Day 4 (Sunday)
I wanted to make sure to get some exercise during the trip
(above and beyond the walking we’re doing) and so on Sunday I started my day
with a run. I screwed up in planning my route – not realizing that Google Maps
was already showing me distances using metric units (since I was in Canada, it
defaulted to km) I measured a route that was 3.1 km, thinking I was mapping out
3.1 miles (which would be 5 km). So, I did my run and felt pretty good at the
end until I checked my phone. “What, only 2 miles?!” So, I continued my run in
the other direction, then back, then a little bit more while watching the phone
until I just hit the 5K mark. According to Strava, despite my confused route I
clocked in at 39:33, which put a smile on my face – getting back under 40 mins
has been a goal since I started being able to run (really jog) again. My run
ended right near a Café Starbucks, but I Resisted. The. Urge. To. Get. Coffee.
As it was, thanks to Philippe’s readily available high end espresso machine I was
already drinking way too much caffeine. At this point I’m not worried about
atrial fibrillation (a problem I had had in the hospital the first time I had
had coffee after my surgery); it’s more that as long as I’ve broken the
caffeine habit I’d rather not get back into it. Philippe insists that espresso
has much less caffeine than regular coffee since the water isn’t in contact
with the beans for long, but my research says the only reason you get less
caffeine from an espresso than from a regular coffee is volume – you drink a
few ounces of espresso vs. a full cup (or more) or coffee. I will tell you that
on a day when I had a few cups of espresso it felt like I could feel the
caffeine tingle permeating throughout my body, all the way out to the
fingertips. Best not to let a junkie feel the pleasure of the drug too often,
or he’ll be hooked again before you know it.
Beyond that, having had three pretty busy days, we started
more slowly on Sunday. Leisurely breakfast. Today’s breakfast was crepes, served
with instructions from Philippe on how to spread jam on our crepes (pick up the
bowl of jam. Spoon the jam onto your crepe, but do not use the spoon from the
bowl to spread the jam.). After breakfast (I must admit, I repeatedly screwed
up the instructions and spread the jam with the spoon) Valerie went back and
slept for a while. When we finally got moving we headed over to the Jean-Talon
market. Montreal has two major markets: Atwater (the English market) and Jean
Talon (the French market). Actually, there’s a legacy of there being two of
everything in Montreal, since historically the French Catholics and English
Protestants did not mix – they occupied two separate worlds demarcated by Saint
Laurent Street. The legacy of that tension lingers even today – when Philippe
(who is French, not French Canadian) first described the city to us he said the
Eastern end is French, and added with some bitterness, “and poor” while the
Western end is English (“and rich”). Anyway, the market is a cool place –
basically a permanent farmer’s market – with an indoor area selling food
products (e.g., honey, meats, spices) and a covered outdoor area which is
mostly fruits, vegetables and flowers. We saw some things which never appear at
farmer’s markets near us – some fruits we didn’t even recognize. I also played another of Montreal's street pianos.
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| Jean-Talon Market |
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| The produce! |
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| Things I cannot eat :( |
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| Street piano |
Once again, the recipe for a “light lunch” is eliminate all
the courses except dessert. Knowing we were going to have a heavy dinner,
Valerie had just a chocolate croissant for lunch. As usual I tried not to fall
too far off the heart-healthy wagon and had a decaf cappuccino and a hunk of
baguette.
Upon our return from the market we napped to prepare
ourselves for dinner at Poutineville. Poutine is is a Quebecois dish made with
French fries and cheese curds topped with a brown gravy. It’s become such a
signature dish of this part of Canada that even McDonald’s
sells it. It’s really better suited to wintertime, and really appropriate
only if you’ve been burning off a lot of calories working as a lumberjack or
mushing sled dogs all day, but it’s become a year-round thing, even among city
dwellers. Poutineville offers a design-your-own approach, with choices of
gravies, meats, cheeses and other toppings. While the only truly heart-healthy
poutine is no poutine at all, I did my best with a vegetarian version:
potatoes, cheese curds, eggplant, pepper and mushroom topped with vegetarian
brown gravy, all washed down with a pint of beer. Valerie went for a more
traditional version with a heap of beef on top of her potatoes and cheese (but
the gravy on the side!). Which may have been her mistake.
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| Poutine |
We waddled back to Philippe’s and settled in for a quiet
evening after two fairly late nights.
