoff Pinchbeck and I presented a poster describing the iEAP program. It was a good chance to share our work and research with other people.
I was staying right downtown and only a few blocks from the university. All around my hotel there were great places to eat and drink. I ate so much while in Montreal! The restaurants in Montreal are fantastic and diverse, the service is great and the prices are reasonable. I ate at two different Mexican restaurants (my favourite was Burritoville, which wasn't very authentic, but was vegetarian and delicious), Reuban's (famous for its smoked meat), Mazurka's (home cooked Polish food), Fairmont Bagels, St. Viateur Bagels, a tapas restaurant, a sushi bar and more. We also discovered great beverages - I had beautiful latte that was so thick that the stir stick stood up in it. There are also great microbreweries in Montreal - I tried beer with hibiscus, beets, green tea and honey - not all in the same glass, though!
After months of preparing the iEAP program I have been thinking and reading a lot about cities and its a really interesting topic. This has opened my eyes and made me notice so many little things that make a city more liveable and enjoyable. Montreal is designed in a very different way from Calgary. It is much denser and so places are easy to get to without a car. I walked or took the bus or metro everywhere. They also have a great new program (called Bixi) that allows people to "rent" a bike from drop off locations all over the city for just $5. I saw lots of people on bikes since it is a pretty easy city for cycling. Montreal also has a lot of public space - many patios and terraces - even the houses tend to have stoops out front where people gather together to spend time and watch the world go by.
So Montreal is a fantastic city and I would love to live there. My mother's family is from Montreal and that is where she grew up and I spent my summers and so I feel comfortable and happy there. But as one of the other conference goers told me: there are no jobs in Montreal, there are no jobs in Montreal, there are no jobs... So I guess I have to just keep repeating that to myself every time I find myself bored of Calgary.
