Montreal
2001 05 29 | journal
I figured a trip to a city that I've never seen anything of but the train station, wouldn't be without its adventures and incidents, but I didn't figure those experiences would start with the trip barely even begun.
Who knew? The bus station in Hamilton has self-flushing toilets.
I also didn't know that the next trip experience would include me developing a head and chest cold on the train to said city. So, my first purchase in Montreal was a bottle of decongestant. Yummy. Never used Robitussin before, and I have to say that it doesn't taste too bad. Certainly tastes better than Buckley's. (Anything would, though.)
We walked from the train station to the hostel we were staying at, and on the way passed St. Patrick's Basilica which is a lovely old church dedicated to, and used by, the city's Irish Catholic population. We visited Notre Dame on our last day, which was very lovely, and very blueish. (I never did get to see its named counterpart when I was in Paris, much to my regret.) I'm not a church-going person by any stretch of the imagination, but I like visiting old churches. Some are quite lovely.
Our first impression of the city was, "Gosh, it's awfully quiet for a big city on a Saturday afternoon."
That impression quickly changed when we headed off to Rue St. Catherine later on. That's one of the main streets, and it seems Montreal retains quite a lot of European style habits that don't seem to exist in other Canadian big cities; namely that all the action is concentrated (more or less) on what (in England) would be called the high street. That street is covered in what one would normally find on a high street; lots of shops, restaurants, a few theatres, and lots of people.
Surviving in Montreal isn't too difficult for non-French speakers, since the city is not only well-used to tourists, but is what could be termed the English city of the French province. One of the best universities in the country is there (McGill), and it's an English university. (Most of it scattered through various buildings lining Stanley Street, which goes up a hill towards Mount Royal. Must be hell in winter.)
Montreal, like many large cities worldwide, has its own Chinatown, which is marked off by these really lovely gates. (Unfortunately the picture I took of one of those gates, got deleted.) The pharmacy there has a pharmacist who can, according to the sign, speak English, French, and six different dialects of Chinese. It's not a large Chinese section, from what I could gather, but it wasn't without its charms. It had what a Chinatown usually has; lots of shops, lots of restaurants (from very Chinese to very catering-to-North-Americans), and lots of people.
The hostel was stayed at (Auberge Alternative du Vieux Montréal), located in Old Montreal near the port and right across the street from what used to be the Central Fire Station but is being reconstructed to be a museum, was quite nice. The people (staff and guests) were friendly, the place was well-equipped, and it was cheap. ($18 per night) I'd recommend it to anyone; and, according to other guests I heard talking, it ranks between 8 and 9 on a hostel scale of 1 to 10.
The metro (subway, tube, underground, etc.) was a metro, but not full of the sort of graffiti one imagines the New York subway to possess. It was clean, and extensive enough. The cars were narrower than the ones in Toronto, but the trains ride quieter, as the cars use rubber wheels. (Fare is $2 per trip, but you can buy a strip of tickets - I think it's 10 - for about $8.50. They also have monthly passes and special three or four day passes mainly geared for tourists.)
Though the metro is nice, the only way to see the city is really by foot. It might be a lot of walking, and some of it uphill, but you miss so much of the flavour by staying underground or on buses.
We ate some traditional regional food, of course, but that's one thing you should (in my not so humble opinion) always do when you visit a place you've not been before. There's the smoked meat that the city is well-known for, which is just smoked ham, and poutine. Poutine is French fries covered in gravy and cheese curd. It's really, really yummy.
The city has other European touches; like the proliferation of cafes, and the existence of what the population of France would term a tabac. That's just a small shop, smaller than a convenience store, that sells cigarettes, beer, wine, junk food, and small things like that. One thing you have to bear in mind, though, should you stay in Old Montreal, is that there don't seem to be too many grocery stores or tabacs. There's one five minutes walk from the hostel we stayed at, but there didn't seem to be any others, and the closest pharmacy is the one for Chinatown. It's not that far of a walk, though.
The city has two IMAX theatres, which is very nifty, and has (of course) the Olympic Stadium. Right under the stadium, in a building that was used for sports like handball and such, is a place called the Biodome. This is now used as an indoor zoo. It's an amazing place. It's set up as forests, each room playing host to a different style of forest. There's an Amazonian type jungle room with crocodiles, tropical birds and fish, and a Laurentian forest room which plays host to North American wildlife. (Including a water area with seagulls… seemed a bit useless to add a room with seagulls, the damn things are all over - like pigeons - but I suppose that's the point.)
