A late bus brought me not to the home of my next WWOOFing host, but to his uncle Clément, the sixty-year-old who responded to my explanation that I was on une année sabbatique (a gap year) with the explanation that he was on une vie sabbatique.
Sitting in the midday sun at Marché Jean-Talon sipping face-twitchingly strong coffee, you could easily be convinced you were in Europe. Here in the depths of the francophone part of Montréal there is barely a shred of english in sight, and now in the absence of a travel companion (apart from the ever-loyal Boogie Bear, of course), I find myself feeling a little more intimidated by the city. Grand in every sense of the world, it teems with a life hidden in some respects by this language barrier and simultaneously improved by it.
Following a day of working in 36-degree heat, my new hosts came to pick me up. The trip back to the farm lasted an hour and drove us into humidity so dense my cheek went numb as I rolled down the window for a little more air. Within a few hours I've come from the city that never sleeps to a village which lays its head down at 9pm sharp and gets up at 6 in the morning, refreshed and ready to work before the sun rises too high.
Now at the last destination of my trip, and one I've visited before, I'm feeling lethargic. It's like the last week of school when work should be done, but no one can really be bothered, and are all just thinking about getting home and getting out of school uniform. Things learnt along the way become memories and notes in textbooks, guidelines of how to live la vie sabbatique
Sitting in the midday sun at Marché Jean-Talon sipping face-twitchingly strong coffee, you could easily be convinced you were in Europe. Here in the depths of the francophone part of Montréal there is barely a shred of english in sight, and now in the absence of a travel companion (apart from the ever-loyal Boogie Bear, of course), I find myself feeling a little more intimidated by the city. Grand in every sense of the world, it teems with a life hidden in some respects by this language barrier and simultaneously improved by it.
Following a day of working in 36-degree heat, my new hosts came to pick me up. The trip back to the farm lasted an hour and drove us into humidity so dense my cheek went numb as I rolled down the window for a little more air. Within a few hours I've come from the city that never sleeps to a village which lays its head down at 9pm sharp and gets up at 6 in the morning, refreshed and ready to work before the sun rises too high.
Now at the last destination of my trip, and one I've visited before, I'm feeling lethargic. It's like the last week of school when work should be done, but no one can really be bothered, and are all just thinking about getting home and getting out of school uniform. Things learnt along the way become memories and notes in textbooks, guidelines of how to live la vie sabbatique
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