We moved to Montreal last week. It was a while in the planning, and I’m very happy to be a resident Canadian again. We drove all of our possessions from New Orleans to Montreal in a very large rented box truck in three days. We arrived in the middle of a snow storm (what was the ice storm in Vermont). We moved all our furniture, 22 boxes of books, pots and pans, artwork, clothing, and our 2006 Honda Metropolitan motor-scooter up a slippery set of outdoor spiral stairs in the snow. We found an illegal parking place for our truck, and went to sleep (in the apartment). Our new apartment is much smaller than our house in New Orleans, but it suits me better. It’s in an old building much like many that I knew as a kid, and smells familiar, which must be a product of the age and the building materials I guess. Everyone in our neighborhood (near where I grew up, but in a Frencher area) is so fashionable, it’s going to take a bit of catching up. New Orleans had a questionable influence on my wardrobe.

All are welcome to come visit. We even have a spare bed. I have a new cellphone number but I can’t remember it. I’m so looking forward to starting a new life in my old hometown.

My father writes:

The countryside was gorgeous all weekend after a night of freezing rain and then a cold morning. All the branches and twigs of the trees, and every stalk of grass, was encapsulated by a tube of ice. In the mornings, the low sun glimmered and sparkled off everything. As the sun rose and the ice began to melt off the trees, tinkling breakage was everywhere and the ground littered with half-tubes of “glass” of many diameters. The gound crunched wherever you walked adding sound to the beauty.

Today Tendayi went to work, while I lolled about in wonderful sloth. I went for a long run in a nearby park. I practiced my Shona. Then I had lunch at a bougie-hippy vegetarian restaurant-shop a few minutes walk from Tendayi’s house. The self-serve lunch was delicious, and the fruit juice more so. If I worked around here, I could eat there everyday.

I got to talking to my waiter, Gilbert, who turned out to be from Kenya. All of sudden, it seems, Americans and Kenyans have something big in common: Obama. He said that, after the election, the government declared a three-day holiday, and people were celebrating in the streets, and slaughtering goats and lambs. (Compare this to your own election-day celebrations.)

We also talked about how the election has changed the perception of Americans in Kenya. Gilbert said that before the election, Bush defined “the image of an American” — “when you thought of an American citizen, you thought of George Bush,” and when you saw an American, you judged that he did not care for you as a human being, that he had a “killing heart” — you judged him so “not because of what he did, or what his father did, but because of this other man, his president.” These were somber and sobering words, delivered with an innocent grin. But now, Gilbert said, “if you are American, people welcome you into their house, treat you as their own.”

I look forward to returning to the veg-restaurant. But dining in this area can be uncomfortable. It is a mostly white neighborhood, and the restaurants are geared towards the local well-to-do class. As a consequence, restaurants here tend to have exclusively white clientelle and and exclusively black waiters, servers, and cooks. This is not, perhaps, so different from many parts of the US, except that in the US, 68% of the population is white, and 12% black (ref), while in South Africa, 80% of the population is black, and 9% white (ref). It requires rather more of a separationist trick to pull off the split around here.

A 10-minute drive away takes you to Johannesburg’s super-hipster Melville– a completely different story, where the cool kids are thoroughly mixed, in race as well as sexual orientation. It feels more like the dreamt of “rainbow nation” (a slogan that seems to ring loudly in everyone’s ears around here). More on Melville, and the slogan later.