Another thing to keep in mind, is that sometimes Montreal has what's called Museum Day (not sure how many times a year they do this), and on this day most of the city's museums are free. I think the Biodome has a cost to get in, but it seems that it might be free after a certain hour of the day, since we paid nothing to get in.
It costs $10 to go up the elevator in the tower of the Olympic stadium, which might be a bit pricey, but it's really a lovely view of the whole city.
The beggars of Montreal don't seem to beg; they just stand there with their hands out. It's kind of nice in a way, since you don't have people in your face begging for spare change, but it's disturbing in other ways. I'm not quite sure why. I won't give money to people who don't ask me for it. I'll gladly hand over change if you ask, though.
The city is also well-known for its underground city. These are a series of tunnels under the city that house shops and businesses of all sorts. It's quite nice, but not necessarily an uncommon thing.
There are horse and buggy rides through old Montreal, but we didn't take one. No idea how much they cost, but it probably isn't what you'd term cheap. Horse and buggy rides never seem to be. There seem to be a few places where they start; two spots are in front of Notre Dame and then from a place on the port. (One of the IMAX theatres is on the port, by the way, and the other is on Rue St. Catherine.)
We didn't get all the way up Mount Royal, as it started pouring rain half way through the walk (and I do mean pouring), so we had to turn back. If you like walking, and bear in mind this is uphill, it's a nice walk up Stanley Street, past parts of McGill University, to the mountain. Watch out for the stone steps up the mountain itself, though; some of them need to be redone. Just a bit treacherous.
First thing to do when you hit the city, is buy a map. That's a good idea for any city though. Get a map of the metro, too. We used a highlighter to mark off the train station and hostel, and other points we wanted to go to, so we could keep everything in perspective. The good thing about Montreal is that there are city maps all over the place. (street corners, metro stations, etc.), the bad thing is that some maps seem to be upside down; so I hope you have a good sense of direction.
Take a camera, take lots of film, wear comfy shoes, and go.
It's a really nice city to spend a few days in.
There's so much more to it than what little I've said, but there are some things I didn't see, and then there are things that you just have to experience for yourself.
The weather during the trip can only be described as damp. It rained every bloody day. We'd go outside and say, "Ooh, not too bad out today," and within five minutes of saying it… rain. It wasn't at all cold though, which it has been in Ontario. Cold and wet don't go together very well at all. In fact, the day we were walking up to Mount Royal, it was raining so hard that my hat was dripping purple drops. Some of my hair turned a bit purpley until I wiped it out.
Many of the streets of Montreal, particularly some of the crosswalks, are all paved with cobbles; which is kind of nice, but funny to walk over if you're wearing thinly soled shoes. The big hazard for pedestrians are the drives. Crosswalk lights seem a touch haphazard, and the drivers there are much like the drivers in Paris it seems; don't stand still or they'll park on top of you!
The city is riddled with museums of all sorts; of particular note is one near the port which has an excavation dig as part of its display. This shows a dig down through the city's history, including old building remains and such.
The port itself seems to be overpopulated with several species of moths, which I found kind of odd, and yucky. (I hate bugs. All bugs. So I spent most of the walk through there keeping my mouth tightly shut.)
The city is not only good about its public maps, it's also very good about garbage bins. They're all over the place too. Very handy. They seem to take public cleanliness very seriously, which is something that some big cities either don't, or can't, do.
I think the oddest thing about some of the shops, is simple name changes. The Body Shop is called Le Body Shop, for example; it just seems kind of cute to change just the one word.
The city, as far as big cities go, isn't terribly expensive; prices seemed the same as they are where I live. That might just be normal for Canada, though. I have no idea what the sales tax in Quebec is, but one thing that did seem to cost more was cigarettes; only by about 50 cents, though, but that still adds up. Milk seemed much cheaper, at least at the tabac I bought it from.
The metro cars were a bit more modern than what I remember Toronto's being like. Some of the cars had little pixel boards that showed the next destination and connecting bus routes. They also had announcements of current stop and next stop. This is something they've only recently started in Toronto.
Max and I both thought that the windows of the Mariot hotel made it look like a beehive. We called it The Hive or The Collective.
Inside the tower of the Olympic stadium is a display of the major towers of the world. It's quite nice. They show, to scale, etched outlines of the buildings, list locations, building facts, etc. It's right across from the place where you buy your tickets to go up to the tower's observation deck. Among the displayed towers are, of course, the CN Tower of Toronto, the Eiffel Tower of Paris, The BT Tower of London, and The Empire State Building of New York City.