Tag Archive: Quebec


Feral Artist Nomad odyssey, part 1

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October 5, 2025

The first part of my 2025-26 Feral Artist Nomad adventure is just about done.

It’s Sunday, and I’m enjoying the somewhat fresh air on a bench in the sun by the big bus station, awaiting the overnight bus that will take me from Montreal to New York and will depart in about seven hours. I’m quite sleep-deprived, but also happy with how things have turned out.

The big move on Tuesday, September 30th, was rough – but they always are. The two tall Ikea bookshelves were the hardest part, as usual. Driving the 15-foot Uhaul for three hours is a fascinating experience: it’s the closest that most of us will ever get to handling a tank. Montreal’s narrow streets and potholes were a bit of a challenge, and the truck may or may not have gone almost flying a few times. There were, fortunately, no cops in the vicinity.

It’s odd to know that everything you own can fit into a 5’x10’x8′ storage unit with quite a bit of cubic space left over. It’s secured with two padlocks and a magnetic card. I have no clue when I will access it next.

I spent five nights at the “Auberge Alternative du Vieux-Montréal” hostel, smack in the touristy part of town. Amazingly low prices, and you get used to the snoring of your dorm-mates eventually.

I swear I’m an introvert, but I made myself go out and attend events every night of the week. There was the literary open mic night, where everyone mourned the anniversary of their friend’s death, and where I performed my first-ever public reading of one of my short stories. (Some of the local poets and writers had grade-A material!) There was the weekly local writer meetup where only five people out of ~1,500 facebook group members actually showed up. They were an interesting bunch.

There was the karaoke party with a twist, where I met a fellow traveler, whom I got to know over the 36 hours that followed. My hostel bed probably wondered why I didn’t return. She’s flying back to Tokyo even as I type this. The bite marks make such beautiful mementos.

Exploring the city on foot is fun: always a lot to see, and my mental map of the place is slowly but surely populating. I’ve already found a popular local hole-in-the-wall that stays open till 2am. And a fun little store that sells random discarded Amazon items for a fraction of the price. I had to restrain my inner hoarder.

And now… I’ve put the last of my random and non-essential items into my storage unit (won’t need fancy dress shoes where I’m going) – I’ll start my one-man two-week film festival circuit very very soon. After that, straight to Workaway, probably. My clothes, fancy camera, non-fancy netbook, and harmonica are in my bulging Osprey backpack. My brand new CouchSurfing account has already secured me one couch in Colorado, for an overnight visit to Grand Junction.

Aside from the lack of sleep, I’m as ready as I can be. Let’s do this, eh.

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Vignette: Shy Anglophones

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August 24, 2025

August. Quebec City. Tourists.

Tim Hortons lobby, filled with folks studying the bright display promoting savoury snacks.

French only.

The two cashiers stand still; paragons of patience.

I smile, stride in, bypass the others.

“Bonjour…”

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In which the author experiments with ultra-minimalism

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June 26, 2025

Been sleeping on the floor these past five weeks. This has been due to a very logical set of decisions culminating in a pretty eccentric conclusion. I wrote about it a few posts ago, but briefly: my attempted thru-hike from Mexico to Canada ended prematurely, all my things were in storage, and I still had my empty apartment’s lease till July 1.

Ipso facto, didn’t make much sense to deal with a moving truck for just a few weeks.As of right now, my studio apartment has one small cooking pot (no lid), one fork, one pocket knife (mangos are hard!), a small pile of clothes, a laptop, a cellphone, a few chargers, some hygiene stuff, and two empty backpacks. Oh, and the sleeping bag I use on the floorboards (I’m not a barbarian), though without a mat (I’m not a king). There are also kitchen appliances (fridge, freezer, stove), but they’re more or less a default setting for rentals.

And… that’s pretty much it. Since mid-May, I joined a nice little anglophone library, attended a book sale, and have acquired a small stack of books that I haven’t quite read yet. In other words, the usual routine has been reestablished.I like to think of myself as a minimalist with a bit of an art hoard, but this is mighty minimalistic even for me, eh. This strange little lifestyle design experiment has had some interesting outcomes…

For example, I don’t miss my art, or my cool gem and mineral collection. Not sure if that’s because I’d gotten so used to them over the years, or because mentally, I’m still in a flux over the failed thru-hike adventure. (Not bad, just weird; a lot of compulsive walking.)

I have internet access through my phone’s frankly exorbitant data plan, and I use my phone as a hotspot whenever I need to do something on my laptop. I’m not streaming anything because I want to preserve all those gigabytes, and I rather miss Netflix. And gaming, even though I realize how addictive that hobby is. (I literally dream of Skyrim.)

Ironically and unexpectedly, the thing I miss the most is radio. Just a plain old little radio-clock cube thingy that can be set to a local station, to babble at me in that beautiful blend that is the Quebecois French, because, frankly, it’s impossible to learn from any app. (The continental French is an entirely different animal.)

One objective improvement has been my productivity. With my desktop in storage, I haven’t made any new short films, but now I have so much time (and so few distractions) to simply write. Over the pasy five weeks, I’ve written five short stories. They range in length from 333 to 5,400 words, and one of them has already been accepted by a Canadian anthology, woooo! (More on that later, once the contract is signed.) Also, I’ve just signed the contract for another anthology – this one will be about superheroes, and will feature my February story “To Fly or Not to Fly.” (Inspired by my experience with bureaucracies and the time I jumped into traffic to save a feral toddler.) The other stories I’ve written recently (and earlier) are awaiting replies from a wide variety of magazines. There’s one particular (and major) magazine that has been sitting on my new submitted story for quite a while now… I’m cautiously optimistic, given that their usual turnaround time is just a day or two.

