This summer, inspired largely by Pinterest vision boards, I vowed to be more proactive about whale-watching, organizing spice jars in unexpected ways, and making terrariums with tiny people in them—and also about travel. I’d spent hours at my computer perusing Kayak and plotting imaginary trips to Ireland and Alaska and Costa Rica and Japan. But my globe-trotting ambitions faced two big obstacles. First, I didn’t have a lot of extra dollars to spare. Second, the logistics of finding a travel companion with a compatible schedule, budget, and level of passport validity seemed daunting.

Tired of putting off adventures, I decided to take the solo budget travel plunge. I settled on Montreal for my first run over Columbus Day weekend. It was close enough to New England for a quick jaunt north, had a big blue river and a killer arts scene, and offered opportunities aplenty to eat frites and practice limited French. Going in, I had two big goals: Keep costs down and meet some peeps. I did both! And in the process I added the city of Arcade Fire (but, confusingly, not the city of Of Montreal) to my mental Pinterest dreams. In the end I spent about $345 USD on four nights and three days’ worth of transportation, lodging, food, and good times. For my fellow solo thrifty travelers out there, here’s what I learned. 

If you’ve got a car and it’s not too far: Maybe drive it?
Driving to Montreal and back from Western Massachusetts (a five-hour trip) cost me about $96—a quarter of how much I would have had to pay for a plane ticket. The one downside of traveling by car was dealing with a scary border patrol agent on the return trip. My claim that I had gone to Montreal for fun turned out to be a wild red flag for the agent, who began blitzing me with questions about my personal and professional history. It all reached an apex when she asked about the last time I’d been to Canada.

I thought back. “I went to Vancouver a couple Thanksgivings ago with my family?”
“Why’d you do that? Do you have relatives there?” she said, wrinkling her nose to indicate that nobody in their right mind would venture across the border unless absolutely necessary.
“No,” I said apologetically.
“So why’d you go?”
I knew she wouldn’t like the answer, but there was no way around it. “For fun,” I said.
Then she ordered me to pop the trunk.

Using AirBnB can save a bundle.
This was my first time using AirBnB, and I picked my room based on the following criteria:

• It was cheap: $119 for three nights, including the AirBnB fee, plus a $100 security deposit.
• It was a two-minute walk to the Vendôme subway station, and the reviews said that it was in a safe neighborhood.
• Many previous visitors had showered host P. with praise, which persuaded me that staying with him would be a good way to not get murdered. Clearly I was still a little nervous about getting murdered, however, because searching for “murder” and “Montreal” in my Gchat history brings up seven results.

Spoiler: I did not get murdered! P. was out of town the whole time I was there, so I had the apartment to myself—a clean, spare place with sloping hardwood floors and chipped paint. The guest bedroom had a daybed, brightly colored Haitian art on the walls, paper Ikea lamps, and a little computer station. The neighborhood was nothing special (my block had a Subway, a gas station, and several cell phone stores), but it was well-lit with plenty of foot traffic, so I felt secure walking home alone at night.

Make a meal plan.
I knew I wanted to try some of Montreal’s cuisine—but I also wanted to make sure that eating out didn’t swallow my wallet whole. So before I headed to Montreal, I stocked up on $25 worth of supplies: MacIntosh apples, crunchy peanut butter, a loaf of mysteriously named yoga bread, bananas, a variety pack of instant oatmeal, almonds, and a bag of cheddar soy chips that I devoured in the first 10 minutes of the road trip.

In Montreal, I’d make myself oatmeal for breakfast and pack a sandwich for a lunch-on-the-go. I also carried almonds for emergency snacking. This worked great! Then I just followed my heart (within reason) after 5 pm. Among the good eats I had over four days, for under $70 total: a delicious, life-restoring $2 latte from Casa del Popolo; french fries in a paper cone with little cups of aioli and cauliflower-onion-cornichon mustard sauce; a Brasseurs De Montréal beer packed with ginger and lime; multiple hard apple ciders; a homey bowl of ratatouille with French bread and olive tapenade; a giant plate of Brie, pears, arugula, and baguette slices; a veggie gyro from a hole-in-the-wall Greek restaurant; and a farewell asparagus-and-cheese crepe.

Take advantage of the city’s public transportation.
Cabs are for Carrie Bradshaw and the Grey Poupon man (post-financial meltdown I bet he ditched the limo), and driving is for people who understand where they are going. A trusty public transportation system, on the other hand, can’t be beat. With just four clearly color-coded subway lines, Montreal is a breeze to navigate. I paid $16 for a 3-day pass and zipped all over the city on Montreal’s rail. My feet got some decent pavement-pounding in, too.

