Learning Why "We Remember" and Learning More About the Fur Trade

In the last week of my Magellan in Montreal, I waited to go to Montreal's flagship museum of archaeology and history with a fellow W&J student who was completing her own Magellan focusing on the history of the city. The museum opened with a fifteen minute or so long video that detailed the vast experiences of the French colonial city that became usurped by the British, invaded by the American revolutionaries, and nonetheless prospered with its unique identity intact. Keeping their own identity is a mainstay of the mindset French Quebec as a whole. Even their words on their license plates "Je Souviens" means "We Remember" our identity, our French heritage. 

Other than the decently large number of language options available in the headset, the most striking thing about the presentation was how the video's narrator spoke as if she was the city herself, and that led to a slightly more emotional telling that allowed you to see the growth of the town through the city's personified eyes.

 After the video, you weave through hundreds of years of history starting in the lower floors and making your way up to modern times, and eventually to their current selection of temporary exhibits. Through dioramas of the town that the museum had built into the floor, one could see the quick growth of the "foolhardy venture" that Montreal undertook to become the wealthy and influential city it is today. Quebecois were unhappy and powerless as the upstart Montreal survived and prospered despite its proximity to initially hostile Iroquois tribes to become the premier Canadian city operating in the fur trade.  

A Surprise Closing and a Surprise Show

Unfortunately this has been sitting as a draft for about a month due to some laptop troubles with the laptop I took with me to Montreal. This day, I had a singular purpose. It was to visit a well-known and highly recommended fur store called Dubarry Furriers. The shop has a great story of being a passion shared by father and son and being a family-owned furrier for two generations. While that is relatively short span for a city celebrating its 300 year anniversary this year, two generations of performing a highly specialized and slowly dying business that competes against dozens of other boutique stores thousands of mass produced fake furs is still an accomplishment. Even better, their prices are superb according to everyone who has every recorded a customer review on the internet, and their quality is supposedly equally unmatched. With the great reputation, prices, and after checking their hours twice, I set out for Viex Montreal to visit their store. 

Along the way, I passed the Notre-Dame Basilica and stood in awe of its grandeur...and also had to constantly stop as dozens of horse-drawn carriages clogged the road shuttling tourists. I took advantage to take a few photos of the basilica's facade and the courtyard while I was there, and made my way to the shop. Only, when I got there, it was closed with no signs of life in the building. I had checked the hours twice! My first thought was "how unprofessional, a store in the US actually keeps their posted hours!" After my couple moments of anger-laced disappointment, I decided to try again another day, and after I talked to my host, I learned the trick is to always call the store to make sure since Montreal stores' posted hours are not as sacrosanct as they are here. 

A Magical Exhibit and A Magical Moment at McGill University

On this action packed day I went to the Redpath and McCord Museum due to their close proximity to each other in downtown Montreal. The Redpath Museum (which is not the Redpath Hall pictured in the next couple photos as I originally thought) is owned by and is part of the campus of McGill University. Unfortunately but interestingly, I accidentally chose to visit the university during its graduation ceremony for its students. I felt that I was intruding on a proud but private moment, but it was amusing to see the bagpipe player lead a procession of new graduates through the streets of Montreal. I actually got trapped for about twenty minutes on the steps of the Redpath Museum since I thought it would be incredibly rude if I were to try to break through a graduation procession. I treated it like a funeral procession and I refused to get in the way, and so I simply watched them pass by and snapped a few photographs and a video. 

After I escaped McGill, I felt bad and bought a hat from a student merchandise tent they had set up, and then it was on to the McCord Museum. Slightly less eclectic than the collection of the Redpath that included taxidermy animals, fossils, minerals, mummies, and even some Etruscan urns, the McCord had three exhibits at the time. Native Peoples and their culture through their clothing, a collection of magic advertisement posters from the Golden Age of Magic, and a collection honoring the forty-year career of a political cartoonist named Terry Mosher (more about him when you get closer to his exhibit's photographs).  