All in all, this has been the most productive stretch of my life, writing-wise. Perhaps it’s the near-isolation, or the sheer emptiness of my living space (my studio isn’t big, but it looks huge without 97% of my stuff), or the fact that the weather is finally good enough to go on looong walks (think 2-5 hours) without being threatened by the elements – just walking and thinking and meditating on new plots and absorbing random new experiences. (Quebec City didn’t get its T-shirt weather till late May. I love this town, but I swear, the spring is getting colder every year.)

Or maybe it’s none of those things, and the wacky desert adventure, where each day had more new experiences than a fortnight in this town, reshuffled my brain and finally helped me internalize the way the narrative process works. I had so many stranger-than-fiction encounters in that desert… I miss it.

Or maaaaybe the secret factor here is that I’ve been doing a helluva lot of reading. In addition to going through my gigantic “to read” list (it’s in triple figures!), I’ve also been devouring the Wolrdcon finalist packet. Worldcon is the biggest annual sci-fi/fantasy convention (held in Seattle this year), and since they picked me for their short film festival, I figured I might as well go for the full event, not just for one day. $275 bought me full membership privileges, the convention pass (it’ll be so much fun to finally meet all my favourite authors), and the PDF versions of all the short stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels (and many other categories) that made it to the final round of voting.

I take my newfound responsibility seriously, which is why I’m reading all of them. Every last one. They are delicious, eh. Currently almost done with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Service Model” – that novel is an absolute blast. (Think Wall-E mixed with Fallout.) I’ve literally laughed out loud – and often – while reading it. Five stars, highly recommended.

So, yeah, inspiration galore. About a week from now, I’ll move into my new apartment (it’ll have a balcony! but no bathtub…) and get all my things from storage, and my life will once again have Netflix, and video games, and other time magnets. Here is hoping the new habits will stick.

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Five years in Canada

Filed under: year in review — Leave a comment
March 27, 2024

Today is the first day of my sixth day in this beautiful country. Time flies, eh. I could’ve posted something yesterday but I was far too busy spending time with my partner and learning cool new stuff at a very special event later in the evening. Life is good!

Five years and a day ago, I made this short blog post to commemorate the end of my epic road trip from Seattle allll the way to Toronto. (It was epic. Would definitely do it again.) Incidentally, that meticulous record-keeping also came in useful when dealing with immigration paperwork later on. Huzzah! But anyway – that day, that crossing of the border still seems so recent in my memory…

A lot has happened since then. I had a couple of great partners, and buried two romantic interests, and ended up in a police interrogation room, and almost killed a cop trying to break into my apartment (on a separate occasion, it should be noted), and survived the first global pandemic in over a century. (While keeping meticulous daily records thereof for 406 days.) Got my Canadian residency, applied for citizenship (any day now!), quit Amazon, started my early retirement. Published a lot of e-books. Finished my sci-fi novel. (Still looking for an agent!) Oh, and hiked from Mexico to Canada, huzzah! Spent a year learning French at the local community college. A very eventful five years, to say the least.

I won’t even try to imagine how much wilder and more different my life will be in another five years, in that kinda-sorta-not-really distant year of 2029. I just know it won’t be anywhere close to what I have now. Will I have hiked and triumphed over the Continental Divide Trail and the Appalachian Trail, securing my Triple Crown achievement? Will I have become a published sci-fi author? Will I have done something so wild and cool that I can’t even imagine it right here and now? Hell, I hadn’t even know the Pacific Crest Trail was a thing until three months before I started hiking it. (I move fast.)

I love it here… Canada ain’t perfect – no country ever is – but it’s so much more sane, more safe, more civilized than the United States. And since the US will have Trump on the ballot for the third time in a row, there’s a fair chance things south of the border will get even more bizarre and chaotic in the next four years. The steadily growing anti-abortion movement is downright insane: they showed their cards a bit too early when they outlawed in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in Alabama earlier this year. Wild. Wild wild wild. They really do want to create Gilead, don’t they?..

Quebec, and especially Quebec City, is all I’ve ever wanted when I dreamed of a quiet, cheap, and exotic retirement destination. It’s so damn beautiful here… A whole alternate history. Even the locals look different, thanks to the overabundance of French genes from way back when. (Check out this wiki article on the “King’s Daughters” initiative – it’s so incredibly strange.) I love it here, and my pidgin French is slowly but surely getting better, woot!

Five-year plans… As someone born in the Soviet Union, I suppose that’s just part of how I see the world. And as someone who (thanks to the Soviet Union) grew up surrounded by pollution and radiation, I don’t think I’ll set any world records for longevity. How many more five-year stretches do any of us have ahead of us? The other day, on Reddit, a fellow thru-hiker said he measures his remaining life in summers: how many more healthy, active summers does he have left to thru-hike? (His two main interests in life are thru-hiking and the FIRE movement. Love it.) And that’s… a sobering way to look at things.

I am now 37. Realistically, if I stay in shape and eat my veggies and protein (side eye to the broccoli and mushrooms I bought two days ago and still haven’t even touched), that’s five more five-year stretches where I can be active and proactive. I imagine things will slow down a bit in my mid-60s. That’s 25 more summers, or 25 gigantic adventures, and many many more smaller ones. That’s quite a lot, but it’s also quite limited.

