To your left is the coat of arms of the City of Montreal, the caption reads 'Concordia Salus'. The 'Fleur de Lys' represents the French settlers, the Rose the English, the thistle the Welsh and the Shamrock the Irish. Today Montreal is still a very cosmopolitain city with vibrant 'allophone' (i.e. non french or English speaking) communities including chinese, vietnamese, african, north african and Native Canadian.

Another famous team from Montreal is the 'Canadiens', , a hockey team.

It's been quite a whie since I've been in Montreal, I have no pictures of it other than those I've found on the Web and, of course, those in my head. What strikes most, looking back on it now, was the weather and the music.

The winter are very harsh, -20 °C in the winter is considered normal. On a normal winter day, kids put on their normal clothes and then add an extra layer: Sonw boots, snow pants, a heavy coats, gloves and a ski-hat. When they get to school they take off the snow clothes and hang them on a peg in the corridor before going to class.

I remember walking home one day without my snow pants and being caught in a blizzard (a very strong snow storm) and hearing my jeans crack as they froze and broke with every step I took. In such blizzard, as much as 2 meters of snow could fall overnight. The streets in the morning would echo of the thunder of the snowplows in convoys of 12 or 15 machines clearing the street. Piles of snow, when cleared away, revealed cars stuck underneath. So much snow fell it would even accumulate a good foot high on telephone cable!

And the sound of falling snow! A snowflake might not make a lot of noise when it falls to the ground, but multiply it by a billion and all you hear at night is the crunching of innumerable fat snowflake crunching those falllen before. In the morning, that first breath of cold, dry air would burn the lungs and clear that nasty hangover in just about as much time as it took your eyes to get use to the blinding light of a virginal white world.

But the summer were all the more remarkable. During the Jazz festival, Montreal is a hub of musicians from all over the world. The 'Parc du Mont Royal' is full of people taking in the sun, playing Jambee or frisbee. Then the weather gets a bit colder, the forest catch a fire of gold and ochre and red an yellow. Children love raking leaves in the garden as it give an opportunity to jump in the big pile when the job is over.

Then for a few days there is the 'Indian Summer', a 4-7 day long micro-climate during which time the weather is hot and sunny again and a lot of people take days off to make the most of it, the whole city, the people and the animals take in a last ray of sun before the long gold winter.

Then again, as a kid winter is quite a lot of fun, once you've cleared the driveway of all the snow. Snowmen, Igloos, Ice Scpulture, snowball fights every recess, sleighing under a full moon in the clear blue sky, skating or cross-country skiing on frozen lakes or in the Apalaches. Quebec has more than a million lakes, and a lot of people own one, where they go skiingin the winter and fishing in the summer. It's so wild that you can drop a line with a bend nail but no bait and still catch fish!

To this day, the memory of this painful exile are kept alive in classes throughout Quebec. The motto of Quebec is 'Je me souviens' or ' I remember', and is represented by the or 'fleur de lys'. So what has all this got to do with music? Well, just about everything. The same way that in the cotton-growing south of the U.S.A. misery and lack of freedom gave birth to specific music genres based on what uprooted people had brought with them, the people of Quebec, especially in Montreakl, kept their traditions alive through music. Despite the language barrier, most of the people on Montreal were of Celt origin and their music reflects it. The music and the words, the plaintive tone of speech and the love of language reflected in careul choice of word, is definitely celt.

Some songs have reached global fame, i.e. 'La Complainte Du Phoque En Alaska' (Beau Dommage), about a seal crying on his snow bank because his girl has gone to the Sates to make a better living. 'Les Gens De Mon Pays' (Gille Vignault, seen by some as the father of the rebirth of French songs in Quebec) is a magnificient ode to the people of Quebec and their love of language. My personal favorites are Kate and Anna McGarricle (eponymous album, the only one in French), duaghters of a Francophone mother and a Scottish Father, perfect example of the 'Concordia Salus' motto of Montreal. Starmania (Michel Berger and Luc Plamendon), and more recently 'Notre Dame de Paris' (alos by Luc Plamendon) , but also Richard Desjardins, are other examples of how Quebec music shines throughout the world. (I should mention Celine Dion, which I respect for being bilingual and unashamed of it, but I don't like her music, so...)

Music played a big part in what some call 'The Silent Revolution', the awakening of the French or Francophone segment of Quebec population, which by shear demographics became the majority of the population around the time I was in Montreal. What a strange and wonderful time it was. The Anglophone Exodus to Ontario had only started, Quebec went metric and started imposing French as the official language. In school all the students were more or less bilingual (which, to thebest of knowledge, is no the case anymore). You may have noticed the icon I used on my main page for Montreal, half 'Fleur de Lys', half maple leaf. I am bilingual and proud of it.

But that's besides the point. The culture of Quebec is a very vibrant one, the language very alive and inovative, much more so than that of France. The omnipresence of Americana (Chevys, NBC, etc...) is very challenging and a lot of English words are now common place, but Quebecans have also learned a lot from their soutern neighbours and have learned to produce cultural events of the same quality one expects from big American productions. For a country with a relatively small population, it has produced remarkably many worthy artists.