Montreal Trip Part 1: Days 1-3

Day 1 (Thursday)

Our trip started with a bang. Valerie doesn’t have the years of business travel experience that I do and so gets nervous about traveling. So of course, when we tried to get to the airport we couldn’t get an Uber within a reasonable time. Then the taxi took longer to arrive than promised. Then we hit traffic on the way to the airport. Then we went to the wrong terminal. we had booked via United but it was an Air Canada codeshare and only when we showed up at the United counter did we learn that we needed to go to Air Canada to check in. Air Canada is one of the few airlines operating out of the old terminal at National and so we had to walk a Get Smart maze of walkways and tunnels to get there.

We also then scolded by a frazzled ticket counter agent after we accidentally inserted ourselves into the middle of a large group that was checking in (while she as an Air Canada employee, it was clear from her demeanor that she was American). Fortunately, everything ended well. We had planned in lots and lots of time and despite all these complications we still got to the gate with time to spare, but it was a nerve-wracking start to the trip. Once in Canada, things went more smoothly. Well, we did have a ten minute wait to “deplane” due to a mechanical problem with the jetway; however, our bus ride from the airport (on the appropriately numbered 747 bus) went smoothly and we had no trouble finding our B&B.

The place had been recommended by a friend who has stayed there ten years running for her annual trip to see the Montreal Formula One Grand Prix. The place is a charming example of shabby chic in the best way and the proprietor is a charming Frenchman named Philippe. Philippe had lots of instructions for us. The special technique for using the doorknob on the front door at night to make it close more quietly. How far open to leave the bathroom door (bathroom is in the hall) when we’re not using it. How to lock the bathroom door. The proper orientation of the dish drainer should we choose to use the kitchen. And of course, no shoes inside. You get the idea.

That first evening we went for a walk in the nearby Gay Village. Having not read up on it I didn’t know if the name referred to the contemporary meaning of “gay” or if it had some other significance – perhaps the area was settled by Francois le Gay, or something. It was the former – it’s the city’s out-and-proud gay district. The main drag (so to speak) is a pedestrian mall with rainbow-colored flags and beads hung over the street. We walked its length – lots of restaurants and bars, and only the occasional seedier establishment – head shops and strip clubs. We visited a well known chocolate shop that along with more conventional offerings sold milk chocolate penises – complete with a trail of white chocolate cum. There was a cool musical stationary bike installation which I rode – there were four stationary bikes side by side, each of which controlled a different element of a multi-track recording – rhythm, bass, instruments and vocals. So, depending on which bikes were being pedaled you’d hear different elements of a song. Cool. In general, visiting this kind of area, whether it’s Montreal’s Gay Village, the French Quarter of New Orleans, several areas of New York, etc., etc., reminds me of how buttoned down D.C. is for a big city. Nowhere in D.C. can you find people letting their freak flag fly in the way you can in other cities. Even smaller, seemingly more conservative cities. We are a city of boring bureaucrats L

Riding the musical bike installation

The Gay Village

Also on a musical note, Montreal apparently has a thing with street pianos. In the states I’ve occasionally seen a piano set out on the street for people to play (e.g., at Merrifield) but they’re always the most terrible, broken down things you could imagine. In Montreal there are volunteers who look after the pianos; they’re surprisingly decent instruments. We sat for a while and listened to a young guy play a Chopin piano concerto (I had no idea that it was Chopin but musical sophisticate Valerie recognized it as such right away). We spoke with him later on – turns out he recently graduated from college with a degree in classical performance and was in town looking for an apartment as he was about to start a graduate program in music at McGill University. He was really good. It was therefore with some trepidation that I sat down and banged out my relatively coarse versions of some jazz and New Orleans blues songs; however, they were well received. I initially started to get up after one song, but Alain, the piano’s volunteer keeper (who, incidentally, bore a slight resemblance to Jabba the Hutt – but was much friendlier, as you might expect from a Canadian), encouraged me to play more and so I did. After two encores I made my excuses and we continued on – Alain urged us to come back later in the evening some time, when apparently some regulars (New Yorkers, at that!) had been showing up. Valerie and I continued on to dinner at Haru Hana, a true hole in the wall Asian place. Their cuisine spanned Japanese, Korean, and a little bit of Thai. Usually that’s a bad sign, but the food at this place was really good – and dirt cheap. I was pretty hungry, too, as we hadn’t eaten lunch. Valerie had had the good sense to fortify herself at the airport with some delicacies from Dunkin Donuts, but I had limited myself to a mixed carrot/cucumber/apple/turmeric juice and a Kind bar.

Day 2 (Friday)

On our first morning in Montreal we awoke all achy. Old people, first night in an unfamiliar, rather hard bed. My left shoulder (the current good one!) ached – from sleeping on it wrong or from dragging the suitcases, I don’t know.