Invading Canada and Invading the Market

Yesterday, I visited the Chateau Ramezay which has a storied history of being the residence of Montreal's governor in 1717, Ramezay (for which the chateau was named), the home of subsequent French West Indies Company, British invaders and administrators, and even a seven-month stint as the wartime headquarters of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. As such, it has exhibits that explained the history of early Montreal and showed a diorama of the Iroquois village that likely existed before European settlement. It then moved on to the early founders of Montreal and those that transformed Montreal into a industrious colony of France that centered mainly around the lucrative fur trade, especially of beaver pelts. After the exhibits dealing with the fur trade, Montreal's first influential citizens, and how they dealt with and traded with the native people, they showed artifacts such as British officer uniforms and the like to show Montreal's invasion and subsequent surrender to British forces. Of course, being a citizen of the United States and going through the trouble of obtaining an American Studies concentration, I found it especially entertaining learning of the Chateau Ramezay's time in the possession of the Continental Army. According to the audio tour, the only thing that kept the colony loyal to Great Britain was Great Britain's own strategy of preemptively placating Montreal's main complaints against the crown in 1774. Alternatively, it may also have been the small pox ravaging the American forces attacking Quebec, but in either theory the result was that Canada did not become the fourteenth state of our great union.

While the Chateau Ramezay was my main objective for the day, I also happened upon two unexpected places while trying to return to my metro station through the labyrinth of city construction project, closed roads and sidewalks, and detours. First I encountered the Mache Bonsecours a building that has served as a public market, a concert hall, Montreal's city hall, and even the Parliament of Lower Canada. It became a permanent public market in 1859 and today it houses a dozen or so boutique stores, a tiny museum, and a few restaurants. Technically I visited this site second, but the first photos I took were with my phone and so you will have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see its beautiful grey dome. I visited each of the little boutiques and enjoyed a productive, if expensive, shopping day that included some handmade crafts from Canada's local native peoples and a special tea sold here called Icewine Tea, which I am excited to try when I return home. Luckily a quick call home prevented me from dropping a few hundred dollars on a fur scarf or fur "hat ring" (it wasn't going to be for me, but I thought it looked nice). Either way, I enjoyed walking through the trendy, narrow hallways of the boutique mall and I felt good about buying certified Canadian handicrafts rather than "Canadian" souvenirs made in China.

The third location was the tiny Notre-Dame-De-Bon-Secours (sharing the last part of its name with the market) whose beauty is better expressed by pictures, so enjoy!

Traveling Through the Biodome and Traveling with New Friends

Today included a journey through three different ecosystems, a four-hour wait in line to see said ecosystems, and a trip through the dark past of my Jewish heritage. All in all, it was an exciting and expansive day. To the great relief of my mental state while waiting in that line (it was Montreal Museum Day and free museums equates to disturbingly long lines) I was joined by a fellow Magellanite, Jess, who just happened to have picked the same dates and city as me. After a sweltering wait in the heat and beaming sun, we were welcomed into the ecosystem of the tropics. Almost a cruel joke to leave the heat of outside, enter the air-conditioned lobby, and return to an even more hot and humid area, Jess joked that making the tropical ecosystem the first upon entry a design flaw.

After journeying through the humid heat of the tropics, the next ecosystem of the Biodome was a Laurentian Maple Forest that was thankfully cooler. In each of the ecosystems, we were surprised to see as many animals as we did. We had both thought the Biodome was part arboretum and part greenhouse, we had no idea that actual animals were present and we were happy to find out that we had stepped into a miniature zoo as well.

After our minor bout of dehydration and sunburn (some people suffered more than I did), we ate at a diner, realized our trip to the Biodome had hemorrhaged our time more than expected for the day and decided we could only make one of the two museums we had wanted to go to for the rest of the day. To put the time spend waiting for and wandering through the Biodome into perspective, we started out at a little earlier than 10:00 AM, and by the time we had sat down to hydrate and eat lunch (the first time either of us had eaten anything all day up until that point) it was past 3:00 PM.

The Biodome from a distance

Humble Beginnings and Humble Buses

First off, I would like to say that exchanging a simple hour or so flight (even though the shortest would have taken about two and a half hours due to a layover between Toronto and Montreal) for about 24 hours of bus travel was a mistake. A great, money-saving, mistake. Granted, the $200 plus dollars I spent on busing here saved me plenty of money to do more in Montreal, but I never understood the emptiness of bus travel until today. My convoluted journey from Pittsburgh to Montreal was by way of  Pittsburgh to Youngstown, Youngstown to Buffalo, Buffalo to Syracuse, Syracuse to Ottawa, and Ottawa to Montreal. That ordeal included the use of five buses, a five hour layover in the most barren bus station known to man in Youngstown, and a route that started by taking me further from my destination. It made getting to Montreal all the sweeter when I finally arrived, and offered a much different experience that my previous flights.

