Last night and today we had a huge dump of snow, in fact a record for December 16 and only a few centimetres short of our all-time record for a single day! Strange that the worst (or best, depending on your viewpoint) daily snowfall ever in Montréal occurred within a few weeks of my birth. Now is that a tenuous connection, or — let’s be honest — an entirely irrelevant (if ego-centric) one? Regardless, today’s “41+”cm was impressive; and I thought I’d seen some pretty decent snowfalls in the past eleven years in Montréal! At one point we got 17cm in an hour, which is the kind of thing that gets meteorologists all giddy and wide-eyed, even staying up to give their breathless reports on the late news.

I’m sick, unfortunately. It started on Tuesday and that made Wednesday’s flight back from Spain no fun at all. And I’m still quite miserable — sore throat, clogged nose. But no fever, so am pretty sure this is not the impending world-destroying flu pandemic. Anyhow, in spite of being under the weather, I had a lot of errands to do today so I wandered all over town — and yes, if you’ll permit me: “under the weather” — to do them. Wandering, on such a day, is more difficult than usual. Rather than striding, you’re sliding and high-stepping through thigh-high piles of fluffy snow, then slapping at your pantlegs and stamping your boots to knock the snow off. But it also makes one (e.g. me) very glad he does not own a car…or at least that he was not driving today! Montréal is probably better equipped than almost any other North American city to deal with this kind of thing (see picture — and note to self: should create a compendium of Montréal snow-clearing vehicle photos). Still, it’s no fun for drivers…lots of accidents, traffic jams, abandoned cars, shovelling the car out from under a snowbank. And there’s the joyous and ever-present winter sound of spinning tires…that oscillating whine that naïve drivers’ tires make as they polish the roads to black ice: Hmm, maybe it I spin ‘em fast enough, the friction will produce enough heat to melt the ice? It’s hard to imagine the smell of burnt anything (other than firewood) when it’s so snowy and cold outside, but there it is — a true miracle on ice: burnt rubber.

Anyhow, I had a magical four-hour stomp all over town, taking photos, shovelling snow for a friend who’s on vacation, listening to podcasts. More photos of the snowy city at night will follow. Well, all right — here’s one more. This one shows the Montréal night scene downtown on Avenue McGill College, where all the trees are wrapped in lights. I have to say I like this natural (if you can say that strangulating living things with electrical wires is “natural”) style of Christmas lighting more than the geometric outlining of linear building facets that’s popular in many cities — for example, Barcelona. Okay, I admit we do some of that here, too. But this isn’t it.

When I return to Montréal from spending several weeks in Spain, I find my “other languages” become confused. Par exemple (or should I say por ejemplo?), as we prepared to disembark from the airplane in Montréal today, a québécois man helpfully lifted down my overhead luggage:

Homme: “Est-ce que ce sac est le tien?”
Moi: “Ah, oui, merci! Et, il y a un manteau también. Um…aussi…”

It seems that my French and Spanish always intertwine in an embarassing way for about a week after I return. Or more correctly, my French is peppered with involuntary Spanish-isms. Sure, you can get away with sí when you mean oui — in fact in France they use that fairly often, if I’m not mistaken. But también and gracias are a bit more obviously not French, so I’m usually given a funny look…

Well, this reminds me of linguistic contexts. Apparently (says my Mom!), if you want to teach a child several languages (for example, as you should (my opinion) in the case where parents or grandparents have different mother tongues), then each person should consistently speak to the child in their native language. For example, Mother always in English, Father in French, and Grandmother in Italian (feel free to substitute your favourite languages and relations here!). Perhaps there is no limit to the number of languages a young kid could absorb in this way; apparently keeping the “linguistic context” constant is the key to this. That, I guess, and sufficient immersion. And a young, sponge-like, brain. As opposed to an aged, sponge-like-but-in-a-porous-rather-than-absorbent-way, brain.

No wonder I’m so confused, and not just because of my leaky, porous brain… But also I’m living most of my life in English, in a French city, trying to learn Spanish by visiting Catalan-speaking Barcelona! And I suppose my “mélange linguistique” emails and blog postings aren’t helping anyone either. Well, to that I say: “Pttthhbt!” (you go ahead and translate that…into your favourite language!)

Today is my last day in Barcelona. It’s been a great trip, including a week-long jaunt down to Almería and Parque Natural de Cabo de Gata-Níjar for some of the sol (y luz) Andaluz. Even in December, it was nice there (except for our first few days). Not super-hot, but better than Barcelona and way better than Montréal. But the night we arrived in Almería (Friday, December 2), there was a gale-force wind blowing and our “little” plane (well, not so little but it had propellers) almost skittered sideways off the runway. At the restaurant that night and in the room, the wind howled and made the walls shudder. In fact, kind of like the Patagonia experience. I think the winds were gusting to around 90km/h or so. But after those first few days, we never had that kind of stormy wind. Sure, the coast and cliffs are exposed, windy places, but the winds we experienced in the rest of the trip were “normal” ones…¡menos mal!

Some favourite photos will follow — watch this space!

The Flybook is a possible winner of the small but hot category for this Christmas… I’m certainly not getting one, but I might consider it when the price for something this complete and portable drops to about half what it is now. I’m quite happy with my iBook, which costs 40% of the Flybook’s price and is, well, pretty darn good. But this new machine certainly is sexy looking and has great connectivity.

Well, a few musical moments to pass along. On Tuesday evening, we went to see Marlango (a Spanish group fronted by singer Leonor Watling which — for some reason — performs mostly in English!) at the beautiful Palau de la Música Catalana. I’ve wanted to see inside that UNESCO World Heritage Site for a while, so it was great to finally see it…even better, the concert was full of energy and humour (and they just wouldn’t stop playing!). It was much more than just an excuse to see the interior of a beautiful building! (-;

Secondly, I wanted to have a guitar to practice while I was here, and had been looking into renting one. I thought that since it is quite easy to rent instruments in Canadian cities, it likely would be here. Well, you can rent guitars and such, but to rent a flamenco guitar, and one that is strung for “zurdos” (lefties), is a bit trickier. So I thought I could buy a super-cheap (crappy) one, just to use here. But I knew I wanted a “real” flamenco guitar at some point… Okay, so the end of this story is predictable: I went to this great classical and flamenco guitar shop in Barcelona, Casa Luthier, and was easily convinced (or rather, convinced myself) to buy a nice (not too expensive but also definitely not the cheapest one you can get!) flamenco guitar. I ended up with an Alhambra, model 3F. To transport it, I “splurged” and got an estuche duro (aka flight case), which I hope will protect this investment for years — and trips — to come.

The service at Casa Luthier was excellent, and I managed just fine in Castellano for the hour or more that I was there, discussing, learning, trying, hemming and hawing — and eventually purchasing.