{"id":3338,"date":"2018-04-24T12:27:41","date_gmt":"2018-04-24T16:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=3338"},"modified":"2018-04-24T12:27:41","modified_gmt":"2018-04-24T16:27:41","slug":"my-first-trip-to-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/my-first-trip-to-canada\/","title":{"rendered":"My First Trip To Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"

I grew up in a wildly multilingual family and Canada\u2019s bilingual nature fascinated as soon as I started learning French in elementary school.\u00a0 It was just a short flight from New York, but felt as distant and exotic as Belgium where my parents had lived for awhile.<\/p>\n

I eventually became my high school’s star French student, thanks to tutoring from my mother whose French was perfect. Even the subjunctive somehow sunk in. I received a certificate of achievement from the Alliance Fran\u00e7aise in New York, so a trip to Montr\u00e9al seemed ideal after I graduated high school and was feeling almost bilingual (unlike my older brother whose French was not very good).<\/p>\n

He put me in charge of hotels and I picked one on Place Jacques Cartier which was then somewhat ramshackle and noisy, but exciting for a student like me. Just being able to use French outside of a classroom–and be understood–was thrilling. I’d been studying it for eight years but in a hot house\u2014now it was alive, transactional.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Getting into the country was unexpectedly dicey. It was 1971 and both of us looked like hippies. Clean hippies, but hippies just the same. And I didn’t realize that joking with Passport Control was not a good idea. When I was asked by a suspicious agent if I had any money with me, I emptied my wallet onto the table and made some remark like “Ai-je assez<\/em>?” (Do I have enough?)<\/p>\n

My brother claims that we were taken aside for an hour and interrogated. I have no memory of that. What I do remember was the superb food everywhere we went in Vieux Montr\u00e9al and the wonderful feeling of being a different person when I was speaking and thinking in another language. Oh, and how difficult it was walking in stalked heels on cobblestones (it was the early 70s, remember?). I<\/p>\n

I knew then that I’d be back\u2014and in more suitable shoes.<\/p>\n

Lev Raphael is the author of twenty-five books in genres from mystery to memoir, He is an assistant professor in the English Department at Michigan State University and also teaches creative writing on line at http:\/\/www.writewithoutborders.com<\/a>
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I grew up in a wildly multilingual family and Canada\u2019s bilingual nature fascinated as soon as I started learning French in elementary school.\u00a0 It was just a short flight from New York, but felt as distant and exotic as Belgium where my parents had lived for awhile. I eventually became my high school’s star French … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1086,1096,1090,1197,341,1006,1171,1009],"class_list":["post-3338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-canada","tag-montreal","tag-quebec","tag-speaking-french","tag-travel","tag-travel-blog","tag-travel-blogger","tag-vacations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3338"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3378,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3338\/revisions\/3378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}