Montreal is hosting a comedy festival called Juste Pour Rire (just for laughs).
As everyone here has French as their first language and I remember being totally bemused by a comedian in Paris, I judged that we might not laugh if I bought tickets.
As part of the Juste Pour Rire festival, Montreal is staging a live version of 'The Adams Family' (understandable) but also Hair (the hippie rock musical). As I recall, having seen Hair a couple of times, it's not a huge barrel of laughs, even in English. I told you that the French have an odd sense of humour.
But the city is very nice to walk around on a lovely Sunday. Sometimes it was easy to imagine that we'd been transported to some exotic part of Paris. The giveaway is that Paris has more signage in English; and more anglophones in the street. In most of Canada signs are bilingual. Yet, not here - only French.
I went into a coffee shop near the Latin Quarter and discovered that the waitress doesn't speak any English. She wasn't pretending. In Montreal there is no need. And we did perfectly well without English.
In the same street as our hotel, we came upon the oldest chapel in Montreal: the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel.
It was here that Marguerite Bourgeoys set up the first school and founded an uncloistered convent. She wasn't so popular back then. Now her dodging excommunication stands as a feminist victory.
So, after only 282 years she was finally canonised, by John Paul II. In 1982 she became Canada's first female saint.
Mary McKillop, Australia's first, also by JPII, was a bit quicker, in a third of that time.
The Chapel is also known as the sailor's church and little boats are suspended over the nave. It operates both as a church and as a museum.
It was Sunday and we half expected a service to be underway or at least someone reciting the rosery. But a young, English speaking, female guide explained that the congregation had shrunk dramatically over recent years so that Mass, that morning, had been attended by fewer than a hundred worshipers.
She explained that this was most dire in Montreal due to the Church's perceived role in oppressing the French speaking community!
I suggested that clerical abuse might also be a factor. "That too," she conceded.
At the Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History there is an Egypt exhibition where we were again reminded that for thousands of years mankind needed many gods, to explain the presence of evil, to sustain agriculture, to cure the sick, and to cause phenomena, like weather and tectonics. But most importantly: to provide for the dead in eternity. Egyptians liked to take their pets and even servants with them. So the Mercedes coffin to carry one into the life beyond, we saw in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto looks very reasonable by comparison.
Who remembers Expo 67? From the Museum of Archaeology, the geodesic dome is still visible. As are many new buildings constructed since.
In the cathedral square there are two bronze satirical statues with grotesque faces and ridiculous clothes. Both are carrying (French) poodles.
The explanatory plaque explains that they are English, the caricatures, not the dogs. Try swapping the nationality with any other and see how long they last.
I'm not sure that the Francophones of Montreal are fully reconciled to being Canadian.
