By this point, the two-day Spartan adventure at Owl's Head was finally done, and now I had three days of sightseeing in the city of Montréal ahead of me.
Monday, August 1, 2016
I didn't have much of a plan for this trip, so all I really did was bounce around and look for stuff to do. The hotel where I stayed was the Quality Hotel Dorval Aeroport, which, as the name suggests, is outside of Montréal proper in a suburb called Dorval, really close to Pierre Trudeau International Airport. It was a pretty good hotel and I'd recommend it; they served a full breakfast every morning and it was in a good location. There is a Tim Hortons across the highway from the hotel, but there's actually a pedestrian tunnel under the highway in which you can cross it. This tunnel can also help you get back to the hotel when you're returning from the city by bus.
Getting into the city from there was pretty easy. I had bought a transit pass, valid for the week, at the airport the night before. After breakfast at the hotel's restaurant, I took bus 378 to the Du Collège subway station, and then got my first taste of Montréal's subway system, which I found to be pretty well-maintained and efficient. The train deposited me downtown...
Yeah, bouncing around aimlessly is a good description of this day. For lunch I stopped by a restaurant/bar called Zibo! (yes, with the exclamation) in the Griffintown neighborhood and finally had my first poutine. If you've never had poutine before, it's basically a plate of French fries with brown gravy and white cheese curds all over it. It's not the healthiest thing in the world (which is why I only had it once!) but it is pretty delicious. And plus you just can't visit Québec without trying it at least once. I washed this down with a delicious pint of another local brew: Rickard's Red Ale.
This massive multi-story shopping mall is called Centre Eaton. Unlike malls in the States, this one is in the middle of downtown, not out in the 'burbs surrounded by acres of parking lots.
I got this pint of Labatt Blue at the Peel Pub downtown. One thing I should point out for any American readers: since Canada is a Commonwealth country, they use the "Imperial pint" like in the UK, which is slightly larger than the pint we're used to in the States. I think an Imperial pint is about 1.2 US pints.
Some ads I happened to take a picture of. I'd never heard of Billy Talent before; it seems that's a Canadian band who are a bigger deal north of the border.
This stretch of Rue Saint-Paul is lined by plenty of restaurants and bars and is pedestrian-only. On this evening I stopped at Restaurant Papillon, which had a bar on the second story, and then went next door to 3 Brasseurs, which was both a restaurant and a microbrewery, for dinner.
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
At this point I had gotten enough of a feel for Montréal, that here I have to throw in a thought I have about the city. I've heard a lot of visitors from the States say that it "feels like a European city" or call it the "Paris of North America." Anyone who says this, I have to wonder if they visited the same Montréal I did, or ever actually visited Europe. I've never been to Paris, but I have been to many other European cities like Brussels, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Geneva, Munich, and Budapest to name but a few, and currently live in Stuttgart, and compared to them, Montréal doesn't feel European at all. In fact, except for the French language, it reminds me more of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or DC--northeastern US cities--than anything else. The streets are laid out in a grid, a subway runs underneath, there are skyscrapers downtown...I think "French-speaking NYC" is a much better description for visitors. I mean, look at this:
I don't know how anyone could walk among those buildings and think they're in Paris.
The highlight of this day was the Biodôme, a massive indoor nature reserve built inside one of the buildings once used for the 1976 Summer Olympics. London, Athens, and Rio, take note: THIS is what you do with your new buildings when the Games are over! The Biodôme was originally the Vélodrome, that is, it was used during the Olympics for indoor bicycle racing.
The Biodôme is right next to the Olympic Stadium. Getting there meant riding the subway to the Pie IX station (pronounced "pee nuff," named for the late Pope Pius IX). When I went through the Biodôme, there were several different ecosystems, completely recreated within the dome, that one could walk through and observe. I went through a tropical rainforest, the Laurentian maple forest, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the poles, both north and south.
Penguins in the polar area. Most of the other photos I took in the Biodôme turned out either blurry or grainy.
I also peeked behind a curtain and saw the entrance to an unfinished swamp area. Remember, this was in the summer of 2016; I just looked at the website now, almost four years later, and didn't see anything about a swamp section, so apparently they're still working on it. The website also says that they're closed for renovations and won't open again until Spring 2020 (which will no doubt be pushed back even further because of coronavirus), so maybe then the swamp will at last be open.
Not much to report for the rest of that day. Sadly I've long since forgotten the name of the restaurants or bars where I went, I only remember having a few pints with some friendly locals at one.
In the subway station beneath Palais du Congrès. "Trump says the elections could be rigged." News from home I was trying to take a vacation from.
Other articles in this series...