Find the free stuff.
Montreal is super-walkable, and I spent a lot of time just wandering around, especially in Mile End. The neighborhood has tons of cool street art—telephone poles papered with Uncle Sam “I want you ignorant” posters; a parking garage covered in black-and-white cartoons of gnomes and dragons; the face of a beaming 1940s-era woman splashed across a brick wall. Mile End also has many cool stores that I could not afford. In one, I admired a ring topped with a lion. When you slid it on, the lion stretched across three of your fingers–the jungle king of brass knuckles. It was $20. I did not buy it, but I can still hear it roaring sometimes.

I got a good fixing of free cultural and historical landmarks, too. One afternoon I visited the enormous, friendly Musee des Beaux Arts, which charges no admission, and ogled paintings by Picasso and Basquiat. Afterward I climbed to the top of Mont Royal, a park created by All the Coolest Parks designer Fredrick Law Olmsted. The summit was like a UN meeting: tourists speaking Spanish and Mandarin and German and English in various accents snapped pictures of the city beneath a powder-blue sky. I also paid $5 for admission to Basilique Notre Dame and sat for a while in a pew, eavesdropping on tour guides and gazing up at the ceiling, deep blue and scattered with stars.

Say yes to strangers.
AirBnB turned out to be not just a frugal choice but a great way to meet people. Since my host P. was out of town, he arranged for his friend M.—a pretty, dark-haired software engineer in her early thirties—to let me into the building. M. showed me where the towels were and gave me the wireless password. Then she paused. “My friends and I going to a bar,” she said. “Want to come?”

It was 11:30 at night, and I was beat after a full day of work and five hours’ drive north. But was I in Montreal for sleeping? “Sure,” I said.

Thanks to M., I had an unforgettable first night in the city: I got to meet a bunch of awesome Montrealers, along with a few Moroccans, one Colombian, and a smattering of French persons. We headed first to Baldwin Barmacie, a pharmacy-themed bar with skinny-jeaned men and women in draped tanks dancing under the glow of little illuminated vials. Later, we relocated to a low-key bar with wood tables shaped like T’s–a genius way to enable large-group conversations. I learned about Quebec politics (contentious) and potholes (the size of your car, sometimes!). Around 3 a.m., the women piled into M.’s car and headed home—but not before stopping on a hill that overlooked the city sprawled large, twinkling in the dark. C., a Colombian fashion designer, pointed out the doughnut-shaped Olympic stadium, the Jacques Cartier bridge, and the dark patch where her apartment was. A., a law student, asked a teenage girl with eyebrow piercings to take our picture. The girl swore as she fiddled with the flash on A.’s smartphone. When it finally went off, capturing the four of us with our arms slung around each other’s shoulders, I thought about how I was just making a cameo in these womens’ lives–but for that night, they made me feel like a regular.

Look up an old pal.
I sometimes feel paranoid about getting in touch with casual friends when I pass through their cities—what if secretly we have become enemies since the last time we talked, and I just didn’t get the notification? Nonetheless, I did a quick search on Facebook to see if I knew anyone in Montreal and found that a friend from my high school French class, M.F., was currently a PhD student at McGill. We met up for dinner on Saturday. After all those speaking scenarios asking for invisible croque monsieurs at pretend cafes, ordering food together at a bistro on St. Laurent felt totally natural. (The bistro also happened to be celebrating its anniversary–every so often our reminiscing was interrupted by a waiter bearing a platter of (free!) mini-pizzas or a magician with a little green card table in tow.) Much to my relief, M.F. and I were not enemies. We were amis, still.

Sit at the bar.
I ate at a bar on my last night in Montreal, planning to take advantage of the cheaper bar menu and read The Tipping Point. Instead, I ended up chatting with the bartender and the motley crew of people sitting alongside me (anarchist guy with his hair in a topknot; businessman working on his laptop; a group of students celebrating a birthday). The students bought a round of shots for everyone perched at the bar, which I’m sure helped increase the chances of camaraderie. The shots were golden and sweet–the kind you can sip if you need to.

Have a project.
If you’re shy but social (much like a hobbit), having a purpose in mind–a web comic, a photo series, a list of your favorite murals or cafes in a city–can inspire you to reach out to new people. I decided that I would write about the trip, which gave me a little extra courage to strike up random conversations. After all, I needed material.

Sarah Todd blogs about feminism and popular culture over at Girls Like Giants. 

