Tidbits From the World

I’m back in Montreal since last month already.

I missed this view of Downtown Montreal from the Mount Royal.

As a ritual, I got a poutine in the first few days after my return. This time I was with tourist friends from France, among them, Florence, who also lived in China.

Walking around downtown, I saw that Montreal hasn’t changed much since my departure. The same streets are being repaired.

I quickly readapted to the North American lifestyle.

Compared to China, the sidewalks here are narrower and empty. One can look in all directions, in the middle of the afternoon, without ever seeing one single human being! (In China, at anytime, including at night, and in the countryside, there will always be, at the very least, a few people).

Pure air, nature, trees…

Water, wind, one million dollar villas…

But I still miss China and its flamboyant artists, with their vivid, dyed blond hair, their lens-less, thick-framed glasses, their pink Converse, their pants with strange patterns that don’t suit the rest of their clothes, who sing in a strange mix of Engrish and Chinese. Yes I do miss them, and I want to go back and see them perform live.

I miss the people too. Everywhere you go in China there is someone to be seen, there is bustling activity at anytime, nearly anywhere, even in the countryside. Conversely, in Quebec, there’s nobody. It’s dead. Past 10pm you won’t see anyone in downtown Montreal. Two extreme opposites.

I left Ying behind me… and that is what I miss most of China.

And friends.

I left my dirty apartment on Zhuque Avenue. On this picture, I had left the window open for a few days only and so was the result: a thick layer of dust on the walls, floor and furniture, all in a misty environment, covered in a perpetual thick smog… Really, those Montreal “smog alerts” sound ridiculous to me now!

Chinglish…

Please follow the usher or duty manager.
Duty manager will arrange those who have
the older, children or the deformities in by priority.
DO HAVE A GOOD TIME IN PIZZA HUT

In Montreal there is not really any Chinglish to be seen. Some Franglish can be seen but they are a little less obvious or funny. However, here and anywhere in the West, you see the opposite phenomenon: “Engnese” or “Frannese”… in short, mangled, meaningless Chinese tattoos.

Sometimes, it’s just a translitteration of a name. I guessed someone I saw in the metro was named “Ghislain”, because he had it tattooed in Chinese on his leg. In this case, on the picture above, I don’t know what it is. “Xingshengmeng” (hsingshengmeng). It doesn’t sound like a name…

If you break down this tattoo, you get 星: star ; 生: be born, create ; 夢: dream. One could try to interpret this riddle in a thousand ways!

On my Beijing-Toronto flight, two Chinese children were sitting beside me. I originally thought they were Canadians coming back from vacations visiting their family in China. But in the end I realized it was quite the opposite: they were growing up in Shenzhen, while their parents were immigrating in Canada. We spoke Chinese during the whole flight. And when we were close to landing, one flight attendant, a Torontonian of Chinese origin complimented me on my Chinese. Well, in general, you only need to say “ni hao” to get congratulations. But this time it seemed really sincere.

When we got the Canadian immigration papers, the customs declaration card, a senior Chinese woman asked me to help her fill her form out. She couldn’t understand the questions in English or in French. So I read each question one by one, and she had a funny reaction when I translated to her the last question: “Have you been on a farm in a country other than Canada in the last 14 days?” half surprised, hald shocked she replied “no! I’m from the city! I am not a peasant!”

Notice to prospective buyers: huge, three-storied house to sell in the Laurentians. Needs a lot of repair. Price around C$ 300,000.

Here’s someone who is contemplating his new house.

Lots of repairs and renovations to be done here. I could take the same picture in six months and see the difference. Before and After.

The Quebec French (or Canadian French in general) dialect, language or regional variation, whatever you decide to call it, is one of the only languages whose swearwords are almost exclusively religious terms. Here are some of them that pop out of my mind:

Hostie (host, wafer), tabarnak (tabernacle), calice, Moses, Christ, sacrament, baptême (baptism), …

Some of these expressions can be used as verbs or pronominal verbs, such as: (se) calicer, (se) crisser, (se) sacrer,… (“se” being the mark of pronominal verbs in French) Each one of these words has its own set of meanings and nuances.

Quebec nationalistic posters pasted on outside walls are not rare.

An Acadian flag. The Acadians are a French-speaking minority that nowadays mostly inhabit the province of New Brunswick as well as some communities in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Louisiana.

Another example of nationalism.

Let’s see some entertainment. Here musicians are practicing for their concert in a park.

An acrobat is rehearsing his performance.

A serial lover is preying on his next game.

A faux Jimi Hendrix is playing music…

Unfortunately nobody is listening.

Two days of sustained torrential rain followed a long week of scorching hot temperatures.

Well, that’s summer in Xi’an. One day, very hot and humid, and the other day, refreshing torrential rain.

I’ve had this project in mind for a long time already… to take pictures while holding an umbrella, which gives the viewer a feeling of being inside the photo, under the rain, breathing the cold, damp air.

Getting off an overhead bridge.

My two year studies in China are now finally over. I will report on this later, when I am back in Montreal. One of the things I will miss most from my life in China is the diversity of people I met here. They were Brazilians, Russians, Ecuadorians, Italians, French, Americans, Australians, Canadians and, obviously, Chinese.

One of the most interesting phenomena that I experienced here was with the Latin students, those whose language belongs to the Latin languages family (e.g. French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese). We could manage to understand each other by using some sort of bastardized form of Spanish, more or less so, depending on the Spanish level of the speaker. Each one would speak Spanish, adding some words from their own native language into it. For instance, Daniele, an Italian, would always say “troppo” (too much) and “ancora” (again; still) instead of the proper Spanish words “demasiado” and “todavía“. But for a French speaker as myself, I could easily pick up those words as they sounded and looked like their French counterparts (“trop” and “encore“). Besides, when talking to him I would use the French word “demain” (tomorrow) instead of Spanish “mañana“, because it sounded more like the Italian “domani“. While the Brazilians would use a more correct Spanish, they would still make some substitutions, for example, the articles “el” and “la” (the) would often be rendered “o” and “a“, as in Portuguese. Sometimes we would even directly speak in our mother tongues and understand each other. (But unfortunately, even if French words look the same as other Latin words when written, they are pronounced so differently that it made French the most difficult language to understand in our group). We made our own pidgin, that is a simple dialect; the first step towards creole. I think that if we were all lost on a remote island, our pidgin would become, after a few years or generations, a full fledged language!

China is going through a phase of rapid changes… you hear about it in all the media, in newspapers, on the Internet, everywhere. Here are some of the pictures that I took in my first escapade around my neighborhood since I came back in China. A lot of skyscrapers are under construction and some buildings have been completed already. You can be the judge of China’s transformation, is it for better or for worse?

Behind this blue fence is a new neighborhood under construction. (A complete neighborhood being built at the same time!)  I visited it about six months ago, however without publishing the photos that I took there. I will try to find them back and post them here.

Real-estate investors are going to visit the neighborhood.

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