This post was going to announce my great regret in misreading, in passing, the posted class schedule at the gym, because I temporarily misinterpreted “Pilates” as “Parkour” and got unreasonably excited.  Somewhere there must be a great sociological study written about the complex quebecois assumption of Franco-European identity.  Montreal is constantly, vaguely identified as a very European city, and native francophone residents of Quebec will not identify themselves as Canadians: they speak French; nous sommes Québécois! And while France and Quebec tend to look askance at each other across the Atlantic (culturally speaking), our stores are still stocked with French soaps, even the smallest groceries carry multiple kinds of duck fat and liver pâtés, and the dominant brand of detergent in our building’s laundry room is most definitely la Parisienne.  And so, I thought it very amusing that — as another one of those artifacts of almost-but-not-really Frenchness — the local YMCA had sandwiched classes in the very French l’art du déplacement among the yoga, dance, and martial arts offerings.

Except when I looked up the schedule of our Y branch online just to make sure, they do have Parkour.  It’s just under the Youth section.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 10:58 am and is filed under bits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.