Good Moning Montreal
Trip Start
Oct 15, 2007
1
9
97
Trip End
Aug 24, 2008
Montreal,
Quebec,
Canada
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Frolicking achieved, we found our way downtown and to the old port area of the town, which was another very European area. It's a bit of an obvious comparison to say it feels Parisian (it's very French-language-centric) but there is definitely a more European than North American feel to a lot of the place. The bits with the giant skyscrapers less so...
We had a nice meal and a bottle of wine (splurge!) and then headed back to Nathalie and Gabriel's. They were out for the evening, so we did various little jobs (washing, e-mail updates etc) until they got home and we had a bit of a chat.
The following morning, we were moving to another Couch Surfer's place, but we woke early to a musical treat - Nathalie was preparing for her yoga session with some music with very Krishna rich lyrics. We left her to it and made our way over to Eva's (our next 'surf'), a few streets over.
Eva was offering coffee practically before we got in the door. We ended up staying and chatting with her for some time, before heading out - Eva was supposed to be working from home, and we were supposed to be seeing Montréal! We wandered along Rue Saint Denis, found a bookshop and bought a travel guide to Canada, had sandwiches and coffees in a cafe whilst examining said guidebook and found our way to the station. We chatted for a while to a lovely member of VIA Rail staff who made some recommendations about which bits of Canada we should see by rail (apparently the Jasper to Prince Rupert journey ranks in the National Geographic top 10 Best Journeys in the World EVER! list) and we bought our CanRail passes and booked ourselves onto the Ottawa train. A CanRail pass gives you 12 days of travel to be used within 30 days of purchase, and costs about £300 per person. Think how much it would cost you to go by train from London to Aberdeen, then think how big Canada is by comparison. Pretty good value, eh?
We also went to tourist information to get a map, but the most enthusiastic member of staff wouldn't let us leave without a bunch of leaflets too - most of which we ended up discarding very soon after leaving. Armed with our new information, maps, guidebook and train timetable, we went back to Eva's where we spent the evening thinking about our cross Canada tour and eating cheese, sausage, bread, hummus and olives washed down with beer. Mmmm.
Our last day in Montréal was great! We walked out to a place called the Biodome, which is part of the Olympic stadium (1976 Summer Olympics) which had been used for the cycling events but has now been made into a kind of museum of ecosystems. The space has been divided into 5 zones (a tropical forest, a temperate forest, an estuary, a polar area and a desert) where we were made to solve puzzles in order to collect crystals, before proceeding to the Crystal Dome! Well, not quite. Each area had the same plant life, temperature, humidity, plants and animal species as would be found in the wild. Even penguins.
From there, we crossed the road to Montréal Botanical Gardens. On reflection, that's probably not a late October activity. For example, the 'butterfly garden', planted with the vibrant, fragrant blooms which attract veritable clouds of multicoloured diaphanous fluttering little creatures, was brown. Sparse, dead and brown. So, inside to the insectarium, and that was definitely very cool. Social insects (ants, bees, etc.) are fascinating things, and can be watched for hours. Hours later, we ventured out of the social insect section to look at the bloody-great-huge beetly thing display and (yes, we know, they're arachnids, not insects, fine, we know, Kirsty's a zoologist, they're arachnids not insects...but they are creepy crawlies, so where else would you keep them) the h-u-u-u-ge hairy spider section. Bigger than your hand. A touch concerning was the constant reference on the little info cards to their being resident in Peru. That's Peru, as in where we're spending Christmas.
The Botanical Gardens were more interesting after dark, as there was a huge display of chinese lanterns, which, although offering the possibility of being quite staggeringly tacky, led to some pretty nice artsy photos. Long exposures producing big squiggly patterns, reflections in the river of an illuminated bridge, that sort of thing. After that, it got quite staggeringly tacky, so we left, and headed over to the old town for munchables. However, as it was the beginning of the nearest weekend to Hallowe'en (the obsessive and extensive celebrating of which is, in North America, compulsory), we had not only steaks and wine, but fireworks and a parade of people dressed as big white cones decked with fairy lights. Takes all sorts.
Well, that's Montréal. Next stop, Ottawa.
