Montreal – few early days

I may sound childish writing this, but for me things I experience for first time in life makes me feel child. There is so much to see and know. That’s why they say Life is a journey. If you are stuck at one place you are more dead than alive. Make a promise to yourself to visit a new place at least every year, but that will make only 40 new places for an average Indian life span if I start now. Doesn’t that sound small? But think in last 10 years or so how many places have you visited. Visiting 40 countries will be a good goal. Two done, 38 more to go, New Zealand I am coming Ha ha ha.

I was just watching “So you think you can Dance Canada”. Dancing is so amazing. I want to learn that too. But then I stop and think should I learn everything I see and like? No I should just do it. I don’t want to learn for whole life, I want to use what I learn sometime in life and teach others. I want to experience my learning. By saying this I am breaking the saying “You learn to live and live to learn”. Enough philosophy, now I will share Montreal as it stands for me today.

Geography: The Montreal district is an Island which is surrounded by the Saint Lawrence River. There is French and English part of Montreal the east and west. English part is rich and French is poorer in comparison. Fall is very beautiful here. Each and every leaf changes the color. This is because of the sudden fall in the temperature from summer to winter and lack of sunlight. The maple leafs turn red.

People: They are good. French are supposed to be aggressive but not here, it’s different. They seem to have lot of patience. I didn’t find any time that they were in hurry or so. While crossing even the small roads, cars will stop for you to cross even if they see that you have already stopped for the car. That’s something no one does in India. Its seems it’s in the culture here.
They hate America, its same everywhere. That why they same the more powerful you are the more people will hate you. Don’t be very powerful in life else everyone will hate you.
Crime rate is supposed to be minimum here in Quebec province. Canadians don’t require visa to travel to many countries like USA for sure, Japan, Australia, most of Europe, Belgium and many more because of their Peace loving status. There can be many reasons for this but I see that one reason could be that everyone here seems to have some hobby. So they spend their free time in pursing their hobby instead of keeping their mind empty for evil to come in. My senior engineer here drives bike (Cycles) for 100 Kms just for fun. He comes to office on it for 4 days, i.e. around 40Kms of biking two ways. And he says it takes him 45mins to do that and in car it takes 50mins. So imagine, he drives at almost 50Km an hour. Not telling other peoples else you will curse yourself. So go get some hobby for yourself. It can be as simple as running (Many of us will be thinking, don’t say that’s easy).
Everything starts very early morning. The hotel I am staying starts serving breakfast at 6 am. Just imagine. Reaching office after 8 is considered late. Average dinner time here is 6 pm. After 7 it’s late. One interesting fact, the shopping malls and other outlets close at 9 pm on weekdays and at 5 pm on weekends. Its weekend boss, you are supposed to be with your family and friends and not doing shopping etc. That’s the culture here. Weekend is very important to everyone. They will never compromise on it.
When in office they are very professional. They are not genius but they try to be specialized in one area. They are not Jack of all trades but surely near to king of their trade. I see them using technology to its best where as we use it as bare minimum for getting our job done. They assume very less and we assume almost everything, so we have fewer questions then them on anything.

Food: I did not expect the world to be so different, at least not when it came to taste. Here almost everything tastes different. The sugar tastes different. I feel it’s not made of cane here, but the maple syrup. The onions are three times what we have in India; I feel them to be genetically modified. It can be that they grow like that here, but then I think its six months of winter here. Canada may be most of time importing food items and when they are importing it may be of good or cheapest quality. Anyway I am fed up of Onions here. They taste bad, and on top they don’t get cooked easily. It takes lot of time to fry them. Milk, I went to store that day and couldn’t count the type of milks available under same brand name, forget number of brands. They even have 0% fat Milk, which my manager calls as blue water. I took the maximum 3.5% fat one. Even it tastes more medicine then creamy milk. On good side potatoes taste very same, cauliflower tastes good. In fruits Apple are very juicy and tasty, but oranges are real bad. They say they are bad in winter. Pineapple is very same. We have local apple gardens here where one can go for apple picking. I hope to go in my last weekend.
Food here is too much commercialized. They are selling same thing under different names and are playing with the natural taste and contents. And here you are forced to buy them as you don’t have any other option. It’s much better in India. You can buy from where you want and mostly original from the farm and not the labs. People here live more on meat than vegetables. Not surprising even McDonald does not sell any veggie here.
They use or I will say waste plastic like crazy. We are supposed to keep each vegetable we buy in a separate plastic bag. And you can’t imagine the amount of paper they waste. No one uses glass here, it’s all plastic cups for everything from water to milk. But the fact is that still they are only 3 crore people in Canada so in terms of volume they are much lesser than in India. Also whatever waste it’s a bit more carefully dumped than back home.

Infrastructure: Lots of space first of all and less people. So it keeps everything simple and clean. Big roads, disciplined traffic. Almost everything is automated and hence very costly. The parking system is automated. Road crossing is automated. On the road crossing you need to push a button to tell the system that there are pedestrian and then only it will find a slot for you to cross. It’s scary to cross road here without that because the roads are so broad and vehicles are so fast, I feel I will not be able to cross the road at time. Bus service and Metro services are good. They have ticketing machine in the bus itself, when you get in put money in it and get your ticket. So you need to have change(coins) to ride a bus. Here minimum ticket costs is 2.75$ but you can use that ticket for one journey of Bus and Metro. So in the sense you can reach from one corner of city to other in 2.75$, but then it will cost you same if you wish to go just a small distance. My view is that it’s the charge for using the service and not the charge for distance you travel.
In name of security, in the building my office reside, outside the office hours we need to have a separate access card for the elevator and without that you can’t reach a floor. There are keys for Restrooms so someone from outside can’t use them. Too much I will say.
Here they don’t have Cooking gas, but they use heaters. Gas is costly for them, and they have surplus amount of electricity. Qubec state produces all electricity from hydro power plants and so they call the electricity bill as hydro bill here. For your knowledge, it seems Canada may become the second largest producer of crude oil if they get breakthrough in extracting oil from the tar sand in an efficient manner. Just search for Tar Sands of Alberta. Here the government distributes the money to each resident on some criteria if they have surplus tax collection or saving. Never imagined of this. Everything is accurate till penny. They have all cents starting from 1 cent still used today. The rates are like 1.74 $ etc. There is some 13% tax on all non essential items.

Some French words
 Bienvenue: Welcome, Bonjour: Good day, RC: Ground floor, SS: basement, Arret: Stop, Sortie: Exit