#ndg

[trottoirsdemontreal]

Twitter : Alternative du jour

Avenue Monkland, 27 juillet 2024

[ayekayshua]

[spockvarietyhour]

361 Boulevard Decarie, corner NDG, 1928 [City of Montreal Archives]

[pro-royalty]

Renée Downer (FLO)

[tgtncomic]

Welcome to the neighbourhood.

[taylorgraymoore]

December 5, 2023

Below is one more day from my online diary thingy, which I'm posting more regularly on my website (www.taylorgraymoore.com). If you like it, please take a look :D

I'm going to take a break from chronicling Montreal for now and try to catch up to the present, which is getting forgotten. And that forgets the whole point of the project. I need to wait to talk to someone about the next bit, anyway, and have time to chew on it. So, a break.

Anyway, here you go:

Today has been an eventful day, easily the most eventful of the trip so far: it’s nearly 4AM on the 6th now, and the day hasn’t ended. I just got back. I am well and drunk, and it’s far too late to write about any of this. Let me try again tomorrow, or later. Perhaps on the plane. I don’t know when the next time will be: this end of the trip is so compressed, and there is so much happening that these last days, as I look back at them (I’m back in Vancouver now, I couldn’t even finish this on the plane), and it feels like it should have been most of the trip. It was not—it was only the last 50 some-odd hours of a week long visit.

…

Almost everything after this point, this day and the next one at least, I finished after the fact. It got that busy. … So, the texture of the narrative will therefore be somewhat different—I don’t know how, but if I’m writing most of it in Vancouver who knows how long later, that will probably happen. It’s a memoir now, not a diary. Although I’ll still try to pretend—

Today is the day I promised to visit Tom in Lachine. Lachine is far—still technically Montreal proper, although this is only recently the case, but so far west it’s almost the airport, and, apart from passing through making my way to a plane, I have never been there. So I had to look up how to get there, and what time I had to leave if I wanted to get there, hang out a bit, and then get back out with reasonable time left in the evening. I have plans to get out to Verdun in the evening, you see—there’s somebody I want to see.

.I check this. I’ve checked it before, but I want to check again to be sure, and be more exact about it. Seems I’ll have to leave the apartment by 10:45—the earliest I’ve left to go anywhere so far—walk to the metro, get off at Lionel-Groulx and change to a bus. Not so complicated. But it’s a long trip, about an hour, and I always dislike unknown transfers, especially when the bus only comes every half an hour.

(It’s Friday, December 15th right now—the fourth day of waking up at 5am, and I’ve been editing this stuff at about 5pm every day this week, after coming home from the early shift I’ve been waking up at 5 for and settling in. It’s starting to get hard to do this, just from accumulated fatigue. And the texture of these texts is starting to turn into something more uncertain, less spontaneous. I’m less sure if I like it any more; I’m not sure if it’s still—and I HATE using this word but it’s the only one I know that gets the idea across—authentic to what it was meant to be. It’s starting to feel too much like fiction. I’m starting to worry too much about the plot, about scenes, about what I want to convey, and I’m going back and editing too much. I’m going to try to quit that a bit.)

I hadn’t seen Tom in… when was the last time I saw Tom? I don’t even remember. We weren’t so close, but I liked him. I was not always nice enough to him. It would be good to see him again. I had promised to see him before I knew he lived way out in Lachine, but that was fine—I like a good, long journey into the unknown. Fleshing out the map of the city a little. I’m a wanderer at heart, at least when I can do it by bus.

He offered to sell me back the copy of Animal Crossing that I sold him back in 2018, during the worst days at the end when I was selling everything off, mostly old games that I had never wanted to get rid of and wish I still had. (Oh, hey, that must’ve been the last time I’d seen him. Standing across from the old bathhouse at Bagg and St-Laurent waiting to meet him and exchange the game for, what was it, about thirty bucks? It was outside where, in the wee hours of the next morning, I would find that Matvey was saying. The world goes in these circles and places find their meaning that way). I said sure. I would be pleased to get it back—I’d give it to my mom, who had played it more than me. I wasn’t happy to sell a single one of those, and the idea of getting one of them, any of them, back is intensely cathartic. Like the quiet sort of emotional resolution you get at the end of a lot of quiet postmodern novels—a little bit of Earthly perfection.

I want to finish editing the last chapter of the novella before I go, and I do that easily—it’s only a couple of pages long, and I don’t have so many notes to copy out. Want to do that so much because I strongly suspect I will have no more time after I heard out the door that morning.

