this one must be about cheese [in the abstract sense of the word]

I found this clever bit of grafitti down in Vieux Montreal, the part of the city that most resembles the antique neighborhoods of Paris. Translated, it reads, "this street constructed by the Romans in 50 AD." As I admire the skills and humor of the artist, I hope to follow in his or her example by providing you with an amateurish, but hopefully memorable, tour of this city as it begins to unfold through my adventures.

Today Leif and I walked up the less seedy end of Boulevard Ste.-Catherine to Petite Italie, where the Quebecian flag is replaced with the tri-colored Italian, the older men speak less and less French (or English)--congregating outside of bar fronts and church fronts and anything fronts--and where the soul finds a bit of rest from the traffic of downtown. We had hoped to explore Notre-Dame de la Défense, an Italian Catholic church with a controversial fresco of Mussolini over the high altar. Unfortunately the door was locked (I'll return for mass someday and inconspicuously snap a photo). The fresco seems to underscore an even larger tension in Montreal's spiritual and civic life. The city is notorious for its intense secularism, and there's an entire industry built upon the conversion of old churches and places of worship into high-price flats and university housing. In the Latin Quarter, Leif and I spotted a Gothic cathedral and walked up the stairs into a sort of nothingness--an urban atrium leading to a university cafeteria. The infrastructure is still there--the vaulted ceilings, the rounded rose stained glass--but cheezy tables and not-so-subtle vending machines take the place of candle-lit altars; intello conversations and lude humor replace pious silence. The irony is hardly missed, and I suppose one's not supposed to ignore it. But there's an eeriness in walking into the double doors of a domineering church to find students sitting at rickety tables, eating poutine.

Ah, poutine . . . a Quebecian specialty. Here's a photo to get you started.

Cheese curds (mmmm!), french fries, and a peppery gravy. Sounds as bad as it looks, and yet (though my bowels may offer their dissent tomorrow), it's not half bad. It will most likely be comforting when it's 50 below zero in January.

Here's me "enjoying" such fine Canadian cuisine.

All this talk of poutine and I'm getting a little road weary. I guess that's why I'm an amateur, relegated to the spray-painted, vandal-inspired tour-guiding circuit. One of these days I'll show you where I live, with whom I live, and explain why the heck I'm even residing in this strange, cheese-curd-ridden, parallel universe. I offer one Canadian dollar to anyone that comes back . . . for more poutine!

P.S. For a more poetic understanding of the religious/civic divide in Montreal, check out Denys Arcand's lovely film Jésus de Montréal.