Keeping busy

Well, yet again it's been a while. But I suppose I had it coming: I only had two major presentations this semester, and of course they would be within 6 days of each other and on opposite sides of the Atlantic. How could it possibly be any other way?

Last Wednesday I hit the road (well, the air, I suppose) for Montreal, for the Northeast MLA conference. Long way to go for a conference, I know, but it had two advantages:

1) Important people in my field (good networking)
2) Montreal. Vacation time!

For better or for worse, I did significantly more of #2 than #1, haha. On Thursday I went up to the Plateau, a neighborhood of boutiques and cafes. Besides buying myself a fun new dress, I also got a kick out of what Starbucks has had to do to make peace with the Francophones of Quebec:



Yes! So if you're Francophone you read the first two words, if you're anglophone you read the last two. Starbucks doesn't even do that in France, here it's just the regular old "Starbucks Coffee" sign like anywhere else in the States. That sure wouldn't fly with the linguistic policies of French Canada, hahahaha. Love it! And for the record, I didn't actually *go* to a Starbucks. The indie cafe scene is WAY too good for that. But I did appreciate the sign, haha.

Other highlights of Canadian French include what they call convenience stores:


Which quite literally means "the one who bails you out." The French use it for car mechanics, but the French Canadians apparently use it for small grocery stores too!

And then the ever-important (and perfectly literally translated) milkshake:


My other main activity, when I wasn't walking down the street, was being a cafe bum. Unfortunately I spent way more time doing this than I would have liked (thank goodness Montreal has a fabulous cafe scene) because my piece of shit knee is being true to form and giving me a lot of trouble. It got to the point that walking around was hurting my hip, probably because I was compensating somehow. So I decided I better not mess around with that and sat around in cafes instead. I spent so much time in cafes, in fact, that I decided to run my own little competition.

The overall winner was a place called L'équitasse, which does all fair trade and makes a KILLER maple latte:


And best presentation went to Cafe U, for the latte in the fancy glass:


Obviously had to pay extra for the fruit salad, haha. The coffee tasted slightly burned so the latte wasn't the best, but how can you not love the glass?

Anyway, I returned from Montreal on Monday and then had a big presentation for my research group in the sociology of culture yesterday (2 hours). That went super well, in fact, and I think the professor who organizes it may have given me the key I was missing to make the rest of the diss fall into place. Yes! So now I'm going out drinking with Kari to celebrate.

And to see the new adaptation of Kafka's In the Penal Colony, done as an opera by Philip Glass. Oh yes, you read that right: weird-ass short story + weird-ass composer = one hell of a weird opera, I'm sure. We'll see if my math is right in a few hours!