Hey everyone!

I've passed the half way point! I feel as though I arrived here yesterday, and that this is a place I've been in for much longer. 

The grunt work with the database is done, and I'm now trying to clean the database and develop a picture of what's happening. By Friday I hope to have a preliminary presentation ready so I can dig up some more leads of where I might want to look next. 

I'm conscious that all the data I'm collecting has been collected by the city: the perspectives it captures; these variables on a spreadsheet; is so far from the tenants that experience living in these communities. I'd like to be able to connect the two together and have this data in the right shape to empower this community.

I went to Montreal last weekend. Other than realising how much work I need to put into my beyond broken French, I got to meet some members of Montreal's Chinatown community. I gained insight into how Quebecois nationalism often promotes a very white notion of what a true Quebecer looks like, adding double standards to ethnic minorities in the community. Language, identity, politics, remain to be complex yet enthralling issues. 

In Montreal's Chinatown is Wing noodles, a business that's made Canadian-Chinese food for the community for almost a century. I went in person and saw a shuttered business covered in fences. Real estate speculation and children who don't want to take on the family business mean that the business will shut in the near future: their current operations are largely reduced to making fortune cookies. Those fortune cookies were the first bilingual fortune cookies in Canada.

Right now this fortune cookie sits in my room. Some time in the future it will become a relic of history, but for now (when I get over my sentimentality and eat it) I'll be able to read my fortune: I'll read the French first.