Downtown Montreal[/caption]Back home Canada is like a sister to the north. As you head further north it seems like the line is blurred between Canadian and American. When we first told people we were coming to Montreal to serve as missionaries, many of them thought we were crazy. How would it be any different than simply serving in Minnesota? We didn't really have any clear way of sharing the differences, but had heard they were there. And, oh, how different it is!
There is the obvious here in French Canada, everything is in French, the signs, the directions and alerts in the Metro, the information posted in the busses. That was to be expected. The little things are really what catch you off guard. You need 4 forms of Canadian ID to get a phone. People are surprised when they hear we have the same last name, in a country where changing your name, even for marriage, is illegal. Bank accounts are not free and some accounts severely limit the number of transactions allowed in a month. The street lights run differently. The food here tastes different and the prices of the food are very different too.
I could spend all day typing up the minute differences of living in Canada, but I won't. The part that makes acclimating to a new life here are the similarities to America. I can go down the street and order a pepperoni pizza just like back home. When I bite into it and I taste that bologna like pepperoni they have here it is a reminder that I am not back home at all. Though the similarities sometimes trick us into thinking we are in the States, it always comes out Canada. We are getting used to the changes and expect there will be more to get used to over our months in Montreal.
We have been so immersed in everything happening in Montreal that the drive here almost feels like a dream...a long awful dream that you are very glad to wake up from. We left on Friday, the 2nd. It was a beautiful day for a drive. We said our teary eyed good-byes to our families, buckled into the U-Haul and began driving. That is when the excitement began.
Day 2 we drove in an ice storm through Chicago. We drove 13 hours that day. It started with snow and changed to ice around Chicago. The second half of the day was just rain. We were all pretty temperamental that day. Day 3 was about 10 hours of driving. It was 60 degrees when we woke up and we were racing the wind. We knew the storm was bringing 60 mph winds and we got an early start. Most of the day brought dense fog and rain. About an hour before we reached our last hotel, the wind caught up to us. We drove into town to find downed power lines being fixed. We could hear the gales outside throughout the night. In the morning we had another beautiful day to drive.