Just being greedy and overthinking things, I know. It’s entirely possible that some tourist driver unfamiliar with the local pedestrian crossing rules will shatter my legs with his SUV (had a few close calls last summer) and make this entire section of this blog post a prime example of hubris. Or maybe they’ll finally invent blood-borne nanobots with the ability to regenerate any cellular damage, and we’ll all live forever as paragons of health. Or maybe yet another unnoticed asteroid will swoop in, score a direct hit, and none of this will matter. Life can be random, no?

And so, off to year six. On a smaller scale, and just today, off to do more gaming and reading and hanging out with my partner. Here is to small triumphs and big victories, and every damn thing in between.

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Yes, I really do live in Canada on just $1K USD a month

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March 18, 2024

Hello, new friends! – assuming you’re here because you googled my name after seeing or reading the news. Everything you’ve read and heard is true: I do, indeed, live quite happily on $1,000 USD a month – or somewhere around $1,354 CAD as of this writing.

How? Geographical arbitrage. If you’ve never heard about it, I’m happy to be the one to blow your mind with that amazing concept. I first learned about it from Tim Ferriss’s 2007 book “The 4-Hour Workweek.” That book is brilliant, it aged quite well, and it’s filled with fun ideas: setting up and outsourcing a business, or hiring a virtual assistant, or moving someplace much cheaper where you can enjoy the same (or even better) standard of living, aka geographic arbitrage. I don’t think Ferriss ever considered that one of his readers would move from Reno to Las Vegas to Fort Worth to Tampa to Seattle to Toronto to Quebec City in pursuit of that dream, but hey – that totally worked. (And yes, just typing up that list of cities took me a while.)

2008 was a bad time to be a brand new college graduate, especially in Nevada – the ground zero for the housing bubble. That’s how, after 18 months of hustling and bustling and trying to juggle broke roommates, I got a gig as a seasonal box packer at an Amazon warehouse in November 2009. I packed a lot of boxes, got my permanent badge, and eventually got promoted to a data geek in my warehouse’s quality department…

Each time I moved and launched a new warehouse for Amazon, I received a cash bonus. As their bottom-level warehouse-based analyst (level 3 out of 12, where 12 = CEO), I never made much ($15/hour or less, usually), but there was always lots of overtime, and the annual cash bonuses for moving were nice… After three years, the twice-yearly pay raises for hourly employees stop, which was the main reason I ultimately transferred to corporate in Seattle. (At that point, I was L4, aka the lowest lifeform on the corporate ladder outside the warehouse world.) That position finally got me some sizable stock options, though – once again – I never made $100K, even if you add the stock on top of my unimpressive salary.

That whole time, I lived frugally, and contributed 10% of my paycheck to 401k (a retirement account in the US) while also trying to max out my Roth IRA (another type of retirement account), cooking at home, avoiding food trucks and food delivery (I still maintain that food delivery is a profligate scam), and generally being a good little saver. There were months when I’d switch my 401k allocation to 90%, just to turbocharge my retirement account while living off my savings. There were two dirt-cheap tropical vacations to Costa Rica – staying in hostels and traveling around the country by bus… Good times.

I’d always had the idea to retire early – recently, an old college roommate confirmed I’d voiced that notion even when we were both 20. There wasn’t much to do for fun during the Great Recession, so I overdosed on personal finance blogs and books, and came up with my own motto: Earn More, Spend Less, Invest the Rest. That’s also one of the main ideas in my book on personal finance, “Let’s Retire Young: Embrace Simplicity, Escape the Rat Race, and Achieve Lean-FIRE.” (While you’re there, check out my other Kindle e-books!) “FIRE” stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early” – and lean-FIRE is retiring early on a very lean, frugal budget. A bit like a modern-day monk, or a grad student – but permanently.

One key obstacle to FIRE fans in the United States is healthcare. That was one of the main reasons I tried getting a transfer to another, more civilized country – and after many attempts, it finally worked. (At Amazon, L4’s aren’t taken very seriously; likewise for our international transfer requests.) In March 2019, I moved from Seattle to Toronto (that was one long drive!) after the company helped prepare all the paperwork to get me a job as a financial analyst (still an L4) at a warehouse in Toronto’s suburbs.

Long story long, I worked and patiently waited for the required two years before I could get my Canadian PR (permanent residency): before that, I’d been in the country on a work permit, which meant if I lost the job, I would’ve had to go back to the US. (That would have been suboptimal.) I got my long-awaited PR in April 2021. I’d spent my 2020 selling my small stockpile of Amazon stock, investing in companies that were severely undersold during the covid market crash, and making a 193% return the following year. By April 2021, I had all the ingredients in place: just enough cash to retire early + a permanent resident status in Canada + a nice safety net in the form of my two US-based retirement accounts (they’ll keep growing for the next 22 years, till I can start withdrawing from them) and my fully funded Social Security benefits. The latter isn’t enough to live on in the US, but that alone could pay for my frugal lifestyle.

