Mousse Blog

Hey there, here I am writing this blog post from my bed, slacking off after my first week as a Montrealer.

So what happened since my last post, something like 5 days ago ? Well, on Tuesday, just as planned, I met up in the morning with the lady from Royal Lepage Relocation, who drove me around in the city for various formalities like getting my NAS, my “Carte Soleil” from the RAMQ (the Quebec equivalent for our Carte Vitale) and opening a bank account at the RBC Banque Royale. She was very nice with me, explaining me lots of stuff.

Of course all this was done using my temporary address in my “appart-hotel” on René Lévesque and I will have to notify everyone when I finally get my own place. And about this, the lady also made me visit 4 or 5 apartments corresponding to what I had told her (location, budget…). A few of them where very cool but I had to make a choice quickly because they were either available right now or on March the 1st. By the end of the day, because Antoine invited me to his place on the Plateau, I decided to phone and try to re-visit one of them. I really liked the apartment in the building called “Le Neuville” located at the corner of Parc La Fontaine and Rachel.

It’s a nice 3 1/2 on the 5th floor, very clean and nicely organized, and with an impressive view on the Parc La Fontaine through huge windows in both the living room and the bedroom. I initially saw it during the day and it was amazing. The Parc is all snow at the moment, and it’s gorgeous, it also gives a lot of light in the apartment :)

And the best things about this place are the equipments and the price. This tower has a laundry room with lots of washers/dryers, a swimming pool and sauna and the price is 850$/month, including water, heating and electricity, and the apartment is already equipped with a fridge and a oven. So that’s pretty cheap (about 575 euros) and I liked it. I just couldn’t resist, even worse when the owner told me I’d better hurry because this very afternoon 5 peoples had already visited it. That’s why I came back, to make sure it was just like in my memories and decided this was going to be my new place ! I gave the guy the classic 100$ advance on the 1st month of rent and I now have to come back before March the 1st to sign the lease, and it will be mine. Only problem right now is, as I just arrived, I have no credit history, so they cannot really trust me, that’s why I will have to pay the 1st two months when signing the lease.

So my main concern right now, is to manage to transfer money from my French account to my newly created Canadian one. And it’s not that easy as they’re using different systems. But I phoned my French bank today and they told me that I could just email/fax them all the informations I could find and that they would take care of it. Gotta love this bank (Monabanq), they really are perfect, too bad I won’t be using them that much now.

Anyway, I will soon have my own place, and things are starting at work. I had a pretty calm week, only a few bugs to investigate/fix, just to browse and poke around in the engine, to get up and running quickly. But things should start for real on Monday, when I’ll have my first “Sprint”. I have no experience whatsoever with “Scrum” or nearly any “Agile” methodology. Can’t wait to discover it.

I also went out a lot this week. Actually, I don’t remember coming back home from work using the “normal” route. In fact, I don’t even know it ! I always went out after work this week. Being for dinner at Antoine’s, Poker night at Laurent’s, movie and drinks with Jean-Sebastien (by the way, don’t ever go and watch the movie “Jumper“, it’s crap), or drinks and chicha smoking with David. Busy week ! And tonight, party at David Baque’s place, it will also be cool indeed.

Quick word about the weather. I think I’m getting used to it. When you leave in the morning and it’s like -20, just equip yourself, and it will be just fine. Anyway, I’m still in the good mood of the “Hey look ! It seems like we are in a big sky resort ! That’s fun !” so I find the weather and snow mostly amusing. We’ll see how it goes in the next weeks or so. But it’s true that I can’t wait for seeing the Parc La Fontaine from my window during the summer, it’s gonna be awesome !

Well that’s all for today folks. Here’s the usual ending: link dropping and video embedding.

My future building: http://www.appartementsamontreal.com/neuville.html

More pics: http://www.appartementsamontreal.com/viewer/Neuvillegalleries/batiment/index.html

Montreal gallery updated: http://gallery.mac.com/thomas.texier/100083

Enjoy the video from Dragonforce - Through the Fire and Flames and the amazing close-ups on the hands during solos: