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My neighbourhood in Montréal.

This year went by extremely fast for me. I simply can`t believe it is the end of the year and that I have been in Montreal almost eight months. I doesn`t seem like four months ago that I saw GBH at Foufounes or five since I dated that weird chick from St Léonard, or eight since I spent the month of May in a disoriented haze. It`s like someone flipped a switch and moved time into fast forward.

My French is coming along slowly. I`m still at the stage where I can understand what someone is saying to me but I don`t have the vocabulary to respond.

There are lots of things I like about Montréal and they include:

• Inexpensive public transit
• Schwartz’s Deli
• Foufounes
• Big cans of beer from the deppaneur. And that you can buy beer at the deppaneur
• The Lachine Canal and Atwater Market
• The architecture
• Pizza Steve (my favourite cheap slice, sorry, pointe, in Montreal)
• The awesomely weird stuff you can stumble into just by hanging out downtown on a Saturday night.

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Instead of writing a list of things I don`t like about Montreal (items 1 through 5 would be anti-Anglo assholes, particularly the ones who run the building I live in), I would say that most of the problems I`ve had mostly come from my difficulty in aligning myself with the energy of the city. There`s times where I feel like I`m standing outside a merry-go-round that won`t stop and I`m and trying to latch on as best I can.

A consolation is that I felt similarly when I moved to Victoria and it took almost a year to acclimate. I think that moving here in late spring had something to do with it. I tend to hibernate in the summer and come out in the winter so coming here when I am usually in withdrawal mode may have had something to do with that.

At any rate I chose the adventure I am on and I know it`s up to me to make the future I want for myself so I look forward to seeing how 2009 plays out.