After leaving Amazon in May 2021 (ironically, right after the long-awaited promotion to L5: too little, too late), I hung out in Toronto for a bit, and then moved to Quebec City in September 2021. Why Quebec City? Well, let’s just say there was a reason I had become a financial analyst – it wasn’t just because of my seniority… I did a lot of research: the province of Quebec had the lowest rent in all of Canada. Within the province, two cities stood out: Sherbrooke had the cheapest rent of all (roughly $450-500 CAD for a studio apartment with all the utilities), while Quebec City had the second-cheapest. Quebec City was a little bigger and a lot prettier, and so…

My shiny 1-bedroom apartment is spacious and nice, on the second floor of a quiet brick building in the center of the city, within walking distance of everything. I live without roommates, and my rent is $674 CAD a month ($498 USD). The water and internet bills are included, and I pay only for electricity (or hydro, as they call it in Canada). With that sole bill and with the renter insurance, my total monthly rent is $734 CAD or $542 USD. That’s unheard of elsewhere in Canada, I know – and you might have a hard time believing it, but look it up – go on Facebook Marketplace, select Quebec City (or Lévis – the town right across the river), and search for “louer” – “rent.” You’ll find many other deals in that price range, and rental rooms for $450 CAD or thereabout.

Feel free to call me a liar. I know, these numbers look ridiculously low, but hey – Quebec is an awesome province with very strong rent control, and geographic arbitrage is a beautiful thing. You’ll have to learn French if you want to live here, but it’s not too hard: I speak passably decent pidgin French after just a couple of years here. You can too, eh. (The local francisation program will pay you $200 CAD a week to attend a community college – cégep – full time for a year to learn the language and the customs of your new home. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than DuoLingo.)

And so, $734 CAD for rent. My cellphone bill is $64 CAD, but I can probably lower it a bit if I try. My grocery budget is $300 CAD a month, and even that is too much: I cook at home, take advantage of sales, and live healthily yet simply. (Yes, I eat meat.) I also brew my own red wine, which is ridiculously cheap and fun. My budget also includes $100 CAD a month (or $25 CAD a week) on going out to eat. If/when I spend less than planned on groceries, that $95 CAD weekly budget ($70 + $25) goes into more trips to local diners and bakeries. The total so far is $734 + $64 + $300 + $100 = $1,198 CAD, or $884 USD. That leaves a whopping $156 CAD for random, non-going-out, non-grocery expenses, and that’s plenty enough.

It helps when you deliberately choose not to have a car: I sold mine shortly after leaving Amazon, and I never looked back. The cost of insurance + gas + parking + maintenance + the low-key stress the car might get stolen… I don’t miss any of that. Quebec City is remarkably pedestrian-friendly, and there are buses all over the place. (I use up one $3.40 CAD bus pass per week to get my groceries.)

For entertainment, I use public libraries, YouTube, and my book collection. For exercise, I walk around town and do body weight and dumbbell exercises at home. And yes, I do have a girlfriend – I’m not some chronically single weirdo living in a basement. The two of us are happy.

A few weeks ago, a journalist from Business Insider found one of my old Reddit posts (where I detailed my $1K/month plan) and asked for an interview, and I happily obliged. You can read it over here. In a matter of days, MSN reposted the article, then Yahoo Finance reshuffled a few words and reposted it too (that was quite funny), and then a local news channel based out of Montreal reached out for an interview too… Here it is – they mispronounced my name, but they got the story across, and that’s all that matters!

I genuinely hope that others will look into these concepts – FIRE, lean-FIRE, geographic arbitrage, and so many others – and will take steps to at least simplify their finances, if not move to an exotic new town/country/continent and retire early, a few decades ahead of the arbitrary schedule we’re supposed to follow for some reason.

My plans for the next couple of years include, in no particular order:

  • finding and agent to sell my newly finished science fiction novel, “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide”
  • writing my second science fiction novel! (See the blog post just before this one.)
  • hiking the Continental Divide Trail (my Pacific Crest Trail adventure in 2022 was glorious, and now I’m hooked)
  • joining the Canadian Army Reserves to help my new country fight natural disasters
  • joining a huge local community garden to level up my gardening skill and get a share of their vegetable harvest when it’s done
  • and much, much more…

There will, of course, be those who refuse to believe me, or – as the meme goes – will not be stopped by this blog post because they can’t read. Nonetheless… A very quick FAQ:

Q: Aha! You worked for Amazon, you rich tech-bro, you! That’s how yo managed to retire at 34!
A: Technically, that’s not a question… But no, like I said above, I never made $100K USD even if you add up my salary and stock grants. In fact, I’m pretty sure I never even made the median salary in any city I ever lived and worked in.

Q: You got lucky with your apartment, and you’re grandfathered in, and you’ll never find that deal again! Why are you bragging about this?
A: My apartment is, admittedly, cheaper than average, but you can find many others in this price range. And I moved here just 2.5 years ago: it’s not like I’ve been renting it since the 1960s. In fact, the rent has already gone up, technically: electricity (hydro) used to be included in the rent when I first moved in. There are many other deals like this.

Q: I can’t read, and squiggly characters confuse me! Where the hell do you live on $1K a month, Nunavut?
A: Nope – in the beautiful Quebec City. Sherbrooke is even cheaper! Also, that’s $1K USD, or $1,354 CAD – not $1K CAD.

Q: You lie! You got a huge inheritance, didn’t you? Didn’t you?
A: I did not, my cynical friend. Despite having buried my biological father and two stepfathers, the most I ever received from any of them was a collection of cool gems (not diamonds, no) and a beaten-up old bicycle. Also, a couple of worn white T-shirts. No riches or deeds to abandoned farms, sorry to disappoint.