As usual, I awakened early. I had noticed that Montreal had bikeshare bikes (called “Bixi”) and that there was a station up the street from our B&B. I went out and took an early morning Bixi ride around our area. The Bixi bikes are pretty similar to the DC bikeshare bikes, except that for whatever reason the one I rode had the gearshift blocked out so it was effectively a single speed bike. Montreal is a hilly city. It’s not easy to haul one of those heavy tanks uphill and I have to admit to walking one brief section. Overall, though, it was a fun experience – and during my ride I stumbled upon the location of the Montreal Circus Festival on Saint Denis street, right nearby.

Bixi Bikes

Upon my return Valerie and I had breakfast together – yogurt, fruit and croissants. Phillipe’s is a one-man operation, and he has a repertoire of two breakfasts: the yogurt and croissant one and the crepe one. We had three yogurt/croissant days and one crepe day. As someone who eats yogurt w/ fruit and granola just about every day at home, I had no problem with the seeming monotony of Philippe’s breakfasts.

There was another guest at the table, Marc, a French professor of Physics, in town for some scientific meetings. His research focus is the physics behind biological rhythms, I provide computer infrastructure to computational biologists studying cancer, Valerie is a math teacher and former computer systems analyst, and Philippe, it turns out, worked for HP doing something IT-related for many years (he said he still messes with computers as a hobby – fixes friends’ computers, etc.). So, to the extent possible given the language barrier, we spent a little while exchanging techie gang signs.

The forecast was iffy about rain, but it promised to be the coolest day of our stay and so we decided to risk the rain and head to the Botanical Gardens. Having misread the map we initially set out on foot, thinking it was much closer than it was (it’s actually about a 5 KM walk, which is far from undoable, but it’s still a long walk). After a helpful local helped us realize our mistake we hopped on one bus, then another, to take us there. A “Top Ten Signs You’re from New York” list I once came across online included, “You consider eye contact from a stranger to be a hostile act.” Yes, New Yorkers and Washingtonians alike actively ignore everyone around them on public transportation. Not so in Montreal! A gregarious senior citizen – complete with the big wrap-around sunglasses, as well as a baseball cap perched at a jaunty angle on his head - waiting at the bus stop with us struck up a conversation. Once on the bus he initiated a conversation with some other passengers, all of whom eagerly joined in (as opposed to New Yorker knee-jerk reaction of giving a death glare to anyone who dared to invade your personal space on public transportation). Likewise, the friendly bus drivers (really!) helped us find our way.

Valerie at the Gardens

Art Installation

Water feature

The gardens were quite beautiful. We visited the Japanese Garden, which took us back to our very first trip together, to San Francisco, and got a tour of the tea house garden. We strolled a big part of the place outside of the arboretum section – the Alpine garden, the flowery brook (my favorite spot), the demonstration garden, etc. We visited the Insectarium for as long as Valerie could take it. We did not, however, partake of the insect-based food items available for purchase. Instead, we ate at the gardens’ regular cafeteria, which offered pretty good food. In the States such a place would be all heat lamp burgers and soggy fries; here I had a rather tasty vegetarian sandwich (one could call it a veggie mush sandwich, since it was filled with some sort of vegetarian pate). By this point it was starting to rain, so we decided we’d call it a day on the outdoor part of the gardens and head to the Biodome, which recreates four different habitats indoors. The Biodome is located on the far side of the Olympic stadium from the gardens and it took us a little while of wandering around in the rain to find our way to it (the stadium grounds were actually kind of creepy – enormous in scale and totally deserted).

Poppies will make them sleep

The first environment was a tropical forest. Valerie hated it since it was HOT and so she went directly ahead to the next, more temperate environment while I strolled the first one a little bit. We caught up with each other and went through the rest together. The whole thing is pretty cool. It’s something of an indoor zoo, but the scale of it is enormous and so you really feel immersed in these environments as you pass through them. The trip through the place culminates in an arctic environment where there were penguins. Penguins, penguins, penguins! We love penguins and so were very happy. Penguins. There, I’ve said it again. Penguins.

Inside the Biodome

Penguins, penguins, penguins!

Over lunch we had looked at the map and figured out that we had taken a much more complicated route than necessary to get there and on the way back we took the easier approach – via a quick metro ride from the stop just outside the gates of the Biodome. Then we napped. This trip involves more napping than I’m used to on this trip – I think I’m still not 100% myself and I get tired a little more easily than pre-surgery.

This weekend was one of the weekends of the Montreal Circus Festival (Montreal is a city of many festivals). In advance of our trip I had bought tickets to Limbo, a “circus cabaret extravaganza”. The show was at the cabaret theater at the Montreal Casino. So, afer a quick dinner at a vegetarian buffet on Saint Denis St. (I’m *trying* to eat right – the buttery croissants at reakfast aren’t helping),  we took the Metro out to the Jean Drapeau staion on the island and then a bus from there. I rarely visit casinos and so just stepping into the place was a head trip. The cabaret theater was pretty cool looking – we felt like we were having quite an adventure even before the show started.

The show itself was quite excellent – circus acts (contortionist, silks aerialist, sword swallower/fire-eater, acrobats, etc.) accompanied by a cool band – three pieces that created a lot of sound! It was like a Cirque du Soleil show but on an intimate cabaret scale. Very cool – mesmerizing.

