There seems to never be a dull day here in Montréal. You can always find something interesting when you are exploring the streets, a historic bagel shop, an F1 store (for Tom, of course), a world class string quartet giving a free lunchtime concert, a street with an art installation by local artists, or a 500,000 people strong march for the environment. It seems that striking or protesting is in the genes of the Québécois. My first day of school, I was greeted in the metro station by a cacophony of people who were support staff of UQAM. They were on strike and making some noise about it, crowding every possible entrance to the university…which is quite a few, as the buildings of UQAM are spread throughout several blocks of downtown Montréal. There is no separate campus like UBC or UVic. A week and a half into school, our class was interrupted by some students who spoke very quickly to us French learners that classes were cancelled and teachers were not allowed to teach us further that day. None of us really understood the reason or what was happening. A few days later we were told, in advance this time, that our following week class would be cancelled and our morning class would end early due to a student strike for the environment. It wasn’t until we looked at media a little more that we realized the magnitude of what was going to happen. This brings us to yesterday, Friday September 27th, 2019. We arrived at class only to discover that classes for the entire day had now been cancelled. We decided to check out what was going on. We’re here to experience culture, right? As we headed to the meeting point, we joined the UQAM group that was marching loudly down the street with police escort, signs raised, chants and cheering, and horns blowing. The crowd grew as people from the side streets converged on our group so that by the time we reached the park, our group had grown to a more than a few city blocks long. We could hear the roar of the crowd and music playing as we neared the park. We jostled through the crowd to get closer to the front of the action, squeezing into any small space available that would move us forward, or stepping into a single-lined stream of others trying to do the same. Even an hour or so after we had been there, people were still arriving in droves from the adjoining streets. It was mind boggling. We were unsure if the march was just to this location, but we were baffled as to how this many people could be marched anywhere else. However, as we circled the outskirts of the masses, we observed the shift in the crowd as those on the actual road began to stream through the greater crowd like the slow-moving current of a great river. We became part of the side streams that overflowed into the side streets until we found our way to a less busy place to rest our tired feet. We heard later that the crowd was so long that when the front of the line reached the end point, part of the crowd still had not left the beginning. Politicians, such as Justin Trudeau, and Elizabeth May, as well as young Swedish activist, Greta Thunberg, had been amongst the marchers. To compare the size of the crowd, I looked online to see what other events have attracted in terms of numbers. Disneyland has an average of 44,000 people per day and closes their gates at around 80,000. The Circuit of Americas Grand Prix has had 100,000 people on a race day, and it’s a similar amount for those who line the streets for a royal wedding. OK, the U.S. has this crowd beat with their inaugural day crowds at an estimated 1.8 million with Barak Obama in 2009. Greater Montreal has a population of just over 4 million, and a record-breaking amount of 500,000 showed up for this one day. That is pretty impressive and we were there to experience it.
1 Comment
Abigail
10/4/2019 05:05:34
I really enjoyed catching up on your adventures through this blog! I look forward to the next entry!
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AuthorTom & Val, off on a mid-life adventure (but not crisis) in la belle province! Archives
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