Recyclage

Recycling is a pretty great thing. I need to see a segment on CBS Sunday Morning (man do I miss that!) that explains the whole process. All I really know is what follows:

1) I buy food and domestic products and when they’re used up, I rinse out the containers and put them in the big green bin.
2) Bo brings them out to the curb on Monday nights.
3) Starting at about 5:00 am (or maybe sooner, but I am just sleeping more heavily,) a series of people walk up and down the street picking through the recycling bins, presumably searching for consignment bottles.
4) At around 7:30 am the big trucks come slowly down the street, the sounds of their heavy-duty motors and brakes are joined by the clanking of breaking glass as the bins are emptied into the trucks. The bins are tossed back to the curb.
5) At around 9:00 am the truck comes back to do the other side of the street after having woven its way through the web of one-way avenues.
6) For the next hour or so, these sounds become more and more faint as the truck travels further and further.
7) At some point we retrieve our bins from the curb and put them back in their rightful places, where they wait ready for the next cereal box or juice bottle.
8) I’m missing from step 8 to approximately 100, I think. I could presume that the trucks go to a “facility” where the items are sorted and smashed and crunched and melted and heated etc.
101) As I shop I notice packaging made from recycled materials…and I buy them.
102) See #1…that’s why it’s called re-“cycle”

I’d be interested in filling in some of the gaps. I don’t need to know every single little detail. Like I said, a segment on a morning show where for example a cute little green Heineken bottle is followed from its birth through the consumption of its precious contents to the green bin to the truck, and then the rest! That would be interesting.

Maybe if I knew more about the process, I’d know the answers to some of my questions like…
--How small is too small when recycling a piece of aluminum foil, does it eventually become cost prohibitive? Same question for bottle caps, both metal and plastic.
--Which is better for the environment…paper or plastic bags at the grocery store? I should add that Montreal supermarkets are ahead of the game in selling affordable, functional, and dare I say fashionable reusable shopping bags for $1 each. My problem is that I can’t seem to remember to bring them with me to the grocery store, partially because I often use them for other purposes. We do reuse a lot of the plastic bags from the grocery store for garbage bags, but many tear just from the contents of the groceries so that they are no longer easily reusable.

Ahh, so many things to learn! It isn't easy trying to be green!

Freewheelin' in Montréal

My mother in law recently gave me her bicycle, which she hadn’t used in years (Merci belle-maman!). The last time I rode a bike was in 1994. Bo has been excited for me to get a bicycle so I can join him on little journeys without the wear and tear on my joints of hiking and even walking around in the city. (Years and years of volleyball and other factors have made me somewhat suddenly “weak in the knees”).

The day after we got it Bo suggested a ride to a “nearby” shopping mall. “It’s only 45 minutes by bike.” 45 MINUTES! I told him he was crazy. I hadn’t even straddled a bike in 13 years and he thought I was just going to be able to hop on for a little jaunt of three-quarters of an hour through the city! I did take the bike to a local asphalt schoolyard and tooled around a bit to get my bearings. The seat needs some adjustments and perhaps replacement, but it turns out that riding a bike after 13 years is well, just like riding a bike!

I’m not overly enthusiastic about riding my bike on the city streets. I’m still getting used to walking the city streets and I see some crazy stuff out there where the cars and bicycles are sharing the road. And I don’t intend to ride my bike on the sidewalk unless I see an extreme need. Bo’s parents also gave us a bike rack for my car, so I’m much more inclined (once the seat situation is resolved), to take the bike to different parks where there are long flat trails shared by bicycles, non-motorized people (and dogs…). The Parc Maisonneuve is not too far from where we live and along the shores of the St. Lawrence River, there are many such parks to explore.

This brings me to the question of cycling attire. The bike Bo’s mom passed on to me is a “women’s bike,” meaning of course that it lacks the highest bar that crosses horizontally on a men’s frame. Seeing it made us wonder why we need two different styles of bike in this day and age and wouldn’t it be simpler to just make one kind of universal frame? Well of course, the missing bar was to accommodate women in skirts right?

Next question…why would a woman today ride a bike in a skirt? Well they do! Everywhere! Women in short, medium, long, flowing, tight and loose skirts are riding bikes all over the city of Montréal. I suppose the long flowing hippy granola bike-riding women are fine. But the short skirts and dresses I see make me scratch my head and go “hmmm?” Of course I never point them out to Bo because I don’t want him to start noticing!

Same goes for the low cut shirts. Now, I've always been sort of modest when it comes to my fashion choices, but when did bicycle-riding women become so provocative? I see cleavage galore on these women and sometimes on other more athletically dressed women who apparently never took the time to stand in front of a mirror and ask themselves “wait, when I lean forward on my bike, am I hanging out of this top?”

So when you see a blond ponytail sticking out of a shiny new red bicycle helmet on a sweatpants-and-turtleneck-wearing woman who is wobbling warily in the bike lane, that’ll be me. You can wave hello, but I may be too freaked-out nervous to notice you, sorry.

You are here.

So, folks have been asking me to post some photos. I don't have enough blogging experience to do this well, and I don't carry around enough extra batteries for my camera to do this often. But I'll be working on fixing that.

