Chicken or Poutine?

We were on our way to the train station when we received the first update. A couple of minutes later, a deluge of notifications flooded our phones, reminding me of the opening minutes of the first episode of Connections.

In "The Trigger Effect," James Burke walks us through the events of what is now known as the "Northeast Blackout of 1965," where a faulty relay interrupted power distribution for over 30 million people in Canada and the USA for up to 13 hours. Burke vividly demonstrated how a simple piece of technology could trigger significant impacts on our lives. His message was clear: our society's fabric relies heavily on technology in ways we do not fully understand. He adds that the technologies available to us define how our society operates.

On the morning of July 19th, a faulty software update by Crowdstrike caused a similar domino effect in airports around the globe. Lufthansa's flight LH185 from Berlin to Frankfurt, along with all other flights from BER Airport, was canceled.

It would be impossible to catch our connecting flight to Montréal. We accepted our fate and found an alternative connection to Frankfurt using Deutsche Bahn, from where we would board the next day through a rearrangement with Air Canada provided by Lufthansa.

Ten hours later, a very sunny and smoldering hot Montréal welcomed us. A bus ride and a couple of metro stations from the airport, and we were in Le Plateau-Mont-Royal, which I would freely, and probably wrongly, translate as something like Kreuzberg/Friedrichshain or Santa Cecília/Pinheiros.

During the summer months, several streets and avenues are closed to car traffic, allowing only for pedestrian and cyclist traffic. The street right at the door of Mont-Royal, Avenue Mont-Royal, is one of those.

We quickly made our way to the Airbnb. Unfortunately, our travel disruptions didn’t stop with the Crowdstrike update. We ended up spending the night at a last-minute hotel until we could find a replacement Airbnb.

Having sorted this out, we ventured out onto the streets to start checking some items off our travel list. We quickly adopted Bixi, the government-backed bike-sharing program, as our main mode of transportation.

I will leave you with a photo gallery of some of those highlights, including Schwartz's, St-Viateur Bagel, public music festivals – which reminded me a lot of São Paulo evenings – some amazing parks with very well-kept grass, SQDC (the government cannabis shops), Ma Poule Mouillée, and Au Pied de Cochon.

This is the first update of the beginning of this vacation trip. Shortly after arriving in Montréal, I headed to New York for the week for work, but I will let you know about this in the next email.

PS: If you want to know, yes, the poutine is as good as it sounds.