Exciting!
It only took a couple minutes to cross the border. Immediately, all the road signs changed to French and the distances and speeds were listed in kilometers. We were in a foreign land!
The initial parts of the trip - flights, car rental, drive to Canada - all went very smoothly. It was almost weird how little drama we had with any of it. Here is our first glimpse of Montreal, driving into the city. Montreal is on an island in the St. Lawrence River.
We stayed at the LHotel in Montreal, located on the very edge of the Old Town, very close to downtown and a metro station. The hotel is owned by Georges Marciano, the CEO of Guess clothing, and he has tons of his personal art collection displayed in the hotel. There were Warhols in the lobby! And we had an original Roy Lichtenstein in our room.
There is also one of these original LOVE sculptures outside the front door.
We were on the first floor, which made me a little nervous about street noise, but the room was totally silent. It was sort of a common theme in Montreal, actually - for all the touristiness of certain parts of Old Town, the city for the most part was really quiet.
We spent our first day in Montreal doing a walking tour of the Old Town area that was in one of our guidebooks. It felt cheesy but was a good way to get oriented.
Old Town Montreal felt a lot like New Orleans to me (except cleaner and less smelly), which seems to make sense considering the common French heritage of both places.
The Notre Dame cathedral is the main tourist-attraction church in town and was just a block or two from our hotel. We did not go inside.
The square in front of the church is where the first French settlers fought the Iroquois four hundred years ago - really hard to imagine what that must have been like when you are standing there in the middle of a large, modern city.
Montreal City Hall is amazing.
For our first dinner we went to Restaurant Holder, which was great. I got lobster ravioli (yeah, that's right), and Ben got fish & chips. I spent a lot of time looking at restaurants before we left, and it became clear that it was going to be an ordeal (or else boring) to try to limit ourselves to vegetarianism on the trip, so we decided it was okay to eat fish on vacation. We did this last year in Scotland, too. For some reason I don't feel bad at all about eating fish, probably because they are not cute and furry. ANYWAY. The pictures of the meal did not turn out but here are our delicious desserts.
Mine was white chocolate souffle with coconut ice cream.
And Ben's was a parfait of coconut ice cream, some kind of mousse, and crunchy little delicious items.
After dinner we wandered some more, out to the Old Port area on the river. There is a science center here, which we avoided as that type of thing seems to be mostly kid-oriented, but the views back toward the city from the piers were gorgeous.
For our second day in Montreal, we set out to climb Mont Royal, a "mountain" (hill) right in the center of town. We started off the day right with chocolate pastries and coffee first.
We took the metro (subway) to the Plateau neighborhood and walked over to the park. On the way there we passed our first of the election signs we noticed during our time there - a provincial election was held in Quebec a few days after we left, which was very contentious.
Parc Mont-Royal is so great - I would be there constantly if we lived there. We saw tons of obviously local bikers and runners in addition to the tourists.
We met a lady at the foot of the hill who told us to take a bus to the top because it took "about six hours" to walk. I don't know if she got lost when she did it or what, because it took us only an hour or so.
It was HOT, though - at least 85 degrees and sunny. We were glad to get to the top and have a little rest in the grass.
The Mont Royal Chalet is at the top of the hill, which was neat inside but not air conditioned as we had hoped.
Every Sunday afternoon, hippie-types gather at the foot of Mont-Royal for the Tam Tam Jam, where everybody brings drums and lawn chairs (and, apparently, marijuana) and hangs out in the sunshine. We didn't stay for long but it was fun to see.
We had lunch at Aux Vivres, a vegan restaurant that I'd heard a lot about. It was great! I got a thai peanut tofu wrap.
and Ben got a BLT, the "b" of which was coconut bacon. He talked about that coconut bacon for the rest of the trip! Fortunately I have found a recipe online and will try it soon.
After lunch we took the metro out to Little Italy to see the Jean-Talon Market, a huge farmer's market.
It was pretty impressive, and so were the prices! The prices listed were for the whole basket of vegetables, not per pound or kilogram. The Raleigh Farmer's Market needs to get its act together.
This is where we saw our first vacation cat.
