Montreal is famous for young Ontarians as a place to go and get drunk when you are 18 years old. The legal drinking age is one year older in Ontario. Also Quebec is known for its strip clubs. I never ended up going on a binge fest to Montreal when I was 18 and I’m not fond of strip clubs but when I heard about the Jazz festival from a Peruvian friend I thought it sounded interesting and an excuse to discover more of my own country.
I hopped on a six hour mega bus with a friend, an old traveling partner from when I worked for an airline. We were determined to have a Sex and the City style Single and Fabulous weekend. Traveling adventures were to be hand by this single girl. Sometimes I feel like my life is a book or a movie where the story is about me I am the main character and the people I meet are just characters playing a role in my story and sometimes it’s the other way around. This time I knew the story wasn’t about me and I was just a character in someone else’s story. I had been feeling ill before we left and it just got worse. I later found out I had a sinus infection and bronchitis but during the festival I suffered wondering what the heck was wrong. I couldn’t even drink a beer in the party capital of Canada.
Montreal didn’t disappoint however I fell in love with the artsy city. I had images of falling in love with a musician name Jean Francois...or maybe a painter named Vincent. While I was lost in a hazy day dream of my future French lover my friend was getting some attention from an attractive Ukrainian, who is an artist living in the city. We shared beers with him and his friend while watching Jazz the first night.
We met up with him again at the festival where I sat hacking out a lung and chatting to a guy from France who was staying in our hostel. I could tell this attractive Ukrainian was completely into my friend. I couldn’t bare to go into a bar with my head throbbing so when he mentioned going back to his place to watch black and white movies on a projector screen in his apartment I was all for it. I also thought it was crazy romantic , watching an old Charlie Chaplin movie projected onto his apartment window blind, an Ukrainian artist...how could my friend resist, although I may have been in the way, a bit of a third wheel. She had no idea though, no idea that this guy could see how fantastic she was and how romantic the situation could have been. I had to basically spell it out to her, this guy really likes you. It made me think, are people these days too busy texting, e-mailing, messaging and facebooking that when it comes to real life in the flesh conversations people are missing the signs. Do we have to talk in texting code to get messages across? Are people too busy and caught up in their lives for the verbal and non-verbal signs we give when courting someone? Perhaps we are past the days of courting and onto sexting? All this made me appreciate the subtle romance and humour in the black and white movie we were watching. There is something to be said about silent movie romance.
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