The real estate market in Canada—and Toronto in particular right now—is, in a word, bananas. The phrase “housing bubble” appears in headlines in the financial pages here on a near-daily basis, and absurd news stories about bungalows in boring suburban neighborhoods selling for $400,000 over asking abound (ok, there was only one story like that, but still! A bungalow sold for 50 percent over asking). This year, the average cost of a house in Toronto reached half a million dollars.

After spending almost a year trying to buy a house in this city, I have a bit of first-hand experience of just how crazy (and crazy-making) Toronto real estate is.

Expensive houses in Toronto are nothing new. After all, this is Canada’s biggest city and economic centre (for now, at least. Hi, Calgary!), and it’s a nice city to live in despite our current civic administration’s best efforts, but that’s another story. For a long time, the houses that were expensive here made sense—they were big, nice, and in good, convenient neighborhoods. Sure, certain neighborhoods were only affordable to rich people, but it wasn’t impossible to buy a decent little starter home somewhere in the city.

In 2009, when my partner Justin and I first moved in together, we moved to one of those neighborhoods where home prices were still somewhat reasonable. We weren’t ready to buy yet, but the idea was in the back of our minds. We wanted to rent in the area first and make sure we liked it before making a huge financial commitment. And after two years—one year of just enjoying cohabitation and our rooftop deck, and one year of me getting over the paralyzing anxiety that gripped me anytime the subject of home ownership came up in conversation—we realized we did.

But as evidenced by articles published in places like Toronto Life magazine, we may have missed the boat.

We are in a position of great privilege to even be able to consider buying a house in this area. We both work in the increasingly precarious media industry, but neither of us had to worry about paying off student loans, thanks to a combination of scholarships and parental generosity (mostly parental generosity), and we’d each managed to save up a respectable sum to put towards a down payment. And both of sets of parents, possibly viewing it as an investment in getting grandchildren sooner rather than later, offered us significant help in our down payment. Thanks to that and the rock-bottom low interest rates (more on those later), we were pre-approved for a generous mortgage, with monthly payments worked out to less than what we currently pay in rent. This home ownership thing was going to be breeze! And then we started looking.

We found a patient and honest real estate agent who never made us feel like the wide-eyed property virgins we were. Our wants were fairly simple, we thought: Enough rooms for us each to have a modest office space, a good kitchen with a gas stove, a cozy room that could serve as a library, a secluded backyard or deck, lots of light. We were willing to do a bit of work to make the place our own, but we probably couldn’t afford major renos anytime soon, and we wanted to be able to move in right away. And after a few weeks of getting an idea of what was out there (like a house with a mold problem, no insulation, and two gas fireplaces in lieu of a furnace—still asking over $400,000) and what we wanted (not that) we made an offer. It was rejected, but that wasn’t a surprise—without the time to book a home inspection, we’d made our offer conditional on getting one. That should be a reasonable request, but in this market, we were learning, that sort of thing gets you laughed out of a real estate agent’s office.

A couple of months later, we were better prepared. We dropped $300 on a pre-home inspection and, hearts in our mouths, signed off on an aggressive firm offer.

“Are you ready to be home owners?” our agent asked. “I think you will be tonight.”

We went to a nearby bar to drown our nerves in pizza and beer, with cell phone on the table awaiting The Call. After about 45 minutes, it came.

“There are two offers similar to yours,” our agent said. “You can sweeten your offer, leave it as is, or withdraw completely. What do you want to do?”

We’d already discussed this possibility, and we swore we wouldn’t be drawn into a bidding war. We left our offer as it was. We lost the house by $16,000. In any other context that sounds like such a lot of money, but in Toronto real estate, it’s practically nothing.

We tried again, bidding on a small but charming two-bedroom (we would have preferred three, but neither beggars nor Toronto house-hunters can be choosers) semi-detached (we preferred detached). We went through another home inspection ($250 this time, thanks to our inspector’s repeat customer discount), and another aggressive bid. This time, we lost by more than $16,000. This dinky little semi went for $112,000 over the asking price. There was nothing to do but commiserate with the F My Listings Tumblr blog, which outlines the more absurd side of house hunting in Toronto. During our search, the blogger’s frustration and humor were a source of great comfort.

We didn’t have the stomach for bidding wars like that, and when Justin’s workplace announced looming layoffs a couple of months later, we put the search on hold indefinitely. That was in June. We still scan the property listings, but it’s with a far more cynical eye.

