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Chris Weber

Student Profile

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Chris Weber

McGill University, Montreal, Fall 2005
Biology Major, Genetics option, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology minor

I left for Montréal on the next to last day of August, plugging due north from Philadelphia. I was tailed by the still formidable remnants of a hurricane that had just devastated another city with a significant French heritage. The next day, Katrina would soak me so suddenly and severely that I found buying an overpriced parapluie pointless by the time that I found an equipped street vendor. I later realized that Montreal winters induced the city's citizens to invest heavily in underground corridors and thoroughfares that I could have made great use of that day, had I known of their existence.

I was nearing the tail end of the extended adolescence American society affords its students, whose nebulous borders can induce a state of indecision in life and career plans approximating paralysis. A confession: I had in part decided to study abroad to justify my delayed graduation (I managed to add a minor which required me to take another six credits past my original spring graduation date), which was justified in part by my relative lack of direction in life. There was a mystique in  traveling to somewhere else, outside the protections of familiarity.

And Canada, and especially Québec, really is an else compared to where I had been. When the roadsigns on I-87 north started going bilingual, I felt an odd exhilaration in applying my high school French to decode the one and two word phrases. This contrasted profoundly with my sudden feelings of francophonic inadequacy in the city a short time later. My leaden tongue, shivering through the first long-atrophied utterances, seized when native grimaces confirmed the auditory discord between the sounds intended and spoken. I found it hard to attempt any French beyond formalities.

But you adjust, reground yourself. You realized that the national discourse here is really different. Canada is a constitutional monarchy; in addition to being on every piece of coinage, Queen Elizabeth II is the official head of state. During my four month stay, the federal government fell. This is not a big deal, just cause for new elections. You find that everyone hates Toronto, a city whose public perception blends the multiculturalism of New York, far left politics of San Francisco and self-absorption of Los Angeles. Your readings and discussion in your Canadian Studies course tells you that Canada is not a blameless liberal paradise, but a nation with its own unease about its historical injustices and current cultural composition. Not everyone thinks that nationalized healthcare is all that great. You do this in the grand reading rooms of La Bibilothèque Nationale du Québec, realizing that it's mid-afternoon, and you still haven't passed a familiar face on the street. And it's not a lonely or forlorn feeling, just part of a semester long meditation.