Saint Denis Street had been hopping with Circus Festival street performers when we were on our way out and so after the show we decided to walk that route back to Philippe’s place. We stopped at Juliette et Chocolat on Saint Denis St. where Valerie had a scrumptious hazelnut chocolate bombe and I, still trying to be good, had just a decaf cappuccino. Once back in the hotel room I indulged by eating three M&M’s, which made me feel like I had had a chocolatey dessert. A little.

The circus was in town

Drummers on stilts

Day 3 (Saturday)

Our Saturday breakfast companions included both Marc and a couple from Belgium. The Belgians did not have the common decency to know how to speak English (they did know enough to express that they were teachers – and so they and Valerie exchanged some teacher gang signs) and so Valerie and I sat largely mute while Philippe, Marc and the Belgians jabbered away in that guttural “language” they all speak. Being a good host, Philippe would periodically turn the conversation to English and would catch us up on what they had been saying. One interesting coincidence was that it turned out that the Belgians and Marc lived within a few miles of each other – just on opposite sides of the French/Belgian border. Apparently gas is cheaper in Belgium and Marc regularly crosses the border and goes to their town to fill up.

Our activity for the day was visiting Old Montreal which was, to tell you the truth, a little bit of a disappointment. I was expecting something like Old Town Alexandria, but Old Montreal was dominated by schlocky tourist stuff – with not much even worthy of browsing. Unfortunately, it turned out we had taken the most schlocky route into the area. When we returned there for dinner on Monday we approached via a different route and got a better feel for how the gives you the feel of a 19^th century section of a European city – it felt less touristy-schlocky coming from that direction.

We didn’t really have much lunch. Generally, Valerie’s idea of a light lunch is to eliminate all the courses except for dessert, and so our lunch was nut-dipped chocolate-covered bananas. This may not have been as heart-healthy as, say, a salad, but at least it had a large component of fruit and nuts –the chocolate dip was the only unhealthful part. Once finished exploring Old Town we returned back to the B&B for, yes, a nap, in preparation for what promised to be an interesting evening.

Valerie’s college friend Deena lives in Montreal. The two of them had been slightly in touch over the years in the Facebook sort of way but hadn’t seen each other face to face in over thirty years. Part of the reason for this is that they had rarely even been in the same country over the years. Right after college Deena had decamped to Israel to live on a kibbutz and she subsequently moved to Montreal with her husband (a native Montrealer, whom she met on the kibbutz).

Valerie called Deena Friday night and they arranged that we would meet Deena and her husband for dinner on Saturday. I’m always leery of these sorts of setups – sometimes they’re great, occasionally they’re really awkward, but usually even if they’re fun for the old friends they’re boring for the spouses, who are total strangers. Not so in this case. The four of us all got along really well and lingered for several hours over dinner. Interestingly, neither of them speaks any French. He’s just old enough to have grown up before the big French nationalist/separatist movement gathered steam, and in those days people on the English-speaking side of town didn’t learn French. I think it was fun for them too to have an excuse to get out of their (almost) suburban neighborhood and into one of the funky parts of town for a night out.

I should mention that the restaurant we went to for dinner was a Burmese place called Dakon. Valerie and I had spotted it Friday night on our walk through the Gay Village. “I love Burmese food!”, Valerie said. “You do not,” I replied, suspecting that she was pulling my leg. After all, there are very few Burmese restaurants around and I doubted that she had ever even tasted Burmese food. A lesson I should have learned long ago is: Do not doubt Valerie. It turns out that years back she and another college friend has as their regular meeting place a Burmese restaurant back in New York. And by the way, the food at Dakon is excellent. And they can customize the dishes from mild to spicy (or as I call it, bland to regular).

Which leads me to ask: why are there so few Burmese restaurants, anyway? Burma has eight times the population of El Salvador and yet while the D.C. area has more Salvadorean restaurants than you can shake a stick at (this is a “guesstimate” on my part – I must admit that I have never actually tried shaking a stick at even a single Salvadorean restaurant), it has few, if any, Burmese restaurants. Are there not a lot of natural restaurateurs from Rangoon? Are they more focused on catchy shaving-related road signs? Maybe they just never emigrated in large numbers to the U.S. Who knows. All I know is that my dish (eggplant on coconut rice) was pretty darn delicious and I will gladly eat Burmese food again if I ever come across another Burmese restaurant (FYI, the one in New York closed years ago).

After dinner the four of us strolled back towards Saint Denis Street. The circus festival was still going on (Montreal is a city of many festivals) and we watched part of a free performance before Valerie’s friends said their goodbyes and headed home. Valerie and I stayed until the end of the performance and then headed back past Dakon down to the river because this weekend was also part of the International Fireworks Festival (Montreal is a city of many festivals) and that was the night that Poland was presenting its entry, starting at 10 PM. As you might expect in a case where national pride is on the line, it was a pretty spectacular display, with musical accompaniment featuring songs by famous Polish artists including Miley Cyrus and AC/DC.

Circus Festival performers

More circus acts

Polish fireworks