Beautiful! Amazing! Foodie paradise! Paris without the jet lag! With the string of superlatives that we heard before going to Montreal this week, it would have been hard for any city to live up to expectations. And while it might not have lived up to all the hype, we had a really fun couple days there.
We headed north on the train on Sunday afternoon, and our journey got off to a rather inauspicious start. The closest train "station" on the line between NY and Montreal is in Whitehall, which is a scrappy little town just over the border in New York. The station itself was a small shack with a cracked glass door in the hulking shadow of a boarded-up tenement, which made us a little nervous about leaving our car there for three days. In typical Amtrak fashion, the train finally showed up about an hour late, and we were off to the great white north. The train ride itself was beautiful, running along the western shore of Lake Champlain. In spite of a lengthy delay at the border, causing us to arrive about 2 hours late, we decided that it still beat driving to get there. Our first view of Montreal from the train was of downtown in the sunset across the St. Lawrence River. The compact downtown is right below the green hump of Mont-Royal, which makes a nice natural counterpoint to the development below it.
The central train station is probably the ugliest station I've ever seen. It's underground beneath downtown, and the platforms have all the charm of a dark, dingy parking garage. After meandering through the underground hallways connecting the station to the nearest metro stop, we were on our way to our hotel. I'm a huge public transit geek, and even though Montreal's metro isn't exactly the shiniest I've seen, I was really excited to be riding it. When buying our metro tickets, we also had our first foray into the French language. Luckily, I just repeated the phrase for "book of six tickets" that was printed on the ticket window, and the ticket agent happily produced them. It was a preview of the level of French that was going to be expected of us for the rest of the trip. Montreal is probably the first truly bilingual city I've been in. We did interact with a few people who didn't speak any English. But when we needed to do anything more complicated than buying a book of metro tickets or a bottle of wine, in almost every case, the other person offered to switch languages and then spoke to us in nearly fluent English. And there were a number of service people we interacted with who were anglophone, even in traditionally francophone neighborhoods.
Our first full day in Montreal was spent hitting some of the main tourist spots. We walked from our hotel at the edge of the Latin Quarter to Old Montreal, which has a lot of impressive old buildings and churches. The highlight is the Basilique Notre-Dame, which has a gorgeous interior. It's full of carved wood with an altar bathed in dim, blue light. The rest of Old Montreal was a treat to walk through and gawk at. It was a bit touristy, but touristy in the way the Latin Quarter in Paris is, rather than in a Fisherman's Wharf kind of way.
That afternoon we walked up to downtown, which was a bit overwhelming. There were some cool, old buildings on the campus of McGill University and in the nearby streets. But I needed to buy some teaching clothes, so we were obliged to head to Rue Ste-Catherine, the main shopping drag. The street is lined with shopping centers, popular stores like the Gap and Mexx, and big department stores, and we quickly discovered that it was not the type of shopping we were in the mood for. We grabbed a quick cup of coffee and a snack before retreating to the leafy confines of Parc du Mont-Royal. We ambled up into the woods and were quickly away from the commotion of downtown. We stopped and rested at the busy lookout in front of the Chalet du Mont-Royal with its panoramic views of the southern portion of the city.
After taking a brief rest, we walked down the east side of the "mountain" and headed into the Plateau. This neighborhood is one of the trendiest in the city, and forms the backdrop for most of the TV shows and movies set there. I knew next to nothing about Montreal before we left, but I could see why this neighborhood is so trendy just by walking around in it. It's made up of leafy streets with charming old row houses and lots of idiosyncratic little shops and restaurants. We meandered for a bit, then settled in for a delicious Italian dinner at Eduardo's (at the corner of St Denis and Duluth, if you're going). Many restaurants in Montreal don't have a liquor license, though if you bring your own wine, they'll happily open it without charging a corkage fee. Unfortunately, we didn't plan ahead, so we had to do without. We certainly didn't make the same mistake the next night. After dinner, we walked backed toward our hotel, stopping for a pint at a brew pub on St Denis near the U of Quebec in Montreal. That just about made up for not having the wine at dinner.