I have another time after I’m done to finish my coffee and get a 20 from the ATM in the dep directly below me, and then I’m off towards Mont-Royal metro through the snow that I’m already used to again. Enough has fallen and been packed now that I don’t slip so easily anymore. Make a quick phone call to home as I go up Rachel, then I turn onto St-Denis, thinking about how I had always wanted to spend more time on the street and how nice it feels to be walking along it now, and then I slip onto the metro and begin the journey proper. I zip underneath downtown and then out the other side.

Lionel-Groulx is a place I’ve never gone to much except to pass through. It’s where the bus from the airport lets you off, and where you catch it if you’re going out again. Sometimes I also got off here to go to the Super C by the Atwater Market, but that’s about it. I know there’s stuff around here, just the pattern of my life. I think I did go to a cafe near here once, just to have done it. But I associate it with comings and goings.

When I first arrived back after five years in exile, last May, I got out here. It has a power to it if only for that.

It’s one of my favourite stations design wise—looks pretty nice, I like the strange twisted tree sculpture with the faces, and it’s highly functional: an exchange station, the obvious transfers are made by just crossing the platform. Refreshing compared to all the walking in Berri-UQAM and not to mention the twisted labyrinth inside Jean-Talon. (I don’t know Snowdon enough to have an opinion.) Matt raves about it on his website: it’s truly excellent. … Let’s not talk too much about who its named after, other than to say he’s got a nice name.

There’s a bit of confusion when I surface from it, because the bus stop I need had been moved for… some reason that was not clarified. I cross Atwater towards a stop I at first think is what I want, only to find another closed stop. I turn around and see the bus appearing and about to turn towards what I realize is definitely the place I’m supposed to be. But the light changes, I bolt back across Atwater, and I join the line with plenty of time. I board. I sit. The bus pulls away and I water the world go by out the window as we follow the same path as that fabled bus to the airport until pulling out to go to Lachine.

Like I said, have never really been to Lachine. The airport bus passes along the top of it, although on the expressway so you don’t really see it, and I did get a better view on Uber ride once, which went along the streets of Lachine while trying to get me through the airport in time to catch a flight while the expressway was backed up with traffic.

The bus followed the same route as that Uber had for a short while, then turned onto Provost. I enjoy seeing previously unknown streets: it looks like how a lot of Montreal looks, but there are more single-floor detached homes. It’s a little like the South Shore, but not nearly that suburban. I watched a TV show filmed here once, and it looks enough like the East End for you to not notice it isn’t. But it is certainly more out of the way than where I’ve spent most of my time.

I get off at the stop Maps told me to get off at, and begin the trek through the snow to my end destination—one long Montreal block away. I pass a stop for the 90 St-Jacques, which is closer to where I’m going and also goes back to the metro. Maybe a better way to leave—and it goes through NDG, where there’s a bookstore I want to visit. Let’s look into that.

The address I’m headed for is the first building around the corner, when I turn. I walk up the steps and ring the apartment number I’d been given, get buzzed in.

Tom is as I remember him, more or less. Which isn’t a bad thing. We do the exchange for the game, he gets his twenty and the Animal Crossing goes into my bag, and then we sit and play some steam games. for an hour or two. It’s the most relaxed I’ve been in days. I do better than I thought I would, and I wish I did stuff like this more often. I note to myself I should see how many of these I can find on the Switch when I’m back in Van.

But then it’s time to go—we promise to add each other on switch, and I leave to catch that 90 St-Jacques bus. Which runs every fifteen minutes, not every half hour like the other one, apart from just plain being closer, and Tom agrees it’s the better way to go. I leave the building, turn the corner. The buss appears, passes me, pulls up to the stop. I break into a run, dunking under one or two tree branches without slowing down and praying I don’t slip. It sits there. I make it. I sit down to catch my breath—my lungs are still not exactly super happy, so I’m suffering a little—and see the useful digital sign telling me that I had five more minutes and so didn’t need to run.

It’s a more interesting bus route: the same way back along Provost, and then down 1re and Georges-V the way I came, but then instead of joining the Autoroute it instead goes under it and takes me through more that I’d never seen—through Ville St-Pierre and the bottom of Montreal West, along St-Jacques until I recognize Cavendish and here we are in familiar lands again. NDG: I spent a lot of time here, I was in a relationship with someone who lived here for years, and then I even lived here for a week at the very end of things. Even after I had come back to Montreal, it seemed like another thing entirely to go back to NDG, and I didn’t honestly expect to do it. But here I am—for the bookstore.

