I visited Montreal for a week and two rather strange and related incidents occured, one on my first day, and the other on my last.

On my last day I was wandering around Old Montreal trying to find a decent place to eat, killing some time before meeting a friend who was supposed to drive me back. An older man walked towards me from across the street and started talking to me en Francais about constellations, what I should expect to see in the sky tonight and this week. I have no idea what prompted him to share this with me. Maybe because I was the only walking alone these narrow desolate streets and it looked like I had nothing to do? He didn’t seem like he was crazy, he was pretty well groomed and spoke eloquently.

I interrupted his space lecture and asked him where the closest fast food joint was. And he was kind enough to walk me there. This place is too complicated he said. It’s hard to find an affordable meal here as this neighbourhood is inundated with high end restaurants! Highly uncharacteristic of what this place used to be!

He asked about the Mandolin I was carrying and I told him where I was at in music.

When we approached the cafe, he left, just as sporadically he appeared.

On my very first day, I was by a punk rock concert to meet another friend in the thick of a young punk crowd. Another old man comes up to me out of nowhere and says, “Are you Iranian?”

“Uh, yes,”   ?!?!?!?!

He then shared his stories of Iran, how he was crossing the border alone to Pakistan where there is 12 KM of no mans land in between and how he ran out of water along the way.

Then he left as randomly as he appeared.

So random and so strange, but it’s all the charm of Montreal I guess.