Continuing the identity debate

This started as a comment to Lion's post and then grew.
When I came to visit McGill during the University tour, my mother and I parked downtown, walked around campus, and then drove back to Toronto to continue our marathon campus-visiting trip. At that time, what attracted me to the city was probably something to do with the campus or the fact that McGill is (arguably) the best university in Canada. I never visited college-age friends here, nor do I have any family in the city. The first night I spent in Montreal was the night before I had to take my Spanish placement test in August 2005. I guess what I am trying to say is that I love this city, and I love living here, but as far as I remember I wasn't really attracted to any kind of image or particular lifestyle.

Now, I've chosen to live in a safe, residential area with lots of families. Outremont is a "nice" neighbourhood and I'm very close to Mile End, but what really revs me up about my neighbourhood are the following:
- babies
- good grocery stores
- proximity to work
- safety

I understand your point, but I do also want to say that I don't have the experience of growing up in a single place and being able to develop an attachment to it. I love Ottawa (cue laughter) and could easily imagine living there. It's a city with a very pretty downtown core, and while it is somewhat lacking in decent restaurants or bars, there's plenty to do - especially if you actually like going to museums. When the bus system is not on strike, I can get pretty much anywhere I need on my own steam, but our neighbourhood is also close to the river, quiet, peaceful, safe, and full of kids.

I came to McGill from Brussels, and I was hardly trying to escape some kind of hometown-induced ennui. I also liked Brussels and Dublin. Obviously I lived in a diplomatic bubble during these experiences, so in the course of my stay here in Montreal I've tried to break out of that. Even so, one of the things about moving so much is that while new places do hold some degree of romanticism, I'm also quite realistic about what living there will ential. I guess what I mean is that without the experience of staying in one place for such a long time, I've managed to lose the ability to view others as outsiders, and at the same time I'm much more conscious of my impact and my integration into new places. I don't want to feel like a visitor or a tourist if I'm going to be spending years in a place - I want a cheap apartment in an okay neighbourhood, even if it means I have to trek a little bit to the hot spots.

While living here, I've made a concerted effort to learn French, to expand my life outside of a campus or hipster-based bubble, and at the same time to make the most of the experience of living in a different city. Montreal may be an normal average-sized city, but it seems to me that it is a particularly nice one. I don't "love" Montreal because it is exotic or so very different from the ROC - I love it because I have a life and a home here, because rent and food are cheap(er), and because it is a walkable, friendly, safe city. It has a fantastic public transportation system and for those of us whose lives revolve around our stomachs, great restaurants and grocery stores. Maybe I'm projecting, but I get the impression that for many of the people I know who have moved here for some reason or another, those are all points in the city's favour.

Of course there's a Montreal mystique, just as there are local and national legends about the laid-back west coast, the flat prairies peopled with tough and resilient frontiersmen and women, the small-town hospitality and ethnic enclaves scattered throughout Ontario, the distinctiveness of Quebec culture, the friendliness and weird accents on the Atlantic coast, and of course the frozen ethereal beauty of the North. Add a lot of national pride in our natural wonders and you have the Canadian mythology. You don't have to love all of it, nor do you have to buy into any of it, but the fact is that these are the myths that are perpetuated, often with basis in fact, by tourism boards and diplomats. The fact is that when you've grown up smack dab on top of the largest cultural exporter in the world and have to struggle to maintain some kind of identity amid the tugging of increasingly decentralized provincial or regional identities, it's easy to fall back on somewhat trite symbolism in order to drum up some sense of national feeling.

None of this means that a little bit of mysticism surrounding Montreal is necessarily a bad thing. As a suburban Ottawan living in the big city, I have felt out of place, like I'm intruding on the lives of people already established here moving in. But I've also brought my own contributions to my neighbourhood. I work, I'm paying provincial as well as federal taxes, and as far as I can tell I'm the only person in a three-apartment building who shovels the front walk. In the course of its lifetime, my neighbourhood has gone from an immigrant neighbourhood with students looking for cheap housing to a yuppie suburb and back, and even now it spans these two extremes. Outremont reminds of me a microcosm of Montreal because its residential patterns are constantly shifting and changing, and the French Canadian secularists protesting the influx of Orthdox Jews can go fuck themselves.

Someone can feel a strong attachment to a city and "belong" within a month of living there, while others may live their entire lives in one place without ever feeling like they belong. I am jealous of Lion's commitment and devotion to his hometown, because I've never felt anything rivalling that about a place. I do love living here, though, just as I love my parents' house in Ottawa and I loved our time in Ireland. Moving and changing surroundings may not be at an entirely egalitarian equilibrium, with Minnesotans moving to Mozambique, but the increased mobility that is available to people is not, in and of itself, a bad thing.