Day 5 (Monday)
Alas, we had not been able to book our room at Philippe’s
for the entire duration of our stay, so Monday morning (yogurt/croissants, BTW)
we said au revoir to the shabby chic charm (and I mean that in a good way) and
warm hospitality of Le Saint André des Arts B&B and moved to the corporate
blandness of the Embassy Suites. Philippe had been horrified at the idea that
we might take Uber (“modern slavery”, in his opinion) and so we used his
recommended cab service instead. We knew we’d be at the hotel too early to
check in. I figured we’d leave our bags and go see some sight – perhaps the
basilica, which is right nearby. Unfortunately, it had started raining and so we instead chose to explore the underground city. Mostly the underground city
is a set of passageways designed to let people get around downtown without
going outside – useful in the cold Canadian winters. But Valerie had read that
there was shopping in parts of the underground city and set out on a quest to find
the mythical underground mall with a fervor not seen since Ponce de León searched
for the fountain of youth.
Valerie wasn’t hungry because he tummy was a little upset,
which meant I was not allowed to stop for food. Relentlessly on and on we went
through the tunnels, like a loop of the opening credits of Get Smart. At around noon we made a
temporary encampment at a food court where I was able to grab a cup of coffee and
eat a bit of leftover baguette from our visit to the Jean Talon market, but we
soon broke camp and continued. At around 1:30 we sighted another underground
food court on the horizon and Valerie finally declared it was OK to get lunch.
I got the heart-healthiest thing I could find there, an Asian salad with
chicken; Valerie, still not feeling right, had a muffin.
Soon after lunch we reached the end of the underground maze.
Making our way back to the planet’s surface, we walked to our hotel - our room
was ready. Tired from the exertions involved in wasting an entire day of our
vacation walking through underground tunnels, we napped. In the evening we went
out for dinner at an Indian restaurant in Old Montreal where they obliged our
request to prepare the dishes extra bland – so, like picture on the box from a
frozen Indian food dinner, it looked like Indian food but tasted like
cardboard.
After dinner we strolled the Old City again, then returned
to our room. And then the fun began. The slight stomach upset Valerie had been
feeling all day turned into a raging, awful, terrible case of food poisoning. Up
all night, running to the bathroom sort of food poisoning. Neither of us slept
much. At about 4 AM I moved to the sofa in the Living Room area where I was
able to catch a little sleep, but when morning came Valerie was wiped and I was
exhausted.
Day 6 (Tuesday)
But it was our vacation, so I plunged onward. We had planned
to do a load of laundry once we got to the Embassy Suites. It turned out the
Philippe had a washing machine and dryer in the kitchen, but guests weren’t
allowed to use it – if you put your laundry into the machine he would do it for
you. I thought this was a little weird and didn’t have him do my laundry, but
Valerie did. So, most of the dirty laundry we still had at this point was mine.
I started my day on Tuesday by putting in a load of laundry but I was so tired
that I forgot half the things I had meant to wash. Once the laundry was done I
walked over to the nearby supermarket to buy some supplies for Valerie – clear broth,
Gatorade, that sort of thing – for when she felt like eating a little bit.
Valerie was not up for even getting out of bed, but (with
her blessing) I carried on with what had been our plans for the day, a walking
tour of Jewish Montreal. There is a Jewish Museum in Montreal, but until
recently it didn’t even have a physical space. It existed only as an archive
(physical and virtual) of Jewish items and history, and a set of walking tours.
Now they have a small storefront with a restaurant, a small gift shop and a
little exhibit space, but it’s still mostly walking tours. Much has been made
of the resilience of the Jewish people in the face of all sorts of adversity –
the variety of strategies I’ve seen for how these small Jewish museums operate
is in itself evidence of that characteristic. Montreal has a virtual Jewish
Museum. Last summer we visited the Maine Jewish Museum, which shared space with
a synagogue – the combination of the two being just enough to allow both to eke
out an existence.
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| A former synagogue, now being restored as a historic building |
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| Montreal's former Jewish tenements |
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Montreal is a city of many murals |
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| Another mural |
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| While better known as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Jackie Robinson played for the Expos at the end of his career |
Anyway, I had figured out how to get up to the museum by
bus, but since it was just me I hopped on a Bixi bike and rode up (and I do mean up – Montreal is one
big hill) there. The tour itself was quite good. The Montreal Jewish story is similar
to the American one: the tenements, the same waves of immigration, and so on.
There are some distinct quirks, though. Jews arriving in Montreal found a city
already divided between English Protestants and French Catholics. In a sense
this made it easier, since they were just one more small faction added into a
pre-existing religious war. The English and French were too busy hating each
other to focus on hating the Jews. On the other hand, the Jews had to create
yet a third set of infrastructure: Jewish schools, Jewish hospitals, and so on.
