Montréal Reflections

I just finished an 8 day trip to Montréal (with 2 days on either end in Toronto). I had some expectations about this trip that I don’t think were met, but still learned many lessons from it that I’ll share today.

My expecations about this trip

This is my second long solo trip. The first one was when I went to Mexico City in February 2020 for 10 days. I went to explore the city, get out of the cold Michigan winter, and see the Monarch Butterfly Preserve. I also wanted to immerse myself in a Spanish speaking environment, and use Spanish. I ended up speaking a decent amount of Spanish to get around, but ended up speaking mostly English with the other people at the hostel.

I had somewhat similar expectations for this trip. Regarding language, I wanted to immerse myself in French. I chose an AirBNB in an allegedly more French part of town (east of Saint-Denis). Regarding meeting people, I expected to easily meet lots of people at the hostel I stayed at on the first two days of my trip, and meet people in bars and clubs.

Reality

Overall, I’m pretty happy about this trip. It didn’t go exactly how I planned (but nothing in life does), but I still got to explore parts of the city I hadn’t seen before and still met many people. But some of my expectations didn’t come true, and I think it’s worth exploring them in depth.

Language

My expectation around language was that my French was as good as my Spanish, and that it would be just as easy to use it here as it was in Mexico City. I was off on both marks.

For one, my French wasn’t nearly as good as I thought it was. I was able to carry out basic interactions in French, like buying shoes or food, or making small talk. However, these interactions are pretty predictable. Even small talk tends to follow the same format, whereby I would make an excuse to talk to someone, they would then ask me where I’m from, compliment me on trying to learn French, and then we would talk for a few minutes about how I learned French, and what I thought. I could do those interactions quite easily. I could still do things that were more complex, but it was noticeably more challenging for me and didn’t feel as fluid as Spanish.

Secondly, I didn’t end up using my French as much for a variety of reasons. I spent most of my time in the “hip” neighborhoods like Plateau and Mile End. Even native French speakers in these neighborhoods also tend to speak English. Montréal as a whole is a bilingual city, and many younger French Canadians speak English fluently. Most of the time, their English was better than my French. On top of that, there were many monolingual English speakers because of a combination of traveling (August is a big travel season) and college students (Montréal has many English universities). Though I could insist on using French (and I did) it was far less of a need because speaking English didn’t seriously impede my ability to get around. Because there wasn’t a need to speak French (because the other person speaks English), I tended to switch back to English when I started struggling.

The social element of solo travel also impeded how much French I was able to speak. I would end up encountering a lot of English speakers through travel or in Cafés, and so we would speak English. Since I was also by myself, and my level of French made it difficult to sustain long conversations in French, I ended up just talking to English speakers because I wanted company, and I could communicate better in English.

Meeting People

I ended up meeting people, but the not the same way as I did in Mexico City.

Before I came to Montréal, I checked Québéc’s restrictions and it said that bars and restaurants were open at limited capacity. In my mind, I imagined it was like what Michigan was at a few months ago, where you were free to mingle and move around in a bar, but with just less people.

That was not the case. Bars and restaurants are open, but all parties are required to be seated and there are partitions between tables. Hostel bars are usually a good way to meet people, but the hostel bars were closed because of the covid restrictions. That made it much tougher to meet people.

On top of that, international travelers aren’t yet allowed into Canada. Only US citizens and permanent residents are (and essential Canadian travelers). So the hostel was mostly people from other parts of Canada who were in town for a few days, and they often came with their own friends. In other words, not as many solo travelers.

Despite that, I did manage to meet two groups of people at the hostel that I ended up hanging out with throughout my trip, as well as some people on the streets and in coffee shops. I ended up having people to hang out with despite my worst fears, and I’m less hesitant about solo traveling again in the future.

Takeaways

Overall, I enjoyed my time on this trip and would label it as a success. It didn’t go exactly as planned (but nothing ever does), but I did learn a ton and meet some cool people. I also got more French practice than I would have otherwise, and was able to get some French books that I wouldn’t have been able to get in the United States. Here are two big takeaways I had.

Escaping English wasn’t worth it

I could have dedicated myself to full immersion by staying in placing where people only speak French. To escape English, I could have stayed in the suburbs, or deep on the east side of Montréal, and avoided many of the centrally located neighborhoods. Better yet, I would have avoided Montréal and gone to a smaller city in Québéc.

But that would have undermined the entire reason I decided to learn French in the first place, which was to explore Montréal. Avoiding English in a bilingual city would have meant avoiding most of the city, espeically the cool neighborhoods and attractions. That tradeoff doesn’t seem worth it.

Languages as expanded option set

Despite that, I still felt a strong pressure to use French as much as possible. I think it falls into the sunk cost fallacy. I spent all this time learning this language, so unless I’m using it as much as possible, I’m not making the investment worth it.

Instead, I’ve shifted my mindset to one of an option set. You don’t learn a language so that you can use it in every single opportunity where there’s someone who speaks the language. Instead, you learn a language to expand your option set. That is, it expands the things you are able to do, people you’re able to connect to, books/movies/music you can consume, and parts of the world you can visit.

Incurring the temporal and monetary costs necessary to learn a language don’t mean you have to use it. It just means you can. It gives you more choice.