Our next day was far less ambitious, with the revised goal of getting me some good teaching clothes at a second-hand clothing store or boutique on the Plateau or the further-north, gentrification-fringe neighborhood of Mile End. Mile End was pretty fun, and impressed us in the way it wasn't quite as postcard-cute as the Plateau.
My shopping ambitions were met (at least partially) early on when we stumbled upon a store in the basement of an old warehouse that sold cut-rate jeans. The store (called Jeans, Jeans, Jeans, appropriately enough) was a confused jumble of pants, T-shirts, and sweatshirts. There were about a dozen people in the store (which is about 11 more than we'd seen on the street outside) and nearly as many employees to help guide them to the right pair of pants. I came away with two new pairs of jeans (luckily GMC is the kind of college where I can get away with teaching in jeans), and we were on our way to second breakfast, which actually became lunch because the pants-shopping was an unanticipated detour. Anne and I were both pretty hungry when we rolled into the cafe, so I was very excited to see on the menu the regional dish of Quebec ... poutine.
I've been wanting to try poutine (aka gravy fries) ever since I first visited Vermont in 2003. They were a bit harder to come by in Burlington than I was led to believe, so I had to wait until this trip to get it. Poutine first came to my attention when, during the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush was informed in a segment of a Canadian comedy show that the leader of Canada, Prime Minister Jean Poutine, was pulling for him to get elected. The president, even then demonstrating his iron grip on matters of foreign policy and diplomacy, thanked the prime minister for his kind wishes.
So there I sat, with a plate full of the fabled gravy fries in front of me, and let me tell you, it was even better than I could have imagined. Now I don't know if the poutine served up by Le Cagibi (nee Cafe L'Esperanza) is in any way authentic, but do I know that it was delicious. I was kind of dreading something that resembled biscuits and gravy, but with french fries substituted for the biscuits. What I got instead was a flavor explosion, with the requisite fries and gravy, along with vegetables, spices (rosemary and mustard stood out), and topped with cheese and grated cabbage. I think it was lacking in the required cheese curds, but that was just as well.
The rest of the day involved meandering through the streets of the Plateau, wandering into whatever store caught our eye (like the Mexican grocery!), and stopping off at little clothes stores to find me some nice slacks. (No luck, although I did get a cool hat made from Alpaca wool. And did you know that second-hand stores are called friperies? How French is that?) We went out to dinner that night in the Village, the "gay neighborhood" of Montreal. It stretches for about 15 blocks, full of clubs, bars, and restaurants, prompting Anne to comment that it "out-Castros the Castro." After an unrushed dinner (apportez votre vin!), we went to a jazz club then headed back to the hotel. Our train left around 10 the next morning, so we went straight from the hotel to the train station. The train arrived in Whitehall yesterday afternoon, again two hours late. We were quite pleased to find that our car was unharmed.
Overall, I had a great time in Montreal. It was a bit smaller and lower key than I imagined, but in a good way. I felt like the scale was closer to Seattle or maybe slightly larger, but certainly nothing like Paris, and it was a very walkable and attractive city. Nearly everyone we interacted with was friendly and nice, and didn't mind that our French is abysmal. I think part of the reason I feel so positively about our trip was that I was desperate for some "city time," since it's been a little over three weeks since we left the Bay Area. We did a lot of the things we like to do that are hard to come by around here like ogle cool architecture, eat ethnic food, and see live jazz. I was, however, reminded of how much cheaper things are here in Vermont while we were away (and the fact that the US dollar is tanking against the Canadian dollar was no help). Hopefully we'll be heading to Boston once Matt, Cascade, and Caden get settled and we need our next city fix. But we'll definitely be going back to Montreal before too long.
Labels: Montreal, train, travel