At Upper Lachine and Melrose I get off the bus. I walk up Melrose, through the tunnel under the tracks, and then continue until I eventually reach Sherbrooke West—which is exactly as I remember it. Why does it seem impossible that it still exists preserved? It should have collapsed like a false vacuum after I last passed by here on the 105. Like a fantasy world one wakes up from, like Koholint Island, gone.

But that’s silly; and nothing has changed. My favourite cafe there closed down during lockdown, but even that is the same on the outside—the sign is still up and everything, just the windows are papered over. I know this because I pass it on the bus when I leave, later, and I’m shocked to see that even that is the same. It must have been held suspended for me, so I could see it again and leave it properly, without fear and without distortion.

The reason why I’m here at all: Encore Books & Records. The third and last bookstore I’m going to to find the Okri book. … have they have it! I hadn’t even planned to come here. Must be fate. They have it, plus a couple of other books I want—Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, which I read shortly thereafter, and then I forget the other one—and a couple of records—Ville Emard Blues Band, plus a Christmas gift for someone—and I make myself glad that I brought a reusable tote back. I prolong my visit a bit longer, because I really did not expect to ever be back here. I take some pictures and send them to Mark, who would love it. Then—I really don’t want to be too late getting back—I head onwards. Walk out to the stop for the 105, wait a good ten minutes for it. Take the trip I remember so well back towards Vendome and the outside world, passing the shuttered Shaika and a past life as I go.

A version of myself died here in 2018. For years after, it really was hard to believe that my life had not somehow ended, that the life I was living in my present was in any way still my own. This bus ride reattaches that death to my continuing life. I don’t think that, then; that’s the artistry brought on by a later week’s reflection; when I disembark outside the totally reconstructed and unrecognizable Vendome, I’m only thinking of how hungry I am.

Back in the Plateau, I get off at Sherbrooke rather than Mont-Royal, so that, on the way back, I can stop off at Le Vieux Europe and get one of their sandwiches. It was on my list of places that I’d always wanted to go to but never did. I also like the walk better: I’m sick of the walk from Mont-Royal, and I want to see Carré St-Louis and the lower bits of the Plateau, I am happy to get to walk along des Pins E and along Roy, go past a not-yet-open Else’s and remember the good and the bad times had in there (mostly good; I only haven’t been there yet because I have decided to wait for Matvey, because it was his place more than mine…)

[gregsantospoet]

A couple of my books - Rabbit Punch! (2014) and Blackbirds (2018) - are in good company at NDG’s Benny Library. And it seems that my latest, Ghost Face (2020), is in process and on its way there soon, too! . . . #gregsantospoetry #rabbitpunch #blackbirdspoetry #ghostfacepoetry #montreal #ndg #bennylibrary #montrealpoet (at Benny Library) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp7uEjhguDKhxsAsUjLdcIGZH4mmXyOugxUX0A0/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[ultralowoxygen]

NDG, 3 by Vygintas Račinskas Via Flickr: Vilnius BessaR2A, Summicron-M 2/35 IV Godak Gold 200

[adib-photography]

Westmount #westmount #montreal #mtl #montrealrealestate #realestate #ndg #outremont #mtlmoments #mtlblog #oldmontreal #montrealhomes #griffintown #somontreal #montrealmoments #montreallife #montrealhouses #quebec #remax #agentimmobilier #realestateinvestor #plateaumontroyal #montrealcity #remaxmontreal #yulrealestate #realestateincanada #listingsmtl #forsale #luxurylistingsmtl #remaxactionwestmount #downtownmontreal (at Westmount, Quebec) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cmkup1Ltcww/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[trottoirsdemontreal]

Twitter : Langues en contact à Montréal

Avenue Girouard, 21 juin 2024

[barbudeville]

La jasette du Barbu #406

Supporte un créateur et partage cet épisode de podcast.

Critique: Escondite dans NDG Le vlog: On the road Daily Buffer (jeff berard) Sous écoute: Boilard et Morency Faire un don ponctuel Choose an amount C$5.00C$15.00C$100.00 Or enter a custom amount C$ Votre contribution est appréciée. Faire un don

[ecolesomerled12]

What Is the Best SAAQ Exam Program in Cote des Neige for Getting a Class 5 Driver License?

Choosing the Right Driving School in Montreal

When getting ready for your class 5 driver license in Montreal, choosing the perfect driving school is important. Montreal provides a kind of choice, each customized to fulfil various learning requirements. Either you are searching to gain assurance on the road or pass the SAAQ driving examination on your first try, searching for a school with the best SAAQ exam program in Cote des Neige is important.

