Well, it’s called “CANEDA” for a reason, and the “New England” phase of this trip is officially over. The CANADA phase of this trip was about to begin, and with it, dozens of interesting experiences were on the way.
Montreal, as it turned out, was still pretty far from the border with Canada. After getting through the crossing, it was an entire hour before we got a chance to see the vast skyline that Montreal was. For a while, there was nothing but vast countryside in all directions. Signs on the street were not only written in French now, but in English as well. The terrain had also started to flatten out; the entire area had become one large crop field with the occasional house every few hundred feet or so. The countryside of Quebec had a very distinctive feel to it, and it was a very big change from the scenery in Vermont just a few hours ago. The cloudy sky grew dimmer and dimmer, and I surveyed each rural farmhouse through the sunset. (although we couldn’t really see the sun because of the clouds) They had lost their colonial architecture that I’d seen when we were in New Hampshire and Vermont, but they were still distinctive nonetheless. It kind of amazed me that I started the day out in Boston; I was all the way back in Boston, surveying the New Englander Charlestown. After having driven hundreds of miles through one of the most rural parts of North America, that whole phase of the trip definitely felt behind us, like there was a new chapter, a Canadian Chapter, that was about to begin.
And here are our first Canadian pictures on the blog:
After some time, the scenery around us began to switch from rural cropfields to suburban sprawl; and I could see on the map that we were starting to get a lot closer to the city of Montreal. The buildings got larger and more interesting:
And finally, we approached the last major point of interest before Montreal; the St. Lawrence River. This is one of the largest rivers and most infamous rivers in Canada, and the city of Montreal sits right on it, along with Quebec City. Another discovery I made just before we arrived; it turns out that Montreal is actually an island in the middle of the St. Lawrence River, not just a city on the side. We approached the bridge to the river and it offered one of the best views ever: a large, enchanting sight of the St. Lawrence River, and a massive skyline ahead.
And once we crossed that river, we had finally arrived at the city, or island, of Montreal. It turned out that in terms of “metropolis-vibes”, the skylines of San Diego and Boston were nothing but warm-ups. Save for Tokyo and New York City, Montreal had the largest skyline I’d ever encountered in all of my travels around the world.
This city proved to have some of the most dense traffic I’d ever seen in a city before; our hotel wasn’t far away from the bridge we’d taken to cross to Montreal island, but it still took around ten minutes just to make it to our hotel. And there weren’t any parking lots like we had back in Boston; the hotel was a large building in the middle of a huge metropolis, and it took us some time to realize that the parking lot was actually underground; there was a really small opening in the building which led to a massive two-story underground parking lot with dozens of cars inside. After taking a lot of time to figure out where we were going to park, we eventually began to take all our things out of the car and began heading up to our hotel lobby. The first thing we noticed that was interesting about this place was that this lobby, unlike most hotel lobbies, was very high up (I think floor 8 or 9) instead of being on the ground floor.
And this was a huge, and I mean huge improvement from our mediocre hotel that we stayed when we were in Boston. To start, the lobby contained some really nice lounges had an interesting glass view of a pool that was around nine feet deep. We could see quite a bit of the city from here, and in general it was just really well-furnished and good looking (certainly much better than Boston).
It was pretty clear from the moment we entered our hotel room that we were definitely in for a treat. The front of the hotel room, near the entrance, was full of some relatively basic stuff; just some storage to put bags, a cabinet with some bathrobes in it. The bathroom was much more spacious and vibrant than our previous hotel, although nobody really found anything incredibly exceptional.
Now onto the bedrooms; we had booked two rooms, each with two large, comfortable beds and a cabinet containing a coffee maker next to a couple snacks and water bottles. Below was also a minifridge and a safe. On a desk next to the hotel’s TV, we also found a map of the city filled with directions of the nearby attractions that we could visit (we would be using that for sure later on in our explorations of the city) as well as a couple bags of hotel-provided cookies for a welcome treat (I tasted them later on; they were really good.) The nightstand between the beds also had a really interesting circular design with a projection of bright text that displayed the time in this weirdly sci-fi looking font. For some reason, it reminded me of something from the future. The last interesting thing about the hotel room was the fact that one of the walls was covered in a bunch of these floating letters across. Casey and I pretty quickly realized that some of the letters spelled “BONJOUR”, but were unable to decode the rest. The hotel view, although showing some of the city, was a bit obscured by part of the hotel building, so I didn’t find it too noteworthy.
And most interestingly of all, the ceilings weren