But, you ask, why do you need to buy a house you obviously can’t afford, you entitled little brats? Doesn’t Toronto have a plethora of condos? The entitled answer to that is, we don’t want to live in a condo. The practical one is that a condo isn’t necessarily the cheaper option. True, there is a glut of condo construction in Toronto right now, but most of the condo units being built are tiny one-bedrooms, and condo maintenance fees in most buildings are exorbitant and liable to rise at any moment. I’m suspicious of buying a condo in this city for a number of reasons, but it’s the monthly condo fees that freak me out the most. To me, condo fees amount to paying rent on top of a mortgage, utilities, and property taxes. And a lot of would-be first-time homebuyers are being priced out of the condo and townhouse market too!

The rapidly rising market here is similar to what the U.S. housing market looked like before that infamous crash. So are Canadians just in denial about our housing bubble, or is our situation legitimately different from America’s was four years ago? It depends on who you ask, but it’s a little of both.

Canadians, like everyone else these days, are carrying more debt than ever before, but we still tend to cling to a common wisdom that our economy is safe because our banks are tightly regulated, preventing the possibility of anything like the sub-prime mortgage lending scandal that did in the American housing market. So while housing is probably a little bit overvalued right now, an outright crash-and-burn scenario is unlikely.

Here’s what we have going for us up in Canada: Mortgages are more tightly regulated than they are in the States. For example, mortgages must be paid off within 25 years. They are also insured by the federal government.

But the current rock-bottom interest rates (around 3.5 percent) are still extremely tempting to would-be homeowners desperate to get in on the market before it’s too late. Although the government has tightened up several regulations in an effort to cool the housing market, but the Bank of Canada still hasn’t raised interest rates on mortgages, which would have the biggest effect on slowing down the housing market. In fact, recent reports do indicate that the housing market is slowing slightly—but Toronto’s real estate hasn’t got the memo yet, and until it does, all couples like me and Justin can do is speculate about how we should have had the foresight to buy a house on our first date five years ago.

Alison Broverman is a writer who still rents in Toronto. She tweets about otters and award shows. Photo: Proxy Indian

We have all lived places. Where have you lived, Alex Leitch?

Moulton Hall, McMaster University, Hamilton ON, $1300/mo including tuition and food.
Housing 600 19 to 21 year old women, Moulton smelled like a lipgloss factory explosion. My roommate and I were lucky: The room was big enough to house four students, which it would do just a year later, and had two windows, one of which looked over a forest path. I set up a motion-activated webcam to watch the path, which resulted in hundreds of hours of underlit footage of undergrads making out, and about fifteen minutes of them losing their minds at a lost deer. There was a residence requirement of a meal plan twice the price of real food, with no actual food available which had not first been deep-fried. The possibility of living here more than a year never crossed my mind.

Sussex St, Hamilton ON, $425/mo inclusive.
A second floor, two-bedroom flat with not a single right angle anywhere in its construction. The light in the apartment was beautiful, so I signed on without checking the basement. The laundry was down there, through a nasty cellar door with a habit of concussing people and past a load of spiders. My roommate loved house music and romantic twists of fate. I loved not being surprised by large, strange men at odd hours. This personal preference turned out to be a dealbreaker when, after dark one night, I answered a pounding at the front door to a mountain of a private investigator. He brought with him a lady wailing in German who turned out to be my roommate’s long-lost mother. As he shoved past me and my grimy baseball bat, declaring the absolute legality of his entrance to our home, I decided to find somewhere else to live. The laundry situation provided a useful excuse.

Cline Ave N., Hamilton ON, $400, inclusive.
From upstairs to downstairs: Cline St. was a basement set into a hill in an eight-person share with huge windows and no real insulation. My girlfriend and I moved here in terror of coming out to our indifferent roommates. Our rooms were enormous, and the initial promise of a semi-private laundry room bath-and-shower was great for an art student budget. Then the toilet exploded, changing the room to a reluctant-at-best laundry. Advantage to single shower between seven women: experiment with every shampoo and bath product on the market! Disadvantage: Dealing with our upstairs housemates, ever, for any reason, much less the division of washroom cleaning duties. Upstairís rolling battle over utility bills came to a head when one of them, for reasons known only to her strange and private gods, shut off the furnace.

In February.

In Canada.

The water pipes miraculously survived, but our housemate relationship did not. We moved the moment the ground melted.

Despite the melodrama, this was my favourite apartment and best year of college. I recall it warmly when I forget to close a window in winter.