The Best SAAQ Exam Program in Cote des Neige

SAAQ provides strict testing needs to confirm secure & proficient drivers on the road. To prepare efficiently, the best SAAQ exam program in Cote des Neige can provide you with extensive instruction, from theory to pragmatic driving skills. These programs are particularly made to assist students prepare for the road test by offering step-by-step guidance, mock examinations, & real-time practice.

Class 5 Driver License in Cote des Neige and NDG

Acquiring your class 5 driver license in Cote des Neige or class 5 driver license in NDG can be achieved through different driving schools. These schools provide particularized courses aimed at preparing you for each facet of the licensing procedure, from written examinations to road tests. In NDG, you will find Somerled driving courses that cater particularly to new drivers searching to clear their Class 5 examination. These courses frequently involve hands-on experience with certified trainers, preparing you entirely for the SAAQ examination.

Driving School NDG and Downtown Montreal Options

Searching for the perfect driving school ndg or downtown Montreal is important for clearing the SAAQ examination. Somerled Driving School has a good reputation in the NDG region, with a history of producing secure, assured drivers. For those searching for driver improvement, there are also accessible choices, like the driver improvement course downtown Montreal, designed to assist drivers improve their skills & rectify any bad habits.

Rental for driving exam cote des neige

For students without admittance to a vehicle, schools in Cote des Neige provide rental for driving exams in Cote des Neige. This service permits you to rent a vehicle that is sanctioned for the SAAQ examination, guaranteeing that you have the suitable car to fulfil the exam’s standards.

Ecole de Conduite NDG – Quality Driving Instruction

Furthermore, Somerled Driving School, Ecole de Conduite NDG is another wonderful option for those searching to clear their Class 5 examination. This driving school offers a versatile syllabus, including academic courses with pragmatic driving experiences. The trainers at Ecole de Conduite NDG are famous for their expertise, assisting students feel assured & delectable for their examination day.

Somerled Driving School and Somerled Driving Courses

Somerled Driving School provides new driver training as well as refresher lessons with the help of their extensive Somerled driving courses. These lessons are made to not only assist you in clearing the SAAQ examination but also to confirm you become a secure & responsible driver. For those looking for the best SAAQ exam program in NDG, Somerled Driving School is a perfect option.

If you are looking to obtain a class 5 driver license in NDG or nearby regions, registering in Somerled driving courses is a pragmatic choice. Their trainers  are dedicated to offering top notch education to assist students obtain their driving objectives.

[crepuscularqueens]

disabling my blue light filter on my laptop for one hour increments so i can see how long i’ve been working on the world’s ugliest edit

[jacobsherf]

Condo à Vendre à Griffintown

Découvrez ce magnifique condo à vendre dans Griffintown! C'est une excellente occasion de posséder un bien immobilier abordable à Montréal. Cette spacieuse unité de deux chambres et une salle de bain est située au cœur du centre-ville et offre une vue imprenable sur les toits de la ville. Avec son design moderne, ses hauts plafonds et sa proximité de toutes les commodités, ce condo est parfait pour tous ceux qui recherchent la maison de leurs rêves! Pour plus de détails visitez notre site. https://jacobsherf.com/

[gregsantospoet]

Find copies of my ‘Anne, George, and Me’ chapbook which I originally had made for the 2022 Expozine over at NDG’s @phoenixbooksndg! The chapbook features poems inspired by the artwork and life of Canadian painter, Anne Savage (1896-1971). What’s our connection you might ask? My childhood home was the house Savage lived in for most of her adult life and I’ve always felt haunted by her presence. This collection is a small sampling of a larger ongoing project that intertwines the stories of Beaver Hall Group founding member Anne Savage, her half brother George - who mysteriously disappeared at the turn of the 20th century, with my own life story. Thanks again to Mel at Phoenix for the opportunity to have ‘Anne, George, and Me’ displayed at their local author and artist table! . . . #gregsantos #gregsantospoetry #annegeorgeandme #poetry #poetrychapbook #chapbook #phoenixbooks #phoenixbooksndg #supportindependentbookstores #ndg #montreal #montrealpoet #writingcommunity #bookshop #bookstagram #annesavagepainter #annesavage #beaverhallgroup (at Phoenix Books) https://www.instagram.com/p/CovUIRKvJVB0bpu2myJoL83bYFR4WIMocVVAXQ0/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=