Living in Laval - La vie à Laval

So says a Sunnyvale, California resident interviewed for this interesting piece in Details magazine, a mens’ magazine my better half Paul subscribes to/clutters our small living room with. Here’s to new beginnings!

We too are heading for the suburbs, in Fabreville, a north-western sector of Laval. In one of the last corners of the Greater Montreal area, where vacant land is still available (mais pas donné!) we set about building our new home, where we’d have our own home office, a real working wood fireplace, a kitchen large enough to host decent-sized dinner parties, and get this- drink water straight from the tap.

The decision to get some bigger digs elsewhere, say, suburbia, was reached over some Pilsner Urquell, the twinkling Montreal skyline behind us, sometime after we had held a cramped Christmas party for a couple dozen of our friends. Even though we don’t plan on starting a family yet, even though the trek to work would be much longer, we craved our own enclave where the closest neighbour had more than a mere hallway’s length between us and where we could comfortably fit in a drum kit.

Of course, the reality of exchanging our taste for the finer things Montreal had to offer- the proximity to Atwater market, 10-minute drives to work, New System BBQ chicken - made the decision difficult. We, too, snootily thought of suburbia as a culturally barren no-mans-land where we left behind our babysitters and 5th-grade crushes, and where decent cocktail bars simply didn’t exist. At least if we stayed ON the Island of Montreal, there’d be some good housing to be had. And it sure is true, except we poor mice were priced out of these lesser evils of suburbia.

Having gotten to know our new neighbourhood, though, has taught us that perhaps we were thinking of culture in narrow terms. This spring, we’ll live adjacent to lovely Vieux Ste-Rose and do our shopping at the local organic farms. We still haven’t found any wine bars, but we did accidentally come across an entire vineyard! I look forward to reporting back on the fantastic places that earn our patronage. In this respect the suburbs are no different than the city- one needs to look in the nooks and crannies between the local Second Cup and Mega Centre to uncover the hidden cool.

Happy weekend everyone!