A few weeks ago, I woke up and decided I wanted
to step away. From work, from going to-and-from, from my life, basically. As of
this week, I’ve been at my job two years, and I’ve taken a grand total of seven
days off; two of those were to go house hunting and three more were to move
house. The world has been closing in around me, and I felt like I should give
it a good shove.
Seeing as to how I got my Global Entry status
last month, I thought I ought to take it for a ride. This meant, at a minimum,
that I would have to get on a plane, preferably to somewhere not in the United
States. (This was a way of preventing me from just staying at home, sleeping in
and mooching around. Doing that would not help WRT pushing back the world.) I
didn’t feel up to a trans-Atlantic flight, but Canada I could handle. I used to
work for a company headquartered outside of Ottawa, so I’d been there, and to
Toronto, but never to Francophone Canada. Ergo Québec City.
To get there from The District They Call
Columbia, I had to take two flights, the second on a teeny prop plane. I speak
French, but I was reminded of an expression one of my professors used about
impure pronunciation: il parle comme une
vache espagnole. It makes sense: Québecois:Français::American:UK English.
But as I eavesdropped on my fellow passengers I thought to myself: man—québecois: je suis croque madame.
Still, people do appreciate that one makes the
effort, and surrounding myself with a species of French helped with the
stepping away. I had constant reminders of my mission, walking along rue Saint-Pierre, rue Saint-Joseph, rue Saint-Roch, rue Saint-Antoine; I was surrounded by saints. Also, the fact that the temperatures hovered on either side of
0ºC, with snow on the ground did, too.
I won’t bore you with all the details here, and
I’ll spread out the photos, too. But let me say: mission accomplished. I left
behind the idiocy of US politics, work and quotidian struggles, breathed
totally different air, drank bowls of café au lait with my breakfast and
wandered where I liked, when I liked. I’m grateful for having the opportunity
and the wherewithal—and for screwing my courage to the sticking place—to do it.
Oh, alright, then—just one photo.
I was able to get a little Christmas shopping
done.
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