Moving to Montreal

The first seven or eight boxes my boyfriend and I have packed contain around one-hundred books. I know how many because we are moving across the border, and the Canadians want a list of every item we bring with us.

To accomplish this in a respectably efficient fashion, we have a google doc spreadsheet so we can pack our separate boxes (he's taken even numbers and I'm taking odds) and detail what's in them on our separate computers. I'm not sure how the listing of the computers will happen yet. . . I assume they will be in boxes. . .

Montreal is in Quebec, which is a special, special part of Canada. From what I gather the French culture that exists there does so in the face of the enormous non-opposition that may be normally found in Canada with regard to such matters. Oh, you're French? That's cool, eh. All the road signs must be bilingual, and all workers must be bilingual, and in order to go there you have to check with them before even thinking about asking the Canadian government about it. These are scant impressions, I assure you, but here is the process.

My boyfriend is accepted to a college in Montreal. Which is in Quebec. So before he gets his student visa from the Canadian government, he has to apply for something called a CAQ, which is a certificate detailing his acceptance into Quebec. So he has to send something like 30 pages of documents to the Quebec Immigration office (Immigration et Communautes Culturelles) and they will issue him this certificate, and then it will be okay for him to get his student visa from the Canadian government.

So my impressions of this part of Canada are already a little mixed. I happen to love the French language and culture, so I'm excited about living somewhere where I can experience it first hand. But there seems to be many well-thought-out barriers to moving to Quebec designed to send the impression that the region is more autonomous than other regions of Canada. I admit: this fascinates me.