On the other hand, employment options seemed more limited than in the U.S.: 75%
of the late 19th century immigrants wound up working in the garment
business.
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| The only active Jewish congregation left in Mile End |
As with New York’s Lower East Side, most of Montreal’s Jews
migrated over the generations to better neighborhoods. At one time there were
90 small synagogues operating in the neighborhood. Now there’s one. Here and
there you find Jewish restaurants, remnants of the past, but the neighborhood is
now multi-cultural and funky – again, like the Lower East Side. Another tidbit:
the founder of the Canadian Jewish Congress, an organization that represented
and lobbied for the interests of Canadian Jews for many decades, was founded by
the grandfather of singer Leonard Cohen.
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| Yet another street piano (this one was in bad shape) |
After the tour was done I continued up St. Laurent Street into
the Mile End neighborhood, which has the feel of Brooklyn’s Park Slope
neighborhood – funkiness fully gentrified. My destination was Fairmount Bagel,
the most famous of Montreal’s bagel shops. Montreal has its own style of bagel,
just as Chicago has what it calls pizza. Both are only vaguely edible and are
far, far inferior to true bagels and pizza (that is, New York style). My friend
Francois had once given me a Montreal bagel to try, but it was a
freezer-burned, dried-out version. I had to try fresh ones. The verdict:
Fairmount has the feel of an authentic, old school urban bagel shop, but the
bagels are way too brioche-like: light and sweet. Non, merci.
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| Fairmount Bagel |
I augmented my inferior bagel with a Kind bar and a soda,
all eaten in a little urban park, and that was my lunch. I then Bixi biked home
(dowwwnhilll! Wheee!), stopping back near the Jewish Museum to check out a second-hand
clothing store. I’m always on the lookout for funky clothes to wear onstage.
Then I returned to the hotel to check on Valerie, who was doing a little bit
better but was still quite weak.
In the evening, after having a complimentary beer at the Embassy
Suites happy hour, I wandered over to the Africa D’Nuit World Music Festival,
where I saw an excellent Senegalese (now living in Quebec) singer named ILAM, and Las
Cafetras, a Chicano band playing sort of Afro-Latin, hip-hop-inspired
music. I also grabbed dinner (a falafel sandwich) at a stand in a big food area
that serviced the various festivals going on in the city.
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| ILAM |
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| Food area |
Day
7 (Wednesday)
By
Wednesday Valerie was feeling a little better. She went down and had a little
breakfast, then we went back to the supermarket. We actually like to browse
supermarkets when we travel to spot the little differences – the package of
frogs legs in the freezer case, the unfamiliar herbal tea, and so on. We got
lunch in Chinatown (hand-pulled noodles – which is apparently a big deal – the food
was good) and then hung out back at the room.
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| Frogs legs in the freezer case |
In the evening Valerie stayed back in the room and I went back
to Africa D’Nuit festival. I saw Joaquin Diaz, a merengue
accordionist from the Dominican Republic. He was a pretty amazing player –
fingers moving too fast to see, but after a while a lot of the music started to
sound the same. He was followed by Kobo
Town, an excellent modern calypso band. Kobo Town showed the true universal
spirit of music: the lead singer was an expat Trinidadian living in Montreal, the
bass player and guitarist were Trinidadians, the horn section was from Guyana
and the drummer was from Croatia! And they rocked. The evening was somewhat
rainy and I hadn’t brought my raincoat, so I had to strategically dodge the
rain. When it sprinkled during Joaquin Diaz’s set I took shelter under a canopy.
It rained again while I was on my way to the food area, and I ducked into a
building. There was a tremendous downpour while I was eating, but fortunately I
had found a seat under cover. I stayed mostly dry (except for my back) while I ate
my seitan wrap. Fortunately, the rain was gone by the time Kobo Town came on
and so the crowd was up and dancing. It was a good finale for the trip.
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| Joaquin Diaz |
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| Kobo Town |
Day 7 (Wednesday)
On Thursday we packed up and flew home. Because of Valerie’s
illness and the weather we never made it to the Basilica, despite staying just
a few blocks away. I never made it to the top of Mount Royal, and I never
kayaked the Lachine Canal. But we had lots of fun, and I had lots of adventures
I hadn’t expected, with my Bixi bike explorations, a couple more festivals than
we had anticipated, and the walking tour. A good trip overall. Except for
Valerie’s illness. And the bagels.
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