Spontaneous Planning

The story about my first winter in Montreal always brings fond memories and lots of laughs, especially when my in laws start complaining how cold it is in Madrid. After six years in Canada, I’ve gained a next level perception of cold. 

When I first landed in Canada, one of my friends send me this joke: a Bosnian named Mujo emigrated to Canada and started writing letters home. In the first letter he is explaining how beautiful Canada is and how he is in love with it and will never leave. In the second letter he writes how it snowed for the first time and how absolutely wonderful it is and he will never leave. In the third letter he writes how it snowed again, and so on. By the 10th letter he is still happy in Canada but his palms are starting to have blisters from all the snow shovelling. By the 20th letter he starts cursing big time about the white shit that just won’t stop falling and show shovelling trucks that keep burying his house in snow. In his last letter he says: F### this, I am moving to Florida! 

By December 2010 I had already been quite accustomed to my new life in Montreal. The colleagues at work were great, I had a nice group of friends from the office, I had settled in my new apartment, and started to enjoy my new bachelorette lifestyle. I was still a bit home sick but that also got sorted out: it turned out some of my ex-colleagues from Ericsson Zagreb came to Montreal on a project for a few months, one of them being my volleyball team mate from university days. There was another person in the mix: a Serbian colleague named Aleks who moved to Montreal from Dublin right about the same time as me, and who is still one of my closest friends today. I have learned this throughout the years: no matter how much of an international / global soul you are, home is always home, you will always feel most at ease with people from your culture. 

My Croatian colleagues eased my Croatian nostalgia and also gave me motivation to find a volleyball team in Montreal! Luckily I did not have to look far: Ericsson Canada had a volleyball team 🙂 When we came to our first training session, I learned that the team was a mix of Ericsson and non-Ericsson people, quite a diverse crowd. It is there that I found new friends who would stay in my life for years to come and would bring me back to the world of volleyball: a Bulgarian named Mike and a Chinese/Canadian called Tomy. It is amazing how fast you grow your network when you are young and in a country like Canada.

As we were having fun, winter started to slowly arrive, and before we knew it, it started snowing. And snowing. And snowing. And the temperatures started dropping. And dropping. And dropping. I will never forget one evening we were hanging out at Aleks’ apartment playing the newly discovered Nintendo Wii (which was a big hit back then), when we realised it was -38 degrees Celsius outside! And yes, we had to walk back to the metro and go home. I ran to the metro at the speed of light, only to realise as I entered the station that my eyelashes were frozen and stuck to each other. Yup, it was that cold. I will never forget it, it was the lowest temperature I have experienced to this date. And the extreme low temperatures are just the start of it. When they are combined by strong cold wind, the feel is 10 degrees lower at least. In fact, in Canada when you watch the weather forecast on TV, they always show the real and feels like temperature, I have never seen this before. But perhaps this cold and snow would not be that difficult to handle if all this lasted for a short period of time. The biggest shock for me was the fact that the temperatures stayed below 0 for several months, and sometimes for weeks it would be -20 degrees. Yup, there would be many more episodes of frozen eyelashes. Usually the lowest period is January-March, but in reality the cold persisted (in a less extreme manner) until May usually. So between November and May, it’s basically half a year of winter. I understood then the Mujo joke.

Three things that fascinated me though:

1. The winter scenery with the pure white and abundant snow was really beautiful. The air was so clean and fresh all the time, and contrary to what many would think, the winters in Montreal are very very sunny. If it is not snowing, it is usually bright sunny without a cloud in the sky. There are a lot of forests and ski places close to the city so going outdoors during wintertime is a must. Also, contrary to what many might think, Montreal is not that much north, it is actually on the same parallel as London. The reason why it is so cold is because of the northern winds. So the days are not extremely short in the winter, like they are in the Nordics for example. With all this, the winter mood is actually a very positive mood, everything is so bright and white all the time, you can’t really be depressed and you actually want to go outside.
2. Life in Montreal never stops. Even with 2 m snow and -30 degrees, everything runs just like on any other day: metro, bus, street cleaners, stores, schools, hospitals,…if you have a snowstorm, within no time all the roads and sidewalks are clean. Also, the center of Montreal has two cities in reality: you have the upper city, the one that is outside and everyone knows from the photos; and then you have the underground city for the winter. Literally the whole city center has an underground, and it is connected to the metro, train, etc. So basically, during winter you can do a lot of the activities without even going outside. That’s absolutely amazing, I have never seen anything like this in my life, such efficiency and adaptability. It goes to show you the spirit of this city and of humanity as a whole: people adapt and make the most out of their life no matter where they are.
3. The winter fashion industry here is incredible. The winter jackets, coats, boots, hats, etc., everything is super high quality, extremely warm and really stylish. My best boots and jackets were bought in Canada and I still have them today in Madrid (even though I do not have as much opportunity to wear them here). To start with, Canada Goose coat and Pajar boots were a must buy that first winter, and they kept me warm for many many years to come. 

I enjoyed my first winter in Montreal with pub nights, dinners, Sunday brunches and lunches, volleyball, trips to other cities (I’ll cover this in the next story), my first indoor climbing, my first Usher concert :), ice skating in the Old Port, next to St Lawrence river.

Then there was the inevitable part of Canadian winters: hockey! I finally got a chance to enjoy an NHL game of the Montreal Canadiens. That was quite an experience: Montreal is very proud of their hockey team so the Bell Centre was packed, it felt like it was the championship final and not just a regular game, everyone was cheering and screaming off the roof, and the game was so fast you could not see where the hockey puck was. Also, there was quite a lot of fights between players, sometimes it felt they were totally unnecessary and just part of the show. Very manly man sport. But I really enjoyed it and would go to many more matches in the future.

Then there was the Igloofest. If you thought you could not possibly organise an outdoor techno music festival in the middle of Montreal in the middle of the winter, think again! This was by far the craziest techno party I have every been to, with giant vodka ice bottles, actual igloos, people in arctic expedition outfits jumping around like they are on a beach. Like I said, you can never be bored in Montreal, even at -40.