“There’s no Canada like French Canada, it’s the best Canada in the land” – South Park
After my stay in Ottawa and Gatineau I moved further into French Canada, to Montreal. There is no mistaking being in French Canada. Signs are all in French. People first address you in French and switch to English if you answer in English instead. I once made the mistake of answering bon jour with bon jour. Luckily it was at a cash register and I understood the follow up question of whether or not I wanted a bag (I didn’t, I had my own) so I didn’t have to say I didn’t speak the language.
Coming into Quebec Province proper I noticed something that still freaks me out: cars only have license plates on the back, not the front. Outside of Ontario a lot of provinces apparently don’t require cars to have plates on the front. It’s a weird thing to see, it’s almost like the cars aren’t finished, you know? Freaky.
All right, that was a bit of a tangent. Moving on.
Montreal marked the first time I used Airbnb to book an accommodation, a private room in a shared apartment in a quiet neighborhood. The metro system in Montreal is very good, you can get anywhere on the cheap in no time at all and the place I booked was about five minutes away from a metro stop. There were two more rooms in the apartment, and one of them was occupied by a chemist from Israel. Really nice guy, but so overworked (that’s not something that applies to me for a while). We often talked the evenings away. Very nice hosts too, but we didn’t get to talk much since I was gone most of the time and they lived in the upstairs apartment, which had a separate entrance.
The best place to go to in Montreal in my opinion is Mount Royal. From the top you have a great view of the city. The climb up there is good exercise when you’re not used to mountains, but once on the top it’s easy going. They’ve made a big park up there, with a pond for canoeing, large grass fields for just relaxing, and forest paths for when you really want to get away from the city. Lots of squirrels and birds all over the place. I spent a full day here.
Contrary to some other places I’ve been to I didn’t really like the harbor area of Montreal, even though it is one of the highest rated places on TripAdvisor. Might have had something to do with the spot of rain I had while walking there. There are various stalls, a zip-line, and other attractions, but on the whole I felt it had a dreary atmosphere. The fireworks show was nice though, but other than that this was a place I could have easily skipped and not feel bad about it.
I also briefly visited the CGI main office in Montreal, just a quick in and out at the end of the workday. At the time I’d just done the Museum of Fine Arts and the office was pretty close to it, so I thought, why not? As for the museum, it had a nice mixture of old artworks and modern art. I spent quite some time on the old stuff, and breezed through the modern parts. After CGI HQ I went to Plateau Mont Royal. There are some really nice houses there.
Now the place I spent the most time by far was the downtown area where the Jazz Festival was hosted. I came here just about every day. I’m not usually one for jazz, but the music was pretty good, especially for free concerts. You can’t really beat free. Montreal marked the start of a number of festivals over the next couple of locations. There are a lot of things going on in the summer in Canada.