Q: What the hell do you even do on that kind of budget? Sit around and watch the paint dry?
A: I do quite a lot, actually! I’m in the best physical shape of my life now, I do a lot of reading and listen to tons of fun podcasts (we live in the golden age of podcasting), I practice my photography and tinker with a couple of musical instruments, I play video games (classics are cheap, if not free), I volunteer at a local non-profit, and so much more… There’s a lot of fun stuff you can do without spending a penny. I hope someday you’ll find it too.

And with that, I’ll probably wrap up this novella. If you have any other questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to comment here or use the “Contact me” form!

Good luck on your financial journey, y’all.

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The time I spent a year studying French at a Quebecois community college…

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November 4, 2023

It’s been over a week now, and anger has subsided. (See the earlier entry.) I’ll probably get even more perspective on this strange year-long adventure as more time passes, but I may as well jot down some notes here and now.

Quebec is a unique and interesting province, and it’s the only jurisdiction in North America where French is the official language. If you don’t live here (or in Canada), chances are you’ll never see any news reports about all the conflicts, reforms, and counter-reforms related to the French language, the pushback against Anglos (that’s the slang term for English speakers such as moi), and so much more. There’s a lot of rich history, and quite a lot of baggage, both historic and cultural.

You can learn the basics of the local francization program over here, but in a nutshell, the government offers free full-time French courses to all the newcomers, be they refugees, Anglo Canadians from other provinces, or immigrants. To sweeten the deal, they also pay $5 CAD ($3.66 USD as of this writing) per hour for attending those classes. That doesn’t sound like much until you remember it’s 40 hours a week, 10 weeks per course, and four courses altogether. With all the breaks and such, that comes out to exactly one year, and approximately $800 CAD ($586 USD) per month, which is pretty neat, actually.

The course was held at the cégep (a uniquely Quebecois type of community college) on the other side of town because, hey, that was the only opening when I finally got the call. Cégeps are used to educate teens right after high school, and train them either in hands-on skills (there were so many bright-eyed and bushy-tailed paramedic hopefuls!) or something more abstract, like philosophy. The entire francization wing was more or less isolated from the local students – in retrospect, kind of a shame.

The class itself was… slow. Very, very slow. To be fair, I’m not an average student: French was my sixth language (or an attempt at one, anyhow), after Russian, English, German, Spanish, and Japanese. Just about every other student in our class (the size varied between 15-19 students) was a refugee. Some from Latin America, most from Ukraine. (They didn’t hold the war against me after I made my feelings about Russia clear.) I had to constantly remind myself that they didn’t choose to be here: a couple of years ago, they probably wouldn’t have even imagined moving to the exotic French-speaking land just north of New York. Unlike me, they ended up here involuntarily, due to larger-than-life circumstances outside their control.

That is a very long and polite way of saying that there were multiple students who simply didn’t give a damn, or would do their best to disrupt the class, though sometimes accidentally. There was a young European guy with a raging case of… something, who delighted in yelling out his name and basking in the confused attention of the others. Every three minutes or so. There was a fellow American who had a bad case of ADHD and would constantly interrupt the class to say that “Ahh, and in the US, we do it like this” – stopping any and all progress for at least five minutes. (She’d do that about once an hour.) An elderly woman who loudly complained about each and every little thing, nonstop. A young Ukrainian guy who either deliberately trolled the professor or had a genuine learning disability, asking a question every 30 seconds on those rare occasions when we’d get an interesting presentation about local history.

And then there was the fact that one of our four professors was a power-tripping, emotionally unstable maniac. (Once again, see the earlier entry.) It had been 14 years since my university graduation, and the blatant power abuse (and a “shruggie emoji” reaction from the administration) strongly reminded me why I never continued my formal education.

All in all, the year-long course really helped my French – it was definitely more effective than Duolingo and other apps. But ye gods, it moved so slowly, and we received so little actual hands-on practice with oral comprehension… (Because you can’t exactly turn on the subtitles when the local talks to you and you don’t quite get what they mean.) I’m fairly sure I would’ve gotten the same amount of French (if not more) if I’d just taken a burger-flipping job at the local Tim Hortons for three months or so.

Toward the end of our fourth and final course, the cégep simply wanted to get rid of us as fast as possible. The final exam was a joke: not a carefully curated and strict affair like in the previous module, but a free-for-all where the professor looked the other way, and we were all encouraged to cheat and copy each other’s answers. Everyone passed, and I’m quite certain the low scores got fudged so that all 18 of us would get a passing grade and GTFO. Ho hum.

I’ve made a fair amount of progress, though quite a few others didn’t. A big part of that, I believe, was due to the fact that they never really tried to “francisize.” Each day, and constantly, there would be conversations in either Spanish or Ukrainian all around me, non-stop. That’s fine if there’s an emergency, but if you’re just blabbing on about the weather or what’s for lunch… Try saying it in French, eh? And then your friend will try to understand and reply back, and then before you know it, you’ll both get some much-needed practice! I was alone in my desire to speak exclusively in French, and that did not make me too popular. So it goes.