Lower Horning Ave, Hamilton ON, $325/mo inclusive of cable internet and laundry.
A three-bedroom, one-shower, 450-square-foot apartment in the basement of our landlord’s house, located next to a Mennonite church which our landlords faithfully attended. We referred to Lower Horning as The Blue Cube for our series of art-school ragers, as the landlord decided an institutional blue colour provided most bang for his renovation buck. His renovation buck sadly did not extend to proper soundproofing for his ventilation ducts.

The air vent thing shouldn’t have been a problem, but the poor man had for-sure never had a case of the Art Students before. The Blue Cube quickly came to house five: me, my new girlfriend, my old girlfriend, her new boyfriend, and her best friend. Normal people would have moved. Art students are broke. There was a rental boom in the surrounding area that doubled local prices, so for $325 a month, we stayed put. I, as Bad Roommate, routinely used my basement window as a door to avoid my housemates and discussions of chores.

This rental lasted two years and quite audibly took the landlord’s marriage with it.

Universitè de Montrèal, Montrèal, QC, scholarship.
A single room with sink all to myself, on the eighth floor of dorms, in Montrèal in summertime, with no roommates whatsoever. Heaven! The room itself was tiny and probably had roaches. It was hard to tell, since I was never in it: I was out learning dirty bar french and dirtier ASL while walking all over the city. I made friends quickly because itís easy to be friends with people when you know you’re leaving. Thunderstorms saw ten of us piled into a single room, watching John Waters, reading Dorothy Allison, eating cherries and cheese curd, finding out how to be young and gay and strong in French. I was in love with Montrèal like it was a person, so thoroughly in love with the city that it was impossible to go, but my family needed me, and so I went.

Woodbine Heights Blvd, Toronto, ON, $400/mo inclusive.
After school there was nowhere to go and not much to do, so I moved home to I wait for life to come find me. I paid the mortgage in the meantime, sometimes food, sometimes emergencies. My parents are artists. The relationship has never been clear, who is raising whom, who is protecting whom, or from what.

Gerrard St, Toronto, ON, $750/mo inclusive
A former parlour in a former wealthy district, this gigantic split-level single room had its own functional fireplace and an upstairs mezzanine. The kitchen was tiny, the ickle bathroom perfect after a minor renovation. I loved the space. The space was perfect. The rent was perfect. The fireplace was perfect. It was all perfect, except, of course, for the location. Someone was stabbed or shot enough for a public bleed-out on the corner every two weeks. There was a constant presence of anti-abortion protesters across the street yelling at the clinic next door. The junkies, everywhere, always. My personal last straw was a man standing outside my enormous, lightly-barred, heavily-draped windows at 2 a.m., setting string raccoon snares and talking to the critters he was catching. The shrieking was unbelievable, the neighbours unfortunate, so when the recession hit and my parents needed help, I gave up my freedom and moved home again.

Woodbine Heights Blvd, Toronto, $600/mo inclusive.
Two bedrooms, a beautiful garden and private studio in the basement, no mumblers, little violence, about a 40-minute walk or an unreliable bus ride from the nearest anything at all other than the industrial park. This was an acceptable compromise in the face of a brutal recession, but I spent most of the eight months sleeping on various couches in the core of the city—and sometimes in other countries—rather than in the suburbs. When the mortgage was paid down enough to leave, my cat had gone a little feral. She appears to enjoy upsetting my mother with gifts of most-of-a-goldfinch.
The garden is still beautiful.

Euclid Ave, Toronto, $1053/mo inclusive.
The second and third floor of a house, one faux-clawfoot bathtub, in-apartment laundry, dishwasher. My roommate and I moved here after I more or less lived on his bachelor-pad couch for six months. The two levels are separated by stairs, and my bed is in the peak of the roof. There is a skylight which I can clamber out to watch the sky, the CN Tower, and the other hipsters writing music on their roofs. There are many trees. The landlord pays for burnt-out lightbulbs. Although I am still The Worst at being a roommate, this is working out, right up until the next one, and the one after that.

Alex Leitch runs an arts lab in Toronto, ON. You can follow her attempts to build a gun that shoots rainbows at bustedsneakers.tumblr.com. The remains can be found at alexleitch.com.

I went to school at McGill, which is a very large and largely broke public university in Montreal. McGill boots you out of the dorms after your first year, turning you out in the city to find an apartment on your own. This is a good idea, because you save money and figure out how to do adult things like pay rent and cook for yourself. It’s also a bad idea, because 19-year-olds are idiots.

