...And now for something completely different: Une Session à Québec

"Ryan!"
It was like déja vu. An early morning wake-up in my sister's living room.
"Ryan!" Ugh. My eyes adjusted to reveal my sister standing beside the couch.
"Ryan, it's ten after 7:00." She said.
My flight was scheduled to leave at 6:55.
"WHAT?"
"Oh, I mean ten after 6:00."
And so began another long day.

By the time my plane began its descent into Québec, the lack of sleep, as well as the glasses of wine and beer from the night before, were beginning to catch up to me. As I dozed on and off and thought about how I was going to live out of two bags of luggage for the next four months, that age-old question slipped back into my mind: ""What the hell am I getting myself into?"

Well, first of all, I was getting myself into a semester of French as a Second Language courses at L'Université Laval in Ste. Foy, Québec, just outside of the capital city. Laval has over 37,000 students, studying everything from Philosophy to Languages, Dentistry to Medicine, and the Languages Department in la pavillon Charles-de-Koninck was to be my home for the next 15 weeks. After landing at Jean Lesage Airport, I hopped in a cab and arrived outside my dorm, la pavillon Alphonse-Marie-Parent, at about 11h00 on Saturday January 12th.

Suddenly I was and eighteen year old all over again, signing in to residence for my first semester at a new school in a strange land. After getting all my stuff packed away, I slept away most of the day on my sheetless bed, and, waking up around 18h00, I decided to check out the nearby mall and to buy some essentials for my room. Like sheets. Of course, no one had told me that the Québécois shut 'er down at 17h30 on Saturday nights, which seems ridiculous. I mean I know that Confederation Court Mall kicks mall rats and prostitots out at the same time, but that's, well, Charlottetown.

L'Université Laval is connected underground by a 15-kilometre network of tunnels, which makes walking around in the winter a lot less of a pain in the ass. And so, even though I had classes in Koninck on Monday and Tuesday, by mid-week I still had no idea what the building actually looked like from the outside. As we started courses we were placed in different levels based on preliminary testing, but some of the placements were messed up, leading to a confusing week for everyone in the program. I somehow started in the 'Débutant' group, where we working on phrases like "Hi, my name is Ryan. How are you today?" (In French, obviously), all of which I had done in about, oh, Grade 2. By the end of the week I was up in 'Inter-Avancé', the most advanced class. Though I'm still not sure if I belong there, you have to admit that's pretty good progress in the language in one week. Haha.

In the class I finally ended up in, there are only three other Canadians, the rest of the class being mostly made up of Thai, Chinese, and Spanish-speakers from various countries. One of the other Canadians and I, along with a bunch of other residents have become the unofficial drinking team of the program, which has been a lot of fun, but which has also taken its toll on the studies, and perhaps also the health, of each of us. We represent a variety of provinces from across Canada: Scott Pickup - Nova Scotia (Or Republic of Cape Breton... and yes, Pickup is his real name), Gillian Irving - New Brunswick, Luke Moyer, Laura McDougall, Debbie Lobbezoo, Barbara Ciochon - Ontario, Sara Lechasin - Manitoba, Tammi Viney - Alberta, and Kirstie Bagshaw - British Columbia. The main topic of discussion is making fun of each other’s pronunciation of different words (I apparently say 'peanut butter' wrong), and sharing regional sayings (Pickup's "Not dat bad... not dat goood, but not dat bad." is an oft-repeated example). Our Mexican buddy Gerardo Sistos Sescosse hangs out too, but his regional diction is in a totally different ballpark.

Designating a different room for pre-drinking each night, one soon notices that the thermostats in many of these rooms are set way too high. The residence has over 900 rooms, and each series of three or four have one shared thermostat, with one lucky resident given the power over the heat of all the rooms within his immediate vicinity. For some people, well for me anyway, this is a problem when it is -22 degrees outside, because there are a lot of Franco-Africans on my floor who like the keep the temperature set at a balmy 30+ degrees all the time. More often than not though, we drink in Tammi's room, first of all because she has candy, and also because from there you can see all the action going on outside. One night last week, for example, four cop cars rolled up with campus security, followed shortly by a media SUV from TQS. Another night, no less than six cop cars sped into the driveway, with an ambulance following close behind. I don't know if some serious shit is going on in Parent on a regular basis, or if there is very little action going on in the rest of Québec. Either way, I don't wander around when the cops show up, just so I don't get caught up in a shoot-out or something.

There is a lot of interesting stuff going on in Québec this year, as it's the 400th anniversary of the city's founding, which adds to the usual Carnivale de Québec, l'Hôtel de Glaçe, and the Red Bull Crashed Ice competition. There is literally too much to do, but so far we have been taking in as much as possible, and enjoying as much as we can without freezing our faces off. One of the big misconceptions that I was wary of before coming here was the idea that les Québécois are rude. I have not found this to be the case at all. If anything, I would say they have been more polite than most people back home. They politely say hi and bye as they get in out of elevators. As far as I know they don't talk about you behind your back or make up rumours about you. As a perfect example, on the third day of school I was stopped in the tunnel by a girl, and I had no idea who she was. She introduced herself as one of the sisters of the kids from the Explore program that I worked with last summer on PEI. She recognized me from Facebook pictures and offered any help that I may need. Now, I would say it takes balls to pick out one student out of 37,000 that you sort of recognize from your sister's pictures to introduce yourself to some random.

Of course once they discover that you to be an Anglophone, all bets are off. Haha.