Some of the things I did while waiting for the particularly slow days of class to end:

  • manually copied (yes, by hand) Wikipedia’s articles on electromagnetism and the underlying formulas thereof;
  • wrote a short fantasy story;
  • wrote poetry;
  • read through my entire pocket English-French dictionary, found the shortest words, and wrote down my own mini-dictionary of said words in my notebook;
  • developed a swing-trading strategy for my stocks;
  • improved my doodling skills;
  • wrote down the full text of a beautiful French poem, then its English translation, and tried to learn the fancy book French by staring intently at the two versions;
  • devoured several science textbooks in an attempt to keep my brain sane;
  • compiled several Kindle e-books on my phone;
  • read multiple lists of quotes by my favourite writers and philosophers, then stashed the best of them into text files on my phone;

There was more, I’m sure, but these are the top ones. That should probably give you some idea how much free (or underutilized) time we all had. Ho hum.

Well… I’m glad this is over. No lifelong friendships had been made, though I did meet my amazing, wonderful, absolutely perfect partner back in March, and she (a native Quebecoise) helped keep me sane throughout all this. That alone means the year wasn’t a waste. We went on so many little adventures…

But I digress. Not every huge adventure ends up particularly fun or exciting, so this year-long project will almost certainly rank near the bottom of my eccentric ideas – but hey, at least now I speak passable French. Or try to, in any case. Salut!

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Bonjour, Quebec!

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November 27, 2021

This post is about three months overdue, but I have it on good authority that time is relative. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So much has happened… The move from Toronto to Quebec City was an exercise in organized chaos: I managed to pack all my stuff (including all the small detritus of life that takes up an alarming amount of cubic space) into plastic crates, moved them into the small Uhaul truck I rented, and drove it all the way to QC with an overnight stop at a rest area. (My original estimate of completing the 8-hour move-and-drive by 6pm was wildly optimistic.) Then it was all about unpacking and moving my stuff to that shiny, beautiful second-floor apartment that is my home. Returning the Uhaul. Walking back to the apartment, ogling all the French signs and sights. I hope those first memories will never fade away.

At some point, I’ll probably forget and normalize the memory of my first month here, before I got my furniture (mostly Ikea, and a couple of used furniture stores), but it was pure chaos: sleeping on my mattress on the floor before I finally got one of the last beds available at the local Ikea. (With another Uhaul rental – those things are like cheat codes for everyday life!), then navigating through all the furniture boxes in my living room, then slooowly assembling it all over the course of three days or so. Did you know that there actual online support groups for people who try to assemble Ikea’s Malm dressers? Ask me how I know…

There were casualties: I wasn’t careful with my gaming PC (just yeeted it in the back of the truck instead of securing it on the passenger seat like the precious baby that it is), and something inside got misaligned. The nearest computer repair store fixed it, got it working again, and then held it hostage for four days because the technician didn’t write down how much to charge me. Fun times… Didn’t help that they closed early on Saturday despite telling me earlier that day to stop by at 4. I fought that particular spike of rage by finding a great deal on a used 20-gallon aquarium and acquiring three little guppies to go with it. (And a fancy thermometer. And a big wooden decoration. And a couple of little plants. And an air pump shaped like a volcano. It’s pretty fun, eh.) I’m still figuring out the exact water chemistry, and will probably have to splurge on a tap water filter to make sure they get dechlorinated water when I change it. It’s an ongoing but fun project – and when it comes to the expense/cuteness/stinkiness ratio, fish are far better pets than birds or mammals. (There are also reptiles, of course, but they’re not as cute in my utterly subjective opinion.)

Quebec City itself is beautiful… Just google its pictures and see for yourself: that’s not just one small touristy block, that’s a good chunk of the city, and there’s more beauty in other parts of it, too. All the parks have lots of trails and pathways for pedestrians, bicycles, skateboards, etc. It turns out Duolingo had lied to me, and the Quebec-French is quite different from French-French. The few times I tried saying “enchante” (pleased to meet you) to new acquaintances, the response was mostly “WTF does that mean?” Heh. It’s getting better, though: while I still can’t follow other people’s conversations at parties (just smile and nod!), I can mostly figure out what I’m reading by recognizing the key words.

It turns out the local government pays a $200/week stipend to encourage newcomers (other Canadians, or immigrants like myself, or refugees) to learn Quebec-French and Quebecois culture. It’s an intensive program – five days a week, up to six hours a day, for twelve weeks – but it sounds like an amazing deal. There’s a distinct lack of good apps that teach Quebecois French, and I will have to become fluent anyway… Might as well. Just need to send off some documents on Monday, and then they’ll slot me into the next available class, whenever that might be. Quebec’s government isn’t perfect, but this “bribe to learn” program they’ve set up to preserve and promote their culture and their language is downright brilliant. Kudos, at least on that front.

My PR (permanent resident) card is finally here, after spending seven weeks bouncing between Toronto and Quebec. (My neighbour in Toronto means well, but for some reason he didn’t write his return address on the envelope when he sent it to me.) It’s incredibly shiny and going to make my everyday life a whole lot easier. I celebrated with a meal at my favourite local diner, La Cuisine. Check it out if you ever visit Quebec City: friendly staff, great decor, delicious food, low prices. What more can one ask?

…you know how some movies have that cliché where the main character travels to a strange foreign land and just happens to bump into a local guide that speaks fluent English, has a ton of badass qualities, and is an overall improbably awesome and helpful human being? Turns out that actually happens! My new Quebecois girlfriend is a certified badass that does krav maga, knows how to ride any non-motor thingy that has wheels (roller skates, longboard, etc), loves simple and healthy living, etc. What’s even better is that she’s also open to the idea of becoming a professional nomad, doing her graphic design work on her laptop while vegging out in some cheap tropical country. My life is highly improbable, I know, and for that I am incredibly grateful.

