Thursday, September 09, 2004

BAD CHEVEUX DAY IN MONTRÉAL

I’m writing this from my hotel room in Montréal on a chilly, rainy night. All of the remnants of Hurricane Frances seem to have descended on points north of New York today, so I got to enjoy them all over again. Definitely a bad hair day.

The hotel is the Marriott Château Champlain, the very same hotel where She Who Must Be Obeyed and I kicked off our honeymoon a little over 27 years ago. Back then, Québec was in the throes of separatist fever, so Anglophones were treated with a certain level of disdain - especially if they were mistaken for Canadians. This is not the case today, at least in my brief experience.

The stop signs, of course, all say “Arrêt,” just as they did 27 years ago. According to my Montréalais expatriate buddy Irwin, there was a movement a while back to change them all to read “WWT” in order to give them that real Québecois flavor: Whoa, whoa, tabernac! But it never got through...

Visited a customer, then had a very pleasant dinner at a place called Med, the cuisine of which was simultaneously modern North American and Asian. Raw tuna, wasabi, the works. The grilled trout was superb. My dining companion was one of our Northeastern US sales reps, a guy whose voice and general demeanor places him somewhere in the cast of the Sopranos. A guy who knows where to find a good meal.

Gotta love this place. I’m a cartoony kind of guy, and there’s something delightfully perverse about watching Spongebob Squarepants, the Simpsons, and King of the Hill in Québecois French - perfect background noise while bloggin’ away and checking office e-mail.

Too bad this is such a short visit to this delightful (if moist) city. I’ll be up at the Butt-Crack of Dawn tomorrow to catch an early flight back home. Meanwhile, there’s a split of vin rouge and a honkin’ hunk of Brie calling my name - you better believe I’ll eat the whole damn thing before turning in (which I will be doing any minute now).

Bonne nuit, mes amis du monde de Blogosphère.

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