Even though I fear this is more of the same, I feel it necessary to describe what I meant by a "barren bus station" in Youngstown. To start off, I am pretty sure that the bus station was actually closed for the majority of the time I was waiting there, and the single guard there was friendly enough to let me stay. There were no restaurants, tiny convenience stores, or any of the usual fare you would expect of a bus station or airport terminal. Instead, besides the central circular desk that was the pulpit of the armed guard, the station's interior has a semicircle of about 7 or 8 vending machines that ranged from the usual snacks and drinks,to a coffee vending machine that reminded me far too much of the one from Better Call Saul's opening episodes. After I had been sitting there for maybe a half hour, the guard suggested I get food from a deli a couple blocks away and told me he would be watching for me to unlock the doors for me when I returned. I happily obliged, and when I got to the "deli" which is deserving of its dubious quotations, I was surprised to see it was a deli/convenience store. Apparently in Youngstown, Ohio, a deli/convenience store equates to fried chicken, cigarettes, a shocking amount of booze, and admittedly, a pretty solid convenience store component. I was a little upset not to be getting pastrami or corned beef on rye, but at least I was able to buy some premade pepperoni rolls and use their microwave. Then I returned to the station, realized I had to kill four more hours on a backless bench, and promptly drained 80% of my cell phone's battery watching That 70's Show while balancing my phone on a window sill and sitting backwards on a bench.

Lake Ontario after we crossed the border.

About This Trip

I abandoned my standard naming scheme, partly because it is hard to come up them sometimes and partly because this indicated more of an informative tone than one about my adventure. So for the about me part and the explanation of what a Magellan Project is in the first place, I would like to refer you to two previous posts under my Malta Magellan Project label. Even though I like to think I did a good job in explaining what a Magellan Project is in the past, that tells you little about why I undertook this specific one to Amsterdam. In the simplest terms, my Magellan Project was to visit areas of Jewish Heritage in Amsterdam, understand the difficulties the Jews and the average Dutchman faced under Nazi occupation, and to see firsthand both the contributions the Jews had made to the city of Amsterdam and see the Dutch "freedom of conscious" which allowed all faiths to practice freely long before any other European nation albeit quietly.

If that was not long enough of a history lesson or reason to satisfy you, here is also an excerpt from my original proposal to visit Amsterdam referring to World War II and the Holocaust :

Unsurprisingly, Jews with the means to leave Germany left as swiftly as they could to any country that would take them. The Netherlands, again, showed its sympathy and willingness to help the persecuted Jews from Germany and Austria and took in between 25,000 to 34,000 Jewish refugees. At this time, the Jewish population of the Netherlands represented two percent of The Netherland’s total population, even before they took in the refugees. Unfortunately, Hitler’s hatred of the Jews compared only with Hitler’s thirst for conquest and by 1941, the Netherlands had fallen under Nazi occupation.

            Even under occupation, the Dutch showed remarkable compassion towards its fellow Jewish citizens. Despite the difficulty to hide Jews in the most densely populated country in Europe, many heroic Dutch took it upon themselves to attempt to hide their Jewish neighbors wherever they could. The most famous case of which is the diarist Anne Frank hiding in the attic of a Dutch family alongside her sister Margot. The Dutch were also the first in all of Nazi-occupied Europe to directly rebel against the inhuman treatment of their Jews in the February Strike. This showed that even the Dutch non-Jews understood the plight that the Jews of the Netherlands were facing.

During this time, most Jews were living in Amsterdam which is why this is the destination that my project will focus on. My project is to chronicle, visit, and reflect on the religious tolerance the Dutch have willingly granted to the persecuted Jews of Europe as well as Dutch resistance to the Nazi’s savage attempts to slaughter the Jews within the Netherlands. My travels will include the Anne Frank House, as well as different Jewish museums and those that relay the history of the Dutch resistance to Nazi rule. I also plan to attend a service in one of the Netherland’s many synagogues. The beauty of the Netherlands lies in its explicit desire to be accepting to all religious creeds. In the 1900s Netherlands was referred to as the “Jerusalem of the West” by its Jews, and to this day, the Netherlands remains a destination that is welcoming and accepting of its Jewish population."

If you have any questions please let me know, but in this goal I feel that I have succeeded in seeing all I wished to see. To see the everyday plight under occupation, I went to the Verzetsmuseum, to see Jewish heritage in Amsterdam, I went to the Portuguese Synagogue, the Jewish Historical Center, and the Diamond Museum, and finally to see the most popularized example of a neighbor attempting to save a Jewish neighbor, I went to the Anne Frank House. All in all, my goals were set and they were accomplished.