This is a picture of downtown Montréal taken last summer from the top of the Mont Royal, the highest point in Montréal. I've been there in the winter too, but I'll save sharing those photos for a colder day.

The other day my beau, I'll call him "Bo," and I went to Vieux (old) Montréal as tourists. We went to the museum of archeology and history at Pointe à Callière and both of us learned a lot: me from reading every single little label of every artifact and Bo from talking at length to two different museum guides, leaving me with plenty of time to read all of the labels.

We saw ruins and artifacts dating from the 1300's (but mostly from the 1600's and 1800's) through this century. They had some cool "multimedia" displays without an excess of lights, bells and whistles, and one in particular with a "you are here" red dot that showed you what your surroundings would look like at certain points in history. It was moving to be standing in the spot where the city of Montréal was founded. I had a similar feeling to when I visited my first cathedral as a college student in Europe, the Strasbourg Cathedral. It was the feeling of being a part of the history of the future and of the weight of all the footsteps that had passed in that very place before mine.

It would be nice to feel that way more often, in my daily life, to think about the people who rented this apartment before me dating back to the 1930's, for example. Bo and I were walking on a nearby shopping street and we paused to notice the facade of a church that we can see from our apartment. We were talking about how the combining of parishes had changed the church's name over the years. Just then a woman, who told us she was 86, joined our conversation as she rested her cane against a nearby bench and sat down. She had been baptized in a church on the same site some years before the current building was built in 1931. She has lived in Rosemont, the neighborhood of Montréal where we live, her whole life. To me, after only two weeks of living here, I find my view of that church from our apartment to be something special...and it is.

8 Random Facts

Shabbydoll, my dear friend and inspirational blog mentor from afar tagged me…I am therefore, according to the laws of blogosphere, obligated to tell you 8 random facts about myself. Hope you’re entertained! (Shabbydoll—your #6 blew my mind!)

1) I am a total snob about chocolate, beer, and bagels (among other things). Only the best for Bijou.

2) As you will see, I am somewhat less of a snob about movies…I’m proud to admit that I own Grease and Grease 2 on VHS. (Believe it or not, I own Kingpin on VHS and DVD—ahem, not so proud!)

3) Again with the movie theme, I can just about recite Grease, Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club by heart along with my favorite onscreen characters!

4) Moving violations: I was pulled over for speeding three times in the last twelve months and once for a blown out headlight, and although all the charges were reduced or cleared, I paid almost $400 in fines. I haven’t had a year like that since 1993. Just call me "Leadfoot"...

5) I can tie a cherry stem in a knot with my tongue. Great party trick, until you’ve seen it a thousand times.

6) I LOVE “Secret Santa” gift giving at work. My last job didn’t have it and that gave me the blues.

7) I have six holes pierced in my ears: four in the left and two in the right. I’m not sure why.

8) Similarly, I have a tattoo that only goes half-way around my left ankle. Did I think that being asymmetrical would make me cool or non-conformist or something? (No, just cock-eyed actually, but this could explain why I keep walking in circles…)

I’m tagging whitneyarlene and dougfine. Go get ‘em!

Cat Ladies

So, I am now living in Canada!

My cat made it too. My cat, who I now often refer to as Houdini, was the central missing character in a typical moving day crisis. Chico, his real name, found an unfindable hiding spot somewhere in my house, where he stayed for about 12 hours! In the meantime, I had assumed he had gotten out because all of the doors were open for hours. The crisis reached its peak during a nasty thunderstorm where I was left crying and thinking that I must be the worst pet owner ever after letting this happen to my poor "defenseless, never-been-outside-before" cat.

To make things worse, my neighbor came over to warn me about a vicious grey fox he had seen in the area. He was wielding a baseball bat to defend himself en route. Thank goodness I still had my internet connection because I promptly googled grey foxes and found that neither humans, nor cats were likely prey.

Chico finally showed himself, dirty and stressed (wait--was that him or me?) at around 11 pm.

The rest of the moving experience went smoothly. My worldly goods are now in storage waiting for a visa to set them free...

Chico was again a concern when I crossed the border. Even though I had crossed the Canadian border many times before with a cat, I figured that this would ironically be the time that it was not OK. So armed with his papers from a recent trip to the vet I went ahead, bumper to bumper as usual.

Just my luck, "la douanière" was a purple eye-shadow wearing, cat-loving woman! She proceeded to tell me at length about her five cats and their roles in her and each other's lives and eventually said "OK, have a nice day..." That was basically it! Chico's reluctant presence definitely made the last leg of the journey a pleasure.

Unfortunately Chico has done little more than hide behind the washing machine since, but he'll come around. Like me, he's getting used to the new noises of city living.

Bienvenue!

Welcome to my new blog.

I am moving to Montreal in a few days and I have decided to chronicle some of the happenings of my "new" life. These happenings may be funny (weird and ha-ha), interesting, cultural, linguistic and much, much more.

My new life also includes a new (and first) marriage (my husband is a native of the Quebec City region), a new job, and downsizing from a house I owned in NY state to a rental apartment.

My cat is moving with me too. (He doesn't speak French, but I do.)