THE MOVE-IN
My two friends and I went looking for an apartment in the lovely, brownstone-and-park-filled Plateau-Mont-Royal neighborhood, one neighborhood away from campus, so it would be clear to exactly nobody that we were not much-loathed English-speaking McGill students. The ground-floor apartment we’d found on the McGill website’s classified ads was big but shabby, with a bright blue door and cheap, Soviet-looking wall-to-wall carpeting in a shade somehow dirty brown, dirty gray, and dirty blue, all at once. I often wondered what its original color was. White? Pink? Taupe? All possible. It had a back patio and a yard overgrown with weeds. It cost $1,500 for three bedrooms. (This is unspeakably expensive in Montreal. I lived in two other apartments there, and each was significantly nicer and significantly cheaper. A fair price for this place would have been half that.) 

In Montreal, finder’s fees are both very common and completely illegal, and the tenants in the place before us—three beautiful, intimidating fourth-year management girls—decided to try their luck. Not knowing any better, we paid $500 each, and secured an utter shithole. The girls did not remove the condom wrappers that were under their disgusting couch when they moved out, but they did sell one of my roommates a used bed-frame for about what it must have cost new.

The Plateau neighborhood is in the foothills of Mount Royal. The whole thing is on a steady, mild incline. (Oddly, Montrealers refer to uphill as “north” and downhill as “south,” which is not even accurate, and left me very confused when I moved to San Francisco, in which literally every direction is both uphill and downhill.) Most buildings compensate for this, because it is the 21st century and we are pretty good at building buildings at this point. Ours did not. If you sat in a rolling swivel chair and lifted your legs off the ground, you would slowly roll across the floor until you crashed into a wall.

THE SKYLIGHT
A few months into our lease, a giant chunk of the bathroom ceiling fell onto the bathroom floor. This is not an ideal place for a piece of the bathroom ceiling to be. It took literally months for our landlord to fix, as we called it, our skylight. For the last week or so, a cheerful French handyman with no English worked on the skylight. He would peek his head through the hole while I sat on the toilet. “Bonjour,” I’d say. “Ah, pardon,” he’d say. We had fun.

THE FOOD
We decided to make our living expenses mildly communal. We would each keep our own bank accounts, but all household expenses, including rent, bills, and food, would be split evenly in three parts. For some reason, we also decided that when we went grocery shopping, we would all have to go together. This happened approximately once every six weeks, and the food ran out after maybe five days. One roommate lost weight due to the very unusual problem of unnecessary negligent malnutrition. I gained weight, thanks to subsisting mostly on poutine and Stouffer’s frozen chicken pot pies from the depanneur, or bodega, next door.

THE ROBBERY
Our landlord had a second handyman, whose name was Artur. At one point Artur came by and said he was asked to change the locks. We said sure. He asked us to pay for the locks. We said no, because even as 19-year-old idiots, we were aware that that is the landlord’s responsibility. “I really think you should pay for this lock,” he said. We refused, probably rudely. This, in retrospect, was a mistake.

Two days later, our apartment was robbed. Two laptops were stolen, along with a camera and a passport. We called the police. They gave us a note to give to our professors to get us extensions on any papers we had due, then left. We called the landlord, whose name was Nader and who until this point had seemed an normal absentee landlord, perfectly content to wildly overcharge three teenage idiots for his shithole apartment from afar.

Nader was not normal.

Nader sat down in our living room, on an easy chair only six inches off the ground because, for reasons I have forgotten, it no longer had any legs. We told him what had happened. He threatened to “slit the throat” of the man who had done it. We muttered that we hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

Nader stayed to chat, feeling guilty that his asshole handyman had robbed us, I suppose. First he mentioned offhand that he had spent time in Iranian prison. Then his mother called (Nader, I should mention, was at least 45-years-old) to, according to Nader, warn him “not to do anything stupid.” Like slit someone’s throat over a couple of $600 laptops.

We chatted some more. Nader told us, in response to some environmental cause popular in Canada that week, that our whole environmental strategy was wrong. “Earth is water planet, you see. Much more water.”

We agreed that this was true.

“So we should live like the dolphin,” he concluded. Even this, we thought, could be normal, or normal-ish. Maybe he had some thoughts about sustainability and living in tune with the natural world! But Nader meant it literally. “We should build skyscrapers, but under the ocean. And then we will wear backpack with motor to travel between them,” he said. We glanced at each other and quickly agreed this was a very perceptive and forward-thinking plan.

THE HOLE
The water and electricity lines for the three-story building were in a crawlspace under our floor. To access them, you pried up a two-foot-by-four-foot trap door just beyond the second entrance door (Montreal apartments often have two doors, to help keep people sheltered from the ridiculous elements). The trap door, several feet deep, remained open for several days at one point. Several people fell in the hole. I was one of them. It hurt like hell.