It was also where we ran into our first person who spoke no English at all - we asked a lady a question about her tomatoes and she had to go find someone to answer us. In general, though, virtually everyone in Montreal was bilingual and when we spoke English to them they answered back completely fluently, most of the time with no discernible accent. This would change significantly once we left the city.
On the way back to Old Town we ran across Chinatown accidentally, which is really only a couple of blocks just north of the old city.
We went back to the hotel to shower and relax for a little while before dinner, and then ventured to Montreal's downtown to wander a bit before dinner. The most interesting thing to me about downtown Montreal is the mix of old and new - in most ways it seems just like any other urban area, but then you'll run across an old cathedral or museum or other random building that has clearly been there a very long time.
This is the Windsor train station, which seems to be mostly historical these days, although there was a metro stop there. We went inside and it was completely deserted.
The Marie-Reine-du-Monde Cathedral is just down the street. It's not listed in the guidebooks but I think it's more interesting than Notre Dame, at least from the outside.
Walking back toward Old Town, we ran across this fiery fountain!
It was just outside this colorful building, which we later discovered is a convention center.
We ate dinner at Gandhi, an Indian restaurant. I did not take pictures, because Indian food all looks the same. It was good, although service was slow.
Old Montreal is even more like New Orleans at night! But without the drunk frat boys. We walked through this area after dinner to find an ice cream cone.
The next day was Monday. We had planned to go to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, but naturally it is closed on Mondays. We walked up through the downtown shopping district to see the museum from the outside anyway.
We walked back through the campus of McGill University, which is an English-speaking university right in the center of the city. It was the beginning of the fall semester, and there were lots of cute little freshmen walking around campus with their parents. Memories!
The Montreal International Film Festival was going on while we were in town, but I didn't find out about that until a couple of days before we left so it was too late to get tickets to any of the events. We stumbled across the Place des Arts a couple blocks north of our hotel, which turned out to be the main headquarters of the film festival. The Museum of Contemporary Art is also here (and also closed on Mondays).
In Montreal, a lot of the downtown area is connected via underground passageways. They call this the Underground City, and it's due in large part to the horrible winters they have there - they try to make it as easy as possible to avoid going outside. The Place des Arts is a good example of how it's set up - it's just a performing arts center, but when you walk in from the outside you're in this big foyer that also has art installations, shops, galleries, and tunnels leading toward the metro and other buildings. It's pretty awesome, really. This is inside that area.
We met up with my friend Melissa for lunch but failed to take pictures.
After lunch we took the metro out to Parc Jean-Drapeau, which is composed of two islands that sit in the river just across from the city. There's a bunch of random stuff out there, including an amusement park and casino, and also the Biosphere, which contains another of those kid-oriented science museums. We did not go inside.
What we did do is rent bikes - Montreal has this awesome system of kiosks all throughout the city you can rent bikes from and return them to any of the other kiosks. It's cheap as long as you don't rent for more than an hour or so. We thought biking would be a good way to explore the islands and they looked sturdy so I wasn't scared. Even without a helmet!
We rode across from one island to the next, and straight onto a Formula One racetrack that is open for biking & running when they aren't having races. It was awesome!
Looking back toward the city.
This Alexander Calder sculpture looked creepy from the bike path. It felt post-apocalyptic!
We eventually made our way back to the city and returned to the hotel for a shower. Our dinner reservation wasn't until 8:00 and I was starving, so we stopped in at a bar for a snack. The cheese menu was in French so we picked three at random and they were all great. It's hard to mess up cheese, I guess.
Then we walked through Old Montreal over to Place Jacques Cartier, which is sort of the heart of that area.
We had dinner at L'Orignal, which was a super cozy place at basement level around the corner from our hotel. You could just imagine how great it would be in there in the dead of winter.
We ordered scallops with black rice and citrus cream sauce to split as the appetizer. This was one of the Top 2 things I ate on the trip.
I ordered the tomato risotto as my entree, which came with shrimp I was frankly too freaked out to eat much of. Their little bodies were just too much for me. But the risotto was good!
Ben ordered deer steak. !!!
For dessert we decided to walk back over to the ice cream place again. This would become a theme for the rest of the trip.
This was our last night in Montreal! The next morning we left to explore other parts of Quebec.
