When people ask me if I don't mind travelling alone, I always tell them that it has great advantages - you can do what you like when you like, and in particular you can eat whenever and whatever without having to consult with someone else. In reality, though, I find this usually means that I spend days walking enormous distances and failing to stop and eat much at all. Today I missed lunch, and finally fell into a Thai restaurant at 8 p.m. on the way back to my lodgings. It was the only place open on a very long stretch of Blvd. St. Laurent from the metro station, so at least I didn't have to make any difficult decisions. Now I am fed, and if my ill-used and by now very sore foot feels better in 40 minutes or so, I'll be going back out to a Christmas concert followed by midnight mass at the Cathédrale Marie-Reine-Du-Monde.
I have been to Christmas mass already this evening at the Oratoire Saint-Joseph. If I make it to the later one tonight, that'll be three church services in under ten days - and that's perhaps one more than I've been to in my entire life. I'd never been to a catholic mass before this evening, anyway. The Oratoire is enormous, and a big tourist destination (and site of pilgrimage too, apparently), so it was a quite dramatic introduction to the whole thing. I sang hymns in French. The woman leading us in the singing was very impressive. What a wonderful way to handle it, with her singing us the first verse before conducting us to join in. And they had printed the music on the pamphlet they gave us. I've always wondered why churches don't usually do that - so that if you're not in the choir you either work from memory, or you guess where the music is going (usually wrongly, if like me you're not hymn-literate).
The outside of St. Joseph's is quite spectacular, sitting on the other side of Mount Royal so that you see it first from below, standing out with its large domed roof. It was dark already when I got out there, and it was floodlit. The inside is full of escalators to get you up to the Oratory itself - that's how much of a tourist destination it is - and from inside the building there is a fantastic view over the (to me entirely unfamiliar) northern part of Montreal. The inside of the Oratory was surprisingly plain, including the inside of that dome which wasn't decorated at all. Before I went up the Oratory I visited their exhibition of Nativity scenes, brought from various places around the world. Not really my thing... though there were some interesting ones, and it was worth looking to see how the conventions had been kept or discarded. When I was small I always wondered why they depicted two white kings and one black - which is to say that I always wondered where the black king came from. At some point I saw an older bible with a map of the holy lands in it, and it confused me because I didn't think of any of those stories of Bethlehem and mangers and the like as having any kind of geographical setting - at least none that we'd be able to locate today. The maps weren't connected to anything recognizable, of course, so it still didn't help to situate it for me in any way that would have made a black king make sense. Adults forget to explain such things - and in this case I mean school teachers, who (unlikely though it seems now - surely they don't do this any more?) were the ones who taught us bible stories and made us sing that bloody awful wailing Away in a Manger (I was just thinking about this last week, as we sang it at the Denver service. It wasn't so bad as I remembered, but it is inextricably tied to my memories of having to sing it when I was in early primary school, and to the fact that no-one explained what "till morning is nigh" meant. And I also realised that my feeling about it is similar to how I feel about performing poodles. That's what you get if you make small children sing cute songs about small children).
Earlier in the day I did my laundry in a place in the basement of an apartment building down the road, with a coffee shop attached to it. The girl behind the counter turned out to have studied Japanese literature at McGill, so we had a lot to talk about.
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