THE WINTER
In February, the toughest month in Montreal, where the temperature drops to the point where it no longer matters if you talk in Fahrenheit or Celsius (the two cross at around -40), we had guests, friends of my roommate’s girlfriend from Wellesley. They were politely horrified by our shithole, I think. They slept on our pull-out sofa in the airy, poorly-sealed living room. At some point in the night, both front doors blew completely open. Independently, all three roommates got up, cranked up our personal baseboard electric heaters in our bedrooms, and went back to bed. None of us thought anything unusual was happening—it’s cold, turn the heat up. That happened sometimes.

When we emerged the next morning, we found that the inside of our apartment had reached temperature parity with the outside, and the entry hallway was covered in snow. The guests told us they noticed it was getting very cold, but they never thought to check if a door was open. I think they assumed our shithole apartment would naturally offer no resistance to the brutal weather outside. They were very nice about the whole thing. I never saw any of them again.

THE BILLS
The electricity and heating bills—which in Montreal are often extraordinarily high, as the city is inconveniently located in the god damn arctic—were mildly confusing. Two separate bills came to our apartment. It was unclear why there were two, but one of them was for about $15 per month, and the other was well over $100 in the wintertime. We paid the cheaper one. Why wouldn’t we?

In our last month of residency, Nader told us we owed him some $700. Apparently we were paying the bill for the upstairs apartment, which was unoccupied for pretty much the entire year and only warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing. We held off paying him for so long, convincing ourselves that if he wanted us to pay the bill that obviously corresponded to our electricity use, he should have told us, that eventually he just told us not to worry about it. I think he still felt bad about the robbery.

THE ARSON
Montreal has very odd renter’s laws. For example, a landlord cannot raise the rent of an apartment without the written permission of the tenant, even if something happened to obviously warrant it (like the installation of a washer/dryer, or a new kitchen). The landlord must politely ask the tenant if the tenant agrees to the proposed rent, and the tenant can just say nope, don’t agree, and then the landlord has to, at his or her own expense, take the case to the Regie du Logement, the housing bureau, and convince them that it is a fair raise. The tenant can just kick back and keep paying the old rent while this mess is going on.

One of the side effects of this heavily tenant-favoring system is that security deposits are not always required. In our shithole, there was no deposit. I was the last one to leave the apartment, and I was by far the biggest idiot of the three of us in terms of cleanliness. I left some unwanted furniture and some food in the apartment, with the back door unlocked, telling my friends who were staying in the city that summer to come by and help themselves. I did not bother cleaning anything, because the place was dirty when we moved in (though not as dirty as I left it). I’m not proud of this. I was an especially big idiot that year.

The next year, I moved into a place in a different part of the Plateau, where the floors were hardwood, the building had security, my bedroom had a lovely fourth-floor view of a park and the mountain, and my rent was, of course, $425. (I live in New York now. It’s hard to talk about Montreal rent without breaking down.) My parents dropped me off at my new apartment and drove around trying to find a parking spot. When they came back, they asked me what happened to my old apartment. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s all charred and burned up!” my mom said.

I took a walk there a week or so later. My mom had exaggerated a little. Certainly there had been a fire. The windows were missing their glass and were now covered with black garbage bags. I took a peek around one of them and saw that the inside of the apartment, while structurally okay, was smoke-damaged and not livable. I asked one of my former neighbors what had happened.

A week or so after I left, the place caught on fire. Suspiciously well-contained fire. Suspiciously not-damaging-or-dangerous fire. The neighbor was convinced the landlord had simply torched the place. If so, he was slow to collect the insurance. It stayed that way for almost a full year.

It’s been about six years since the fire. According to Google Maps, it now looks exactly the same as it did before the fire. Except the door is white now.

Dan Nosowitz lives in Brooklyn and writes words for money, mostly at Popular Science. He has serious opinions about fruit. Illustrations by Charrow

As of March, there are new fifty-dollar bills here in Canada. I discovered this when I was handed money to go buy printer ink for work because I neither have a reason to use large bank notes, or especially keep up with the latest gossip on them. The new fifties are made of a plastic polymer so they’re un-rip-able—literally slick. They come with lots of new security features—if you’re going to start printing your own Canadian money, do it now before the old easier-to-copy ones are completely weeded out of circulation. Those things, however, aren’t its coolest feature, which is: the intersection of plastic bill + security features = giant see through clear space, right in the middle. May I present: the afternoon-joy-ride of having a fifty dollar bill to hang out with (as experienced entirely from my desk):

Canadian fifty-dollar bill has a cup of coffee. 