It’s been six months and twelve days since I left Amazon for good. (Unless, of course, they decide to pay me back the 47 shares that they owe me; then I might – might – consider entertaining the preliminary notion of possibly going back.) The time flew by, and I feel so much more relaxed and healthier… This whole “early retirement” thing is great, really. Five stars, would try again, highly recommended. I could stay in the rat race another five or 10 years, become a multimillionaire, get more shiny toys, but I’d never get those years back. You can double your net worth – you can’t double your life expectancy.

To give you some idea of how sweet this life is, the only things on my calendar are:

  1. the final expanse book coming out in 3 days;
  2. liquidating all my stocks in late December because I’m quite convinced there’ll be a major correction by April. (Student loan payments will start up again. People will owe taxes on their huge 2021 gains. None of that is good news. Keep in mind that the dot-com bubble burst in March, when the 1999 taxes were due…)
  3. a cool date at the opera with gf in January;
  4. an equally cool long weekend getaway with gf and her friends at a rented cottage somewhere in rural Quebec in February;
  5. possibly a family reunion in March-April-ish?

In September 2022, I will have lived in Quebec for 12 months, which will make me eligible to join the local Freemason chamber. They’re an odd group, but I like what I’ve learned about them so far. When the world begins to fall apart (sort of like in Vancouver, which is currently inaccessible by road thanks to the flooding and mudslides), it’ll be vital to have a gigantic support network on your side. Prepping and stashing food and guns and medicine is only the first step. The second step is getting to know your neighbours (are they medics? cooks? people with no particular skills but with great vibes?). The third step is acquiring an army: a giant social network you can rely on, no matter where in the world you are. I considered other options, like Scientologists, Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, etc, and decided against them – and Freemasons actually seems like a fun and non-judgmental bunch, and a great way to learn new stuff, and make new local friends, and liven up ye olde social calendar. Too bad they have a strict anti-nomad policy in Quebec, thus the 12-month waiting period first.

At some point, most likely May 2023, I’ll be eligible to apply for my Canadian citizenship, and once I get that, I’ll finally start my life as a snowbird, thus completing my weird, weird metamorphosis. Until then, though, I’ll spend a couple of winters here in Quebec. It’s pretty ironic that the goal of my early-retirement journey was to live someplace cheap and tropical, yet I’ll have to live through the coldest winters of my life (since leaving Siberia in 2003, anyhow) as the last rite of passage. Heh.

And now, after a walk through the snow and a bit of exercise, I’m off to do some more gaming (gf is in Montreal this weekend) – Sunless Skies is both amazing and cheap – while listening to the excellent Ologies podcast (amazing pop science in 90-minute-long increments!), followed by a homecooked meal with a glass of red wine, and maybe another Werner Herzog movie. (It is my new quest to watch everything he’s ever written and/or directed. Two movies down, dozens to go!)

Life is good.

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Plague diaries, Day 22

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April 4, 2020

Saturday evening. Today, gf and I went for an hour-long walk – for once, in the middle of the day and not in the evening. The resort near which we’re staying has been shut down. Normally, there’d be hundreds of people out and around on a sunny day. Instead, we saw only 25-30, walking mostly in couples, keeping their distance from us and others. We looked at a nearby lake and a tiny waterfall before heading back. There’s so little traffic that a family of five deer crossed the road about 100 meters away from us.

I tried to go out and get some more snacks and wine/cider/soda. (We hadn’t stocked up on those because there was limited space in my Kia.) The end result was pretty funny: the resort is one giant tourist trap, with fake-looking storefronts that are open only for pedestrians. The only legal parking spot in the vicinity was a “VIP” parking lot that charged $20 for the privilege. (The only other car there probably belonged to a security guard.) When I made my way into the gaudy tourist trap, it was disturbingly empty: I saw about five people during my 20-minute walk. The sole grocery store was closed – indefinitely, according to the sign taped to their door. The liquor store (SAQ, Quebec’s version of LCBO) simply had a “closed” sign without any promise to reopen. The nearby gas station was also shut down.

The speed limit is low here, so it took a while to drive to the gas station 5 miles away. They were open and had some food and (fortunately) plenty of wine and beer, though no cider. Just for the sake of gallows humour, I picked up a couple of six-packs of Corona. The gas station’s clerks were hidden behind a shield of plexiglass. They wouldn’t accept cash, according to the signs posted at the counter. The barcode scanner was pointed toward customers: you were expected to scan your own purchases and then bag them up into the plastic bags they’d slide your way through the small opening. (They also yelled at me not to touch anything unless I intended to buy it. Admirable vigilance.) It’s the small changes around me that fascinate me: there were no discounts on candy and snacks, and it really looked like the gas station’s owners decided to capitalize on the disaster. ($4.79 for a small bar of milk chocolate, etc.)

The Tim Hortons next door was open for walk-ins (unlike the ones in Ontario, where they’d only take drive-through orders), and they were happy to see me buy a dozen doughnuts. (Hey, it’s the pandemic and my first vacation in three years – you don’t get to judge me.) Once I finally made it home after a two-hour trip, gf and I sprayed everything with Lysol like the virus-avoidant team that we are.

