Café Pi

Café Pi

McGill University - Montreal, Canada 

Guest Blogger: Laura Franklin

I live on a mountain. Not a craggy, colossal peak, but a hill large enough to have a city named after it. Mount Royal. Some days I spend all day in my residence on the mountain when I don’t have class because the prospect of walking back up the mountain at the end of whatever I had ventured out to do is a bit too much for my lazy bones to bear. This past particular Sunday would have been a perfect day to hole up in my cozy dorm room, hiding away from the commotion of the city below. It was the first snowfall of the year and the trail leading to downtown was slippery and cold. Despite all of this, I bundled up and a few of my friends and I traipsed down to find a café to study in. After looking for 20 minutes and nearly giving up, we stumbled in to a dimly lit little shop called Café Pi. Unlike all the other cafes we had checked out, this one was quiet and spacious. I found a little corner in the front of the shop with a low, circular wooden table and wide squishy chairs with worn burgundy red seating. Despite cafes normally being the worst place for an easily distracted person like myself to write a paper, Café Pi felt calming. The light breaking through the cloudy sky assured me of the hours I had ahead of myself to complete my assignment. The jolt of energy from my impeccably prepared London Fog had my fingers typing a mile a minute. The only real distraction I had from my surroundings was the occasional spat between the old Québécois men playing chess a few tables over. After spending hours in Café Pi and completing a good deal of my paper, the walk back up the mountain felt like a welcome opportunity to see the city dusted in snow.