Canadian fifty-dollar bill studies differential equations.

Canadian fifty-dollar bill examines sad, opaque pieces of money on their way to meet their fate in the laundry machine coin slot.

Canadian fifty dollar bill stalks people on Facebook (fifty-dollar bill—just like us!).

Canadian fifty-dollar bill, meet your evil cousin.

Canadian hundred-dollar bills have had this design for a while, and smaller denominations are going to be rolled out in 2013. Exciting!

Shannon Palus just might never move back to America.

W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) is an organization that is fighting for minimum payments for artists in NYC.  As part of their work, they surveyed NYC artists about payments they’ve received for exhibiting with non-profits.  Hyperlink has some infographics displaying the results of the survey, but here’s the gist: most artists showing work at non-profits in NYC do not get paid.

Alternatively, Canada has an organization called CARFAC (Canadian Artists Representation/Le Front Des Artistes Canadiens). The organization was founded in 1968 in response to a National Gallery of Canada project that intended to use the works of Canadian artists without providing compensation. The non-profit CARFAC is now the voice of the Canadian artist community. They publish an annual fee schedule, which a list of minimum fees that artists should be paid for the use of their work. 

The schedule is very detailed and slightly complicated to someone (me) who isn’t well-versed in the art world, but this section, outlining payment minimums for a solo show, is a good example of the kind of fees that artists might garner (group exhibitions get much lower fees).

Since payment is guaranteed in Canada and not in the U.S., I wondered why an artist might choose to live here. My roommate Mona Kamal is a Canadian artist living in New York City. I spoke with her briefly about the difference between Canada and the U.S. for artists, and why she chooses to be here.

Logan Sachon: What is it like to be an artist in Canada versus the U.S., as far as compensation?
Mona Kamal: Artists in Canada do get fees for exhibitions in public galleries, and there is a good granting system, but the money that artists receive within this system is small. An artist can live very meagerly with this sum. In the U.S. there isn’t a funding structure like there is in Canada, but the art market is so much larger, the art market allows artists to be able to make a living through selling their work.

What is it that has allowed or encouraged the Canadian system of artist pay versus the U.S. system (which I gather is no system)?
Canada has a long history of government funding for the arts, beginning with the Canada Council forming in the 1960s and then Canadian artists began public galleries called the Artist Run Centre—all these galleries pay artist fees. During this time the CARFAC also started.

Unfortunately the U.S. doesn’t have a government-based funding structure for the arts. They do have the National Endowment for the Arts, but that got heavily cut in the 1990s when Andre Serrano made a piece called “Piss Christ” [You've seen this. It totally outraged Republicans, and Jesse Helms fought to ensure federal dollars never went to fund such filth ever again —LS]. There is little funding in the organization and it has a lot of red tape.

Why, as a working artist do, you choose to be in the U.S. rather than Canada? It seems like there would be better opportunity for pay there, because of CARFAC?
I choose to be in New York, not the U.S. Being here enables me to be exposed to an international art scene that has international artists and curators. This is what opens up a world of opportunity for me as a working artist. There is “pay” for artists in Canada, but it is not enough to sustain yourself. There are more non-profit galleries in New York City than all of Canada. It also is difficult to sell work in Canada, and being paid $1,500 for a solo exhibition isn’t enough to make a living.

You still have healthcare in Canada. Is there an opportunity for you to get healthcare here, as an artist?
I can get health care through teaching (at Parsons), and there is also the Freelancers Union, which I find to be expensive. Healthcare in the U.S. is an entire other issue. It’s a system that’s broken and needs to be fixed, but in my opinion has gotten so bad that I think it’s too late to fix. Even if I had insurance here I would still keep my Canadian Health insurance because it offers me so much more at zero cost. I’m taking a trip to Canada soon just to go have a physical.

What are some ways the working artists you know here supplement their income? (I know you teach …) Are artists in Canada able to spend more time on art, because of the payment system?
I think artists do anything they can to supplement income. Many artists freelance because that way they can choose their schedule. I actually feel like I focus on my art more now than I did in Canada, though this may be because of a change in my attitude and wanting to make more time for my art.

Have you been paid for shows here? 
I think I’ve been paid once, in all the time I’ve been here. Whereas I went to Toronto last month and, because of CARFAC, I was given a stipend for travel and a fee.