The world is… Well, it’s not getting better. Not really following the news too much anymore. I have a rough idea where this will end up: years of working as an analyst can get you to see big trends long before they happen. In the US, you now need papers to cross state lines. So far, it’s just Texas and Louisiana: there are no real penalties and the enforcement is more like a guideline, but visitors from Louisiana are nonetheless expected to explain why they’re traveling and where they’ll be staying. Meanwhile, in Miami Beach, the police set up four three-person squads to respond to anonymous tips about out-of-towners (New York, New Jersey, etc) who don’t stay put. (No real sanctions either, at least not yet.) It’s too little too late for Florida, since their governor had kept the whole state running so as to avoid losing the spring break profits… 8,383 dead in the US as of right now. At some point in the not-too-distant future, we’ll all look back at this and think of early April as the good ol’ days. Here is hoping states and cities won’t turn on one another.

Gf and I are about to go on Amazon to shop for random things – art supplies, hair scrunchies, hard-to-obtain snacks… Her roommates in Toronto are disregarding all the social distancing rules. One of them brought over three guests; others are saying they should each be allowed to bring “one person you love.” The one roommate who is asking them to reconsider is being made fun of. I know they’re all party-loving extroverts but jeez… This is only their second week (I think) of isolation, and I don’t think they’ll make it. On the upside, gf’s friend’s cough has gotten better, so maybe it was just a cold. So it goes.

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Plague diaries, Day 21

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April 3, 2020

Friday evening. I refresh my tracker for the first time in hours, and the US death toll jumps from 6,066 to 7,084. Only 179 in Canada. 10% of the US population, 2.5% of the US fatalities.

The news keeps getting stranger yet. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, vomited a string of MBA jargon at a press conference yesterday, and said that his math shows New York won’t need additional ventilators. That’s something you’d normally see in a banana republic… Elon Musk had bragged that he’d get Tesla to manufacture ventilators for any hospital that needs them; he ended up buying 1,000 CPAP machines elsewhere instead. (Not what anyone would call a useful alternative.) Justin Trudeau said that Canada will use Amazon to deliver medical supplies. That’s huge: a G8 nation has explicitly admitted that Amazon is more efficient than its own postal system. Ironically, the almighty efficient market didn’t quite get the implications, and Amazon’s stock price closed 0.64% down for the day, like the rest of the market. Heh.

Trudeau also said that after Quebec requested federal assistance (the first province to do so), the Canadian armed forces will be dispatched to the northern part of the province to help isolated communities. (Not anywhere near our AirBnB refuge.) That too is huge news. On top of all that, 3M said that the White House tried to pressure them and keep them from sending masks to Canada. They went public with that instead. A banana republic at its finest… In other news, a train engineer in California took his train off the rails and tried to ram the hospital ship. He came mighty close to succeeding, too: the train came to a full stop just 250 yards away. I expect to see more news about conspiracy nuts losing what’s left of their sanity.

I closed my work laptop an hour ago. My 3-week, 23-day vacation is officially on. (Barring a few days with short consultations of a newbie colleague who is behind on our joint project…) The first vacation over a week long since February 2017. I’d looked forward to it for so long, but never imagined it would be like this. And yes, I’m quite aware just how spoiled I am, to reminisce about an imperfect vacation while millions are sick. (1 million officially, likely many more unofficially.) Well, in any case, I’ll finally catch up on sleep and reading. Not a lot of sunshine in rural Quebec, but there’s plenty of fresh air. No fellow travelers and hostel guests to chat with, but I’m with my favourite person in the world – and I’ve never been much for crowds, in any case. How strange to think that 23 days from now, the world will be in far worse shape while my internal battery will have recharged. Rest and recreation as the pandemic rages.

Gf and I are having more deep, heart-felt discussions in between cooking experiments and binge-watching Le Chalet on Netflix. She’s feeling better after breaking the keto diet, though her heart acts up at random intervals. Just a matter of finding the right electrolyte balance, most likely. With every passing day, we grow a bit closer. If and when this all ends, we’ll move in together – and continue this beautiful, strange adventure.

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Plague diaries, Day 20

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April 2, 2020

Thursday evening. Penultimate day of work before my 3-week staycation. I look forward to it: playing hide-and-seek with gendarmes in rural Quebec isn’t quite what I’d been planning to do, but it’ll still let me catch up on sleep and relaxation. It’s been 3 years since my last real vacation… What a strange world.

Have I mentioned a field hospital going up in the Central Park? Because there’s now a field hospital in the Central Park. There are reports from around the world about cash-waving Americans hijacking shipments with PPE supplies bound for other countries. Earlier today, Trudeau very politely said that Canada is looking into one such shipment hijacked from Canada. Brett Crozier, the captain of USS Theodore Roosevelt, has been relieved of command for the horrible crime of writing a letter stating his ship needs to be docked and quarantined. The ship had roughly 4,800 crew members. He did the right thing, and got punished for it.

Spain has crossed 10,000 deaths. The US has 5,833 as of right now. Ontario is finding more cases even as the death toll stays low at 131. Georgia’s governor claims nobody knew until just now that the virus could spread asymptomatically. That means he’s either playing dumb to cover up his incompetence, or he really is that dumb. (The CDC is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.)

Gf and I venture out for small 15-minute walks around the building to get some fresh air and keep from getting stir-crazy. We started watching a French Netflix show about a group of people stuck in a French village. It describes our current situation fairly well. Gf is feeling better after quitting keto, though there are still random health scares. (Drinking salt water seems to help.) On the upside, her diet is now far more inclusive – we can dine like royalty on our supply of frozen pizzas. 🙂

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