...ontheroad

I'm not bräve, just naïve...

Saturday, October 01, 2005

Yeah, great... a real regular blog...

So, anyway, the plan was I would be keeping you updated on this blog with news of my progress in Montréal. And I've just realised it's almost two weeks since I arrived and you've not heard a jot.

So here's what's happened. Ryan and I rendezvous-ed in Montréal at the apartment of our wonderful friend Charlotte, right on the bustling ave. de Mont-Royal, in the heart of the French speaking Plateau of Montréal. Within 100 metres of the front door are cafés, bars, shops, patisseries, boulangeries, an amazing bagel bakery and everything that a young man about town could possibly want.

Due to a very sad illness in her family, Charlotte has had to leave town for a while, and has returned to her home town of Chandler on the Gaspésie coast, about 17hrs from here. In her absence, we've agreed to keep an eye on the apartment, the four cats (pictured above is Toast peering out of the window onto the street) and the plants. We'll be here for the foreseable future; please email me if you don't have our telephone number or address here and I'll send you them.

Ryan has been thwarted in his numerous attempts to attend film classes by regular cancelations, but he has plenty in the pipeline to keep him busy. We are both anxious to keep ourselves busy; there are only so many days you can spend waking up at 1100 with a 'to-do list' that has one item, namely getting up.

I have visited the offices of about a dozen architectural firms in Montréal, and have been cold calling, email and posting CVs to many more. And the truth? It's a bad time to be an architect in Montréal - no-one is hiring, and many firms seem to be laying off as the construction industry slows down after a hectic few years. I might just have been twelve months too late on this big plan. However, there remain a number of options still to be explored: rest assured I am a long way from washing dishes.

In between job hunting we've been enjoying the fantasic scene and atmosphere Montréal has to offer. It's an incredibly cheap and easy city to explore and to get to know: we can walk downtown in about half an hour, passing from the low rise Victorian houses and apartments of the Plateau, down the broad and trendy Boulevard St. Denis and straight into the cluster of downtown skyscrapers. Everything is cheaper, friendlier and more diverse...

To everyone back home, we send our love. Ryan apologises for his long silences - I can assure you that he is alive and well. We look forward to welcoming our first guests from home soon...

More to follow...

*j*

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