Montreal departure

The bus station in the centre of Montreal has the most terrifying diner I've ever seen. Luckily it wasn't the only place I'd eaten in town, although their poutine wasn't at all terrible. For those of you who aren't familiar with poutine, it's a large bucket of chips/fries covered in gravy and really fatty cheese. It's sloppy and extremely fattening, which is why it's a favourite dish in a city as cold as Montreal.

The snow was covering the ground, and I had to drag suitcases through slush and ice to get to the station. Somehow my mobile phone had vanished the night before, while I was out having a celebratory drink in a blues bar the previous night. I went back to the bar and luckily they still had the telephone, and hadn't called any antipodean countries on it. So I was all set to go.

So much has happened during this time in Montreal. I haven't even started to blog about the trip to Quebec city with Jo, Niels and Julien, and our fantastic experience of photographing dilapidated buildings and ice skating in the old centre of the city. I didn't even get round to posting pictures of the Montmorency waterfalls we visited on the way, or the surreal Ethiopean restaurant we dined in when we got back.

Nor did I even get to describe my most unusual professional experience to date; working morning shifts in a factory and teaching evenings and afternoons in high schools and universities. Try preparing a lesson on 20th century short stories while sitting on a bag of rice in a warehouse, between two rushed bouts of loading a truck with pallets. Without even starting on the political discussions these guys get into on their way to delivering in Chinatown.

But I suppose that's what happens when you are living life rather than writing about it. Unlike Sartre's protagonist from "La Nausee", I don't really get to sit about contemplating all this very much. All I can do is stick up a few pictures in retrospective (when I get my camera in order), and tell you that Montreal is unforgettable. The graffiti around the city (take a look at the facebook albums), the snow-capped trees, the unmistakable cafes and the bums in the metro are completely unique. Nowhere else does the teenager bagging groceries in the supermarket say 'papier-plastic-paper-plastic?' when you get to the checkout and are trying to remember which language to speak in. No other city has a Chinatown with shop signs which are bad translations of English badly translated into French, and then back again.

Goodbye to all the wacky people I've met in Montreal, and thank you for the music. Now I get down to supply teaching in London. Won't that be an eyebrow-raiser...? Stay tuned for the next chapter, where guitarist and composer extraordinaire Will Rutter plays Irish melodies while scoring Mariah Carey songs for high school Christmas parties, and takes me running round sphinxes in London's strangest park. The Ghost of Crystal Palace...