Montréal

Montréal is one weird place. The main shopping street — rue Sainte-Catherine — reflects how jumbled the city is, highlighted by the bizarre mixture of high-street shops placed in-between sex-shops. Within the city centre seedy mixes with up-market, trendy with off-beat, wealthy with under-privileged.

The city is a mélange of Parisian and some nondescript North American city, and I like that. It's a de facto bi-lingual city — English and French — although still very much francophone, and I quite like that too.

There's a very Commonwealth style welcoming feel to the place, and I'd now love to see the rest of Canada outside of Quebec!

The city boasts an enormous underground city (known as RÉSO, since everyone loves a good pun), spanning some 32km of tunnels which connect several shopping centres, hotels, metro stations, and office buildings together. During the winter, the city centre must be quite a comfortable place to be!

We didn't manage to navigate our way through the whole complex, but after a few days it becomes very easy to navigate your way around. The city's grid-system street layout above-ground also helps. It seems like the majority of the high-street retailers are located within these complexes.

A recycling themed display in Eaton Centre (part of the underground city), which was quite impressive but difficult to capture up close with the camera.

The architecture of the city in parts is pretty, but in other parts a reminder of a financial boom in an ugly decade (mostly the 60's and 70's). As much as Old Montréal is touted as being beautiful, I think it's destroyed by the fact that I live in Brussels: Cobbled streets just don't do it for me anymore, and the saturation of tourist shops pushed me away from wanting to spend much time in the area.

Well, that and the fact that there wasn't an open café to sit and warm up while planning our next move!

Old Montréal

We did find the Marché Bonsecours, a rather imposing old building filled with boutique shops, somewhat like a giant and successful version of our Halles Saint-Géry here in Brussels. Again though, I felt like I'd just gotten off a tour bus and we didn't stick around for long.

So… can you park here?
This is nothing compared to some of the parking signs around the city!

During our escape from the area, we spotted a shop only my mother would adore. Noël Eternal is a shop that caters for those who have some bizarre compulsion to wish it was Christmas every day of the year. They sell Christmas decorations all year-round. I wasn't able to take photos as we looked around the city, mostly because I was in a state of shock and appallment.

Noël Eternal

Across the road from that horrendous place is the Notre-Dame Basilica, and while A headed in I attempted to do a bit of caching in the area. Some of the caches in the city centre are devilishly difficult nano-caches, this one included.

Notre-Dame Basilica

Much of the trip was spend shopping and testing the local lifestyle. We of course wound up heading to Schwartz's for their famous smoked meat sandwich, explored a bit of the McGill campus, had some Poutine from a variety of places (delicious despite what it looks like), saw some stand-up comedy, and probably ate too many Timbits (thanks John)!

We found an excellent place for Chinese too, partly because they were still open and pretty full at 1am (or whatever ridiculous time it was).

Marche de Zombies de Montréal 2011

Near to the hotel, we did find ourselves catching the end of the Montréal Zombie Walk, with said zombies preparing themselves for a zombie movie marathon at a nearby theatre. I now know that zombies are more attracted by the prospect of having their photo taken rather than devouring your flesh, so this was an important lesson should there be a zombie apocalypse.

It's a shame some of these kids confused “zombie walk” with Comic-Con — although potentially we could be made to believe that the likes of Darth Vader and Frankenstein have become zombies despite any particular change in their appearance.

After our visit to La Ronde, I had to return to Île Sainte-Hélène to visit something architectural that caught my eye…

Buckminster Fuller's geodesic Biosphère

If you don't know who Buckminster Fuller is, or the significance of this structure, then go away and do some reading. This is the Montréal Biosphère, which served as a pavilion during the Expo 67 World's Fair. This time I wasn't able to jump off this particular World's Fair relic, but I took a heap of photos; the structure is fascinating to look at.

Like all World's Fair structures this was designed to be temporary, and originally it was intended to be bolted together. At some point, possibly due to safety concerns, the structure had to be welded together rather than bolted. Originally the structure was covered on the inside with transparent acrylic panels, but during renovation efforts in 1976 a welding mishap caused these panels to ignite and the whole place rapidly went up in flames.

The building now houses an environmental museum, which is reasonably interesting (and fantastic for kids), but not as interesting as the structure itself. The fact that Bucky's structure became an environmental museum is such brilliant idea, and I think he'd be quite proud.

I have to admit, we were also looking for the Biodôme, which we thought were one and the same: Woops!

Beers at the Benelux Brasserie

We managed to visit a few pubs, including Brutopia (I don't recommend it; see my review on this page), Brasserie Benelux (where we found the beers a little too artisanale, but loved the atmosphere), and Le Saint Bock (which we really enjoyed to the point of returning to watch a few hockey games). Brussels has made us fussy when it comes to beer!

Looking back, if we were sure we'd survive the cold, I think it'd be a city we could live in one day.

I wonder if I can buy Coffee Crisp chocolate bars in Brussels…