I really enjoyed my brief visit to Canada. Almost all the people I met were perfectly polite and charming, the weather was beautiful and my arrangements all went as planned. But there were one or two odd aspects to the place.

Quebec is a mostly French-speaking province, in a mostly English-speaking country. But while the rest of Canada bends over backwards to be multi-lingual, with French and English on their road signs, in their advertising and in their public announcements, Quebec has a very aggressive policy of using only the French language. For everything.

This strikes me as very childish, contrary to the general Canadian niceness that I spoke about, and ultimately counter-productive. By demanding that the English-speaking minority conduct their lives entirely in French, the Quebec provincial (in both senses of the word) government risk engendering significant resentment against French-speaking people, and ultimately backlash from the rest of Canada.

In fact, in Montreal most people are bi-lingual. I speak a little French, but I never had any problems communicating with anyone. Regardless of the edicts of their government, the people seem to recognize that speaking English to those who naturally communicate in that language does not destroy the unique character of Quebec.

I am writing this in January in New York. The temperature outside is 7 degrees Fahrenheit - minus 14 Celcius - and even when I wrap up in several layers of thick clothing to go out, I still find that my face stings with the cold.

But the Canadian border is nearly 400 miles to the north of here, and the whole of Canada stretches further north still. How can people live in a climate like that?

The weather while I was there was beautiful - pleasant tempertures and near-cloudless skies. But my Montreal friends told me that this was likely to be the last weekend of the year when they could enjoy being outdoors. Montreal life would shift to being lived in entirely enclosed spaces for something like the next six months. Even if that were possible it does not seem a satisfactory way to live.

Sometimes in winter I question my sanity for wanting to live in New York. The idea of somewhere even colder is a concept so unthinkable that all the niceness in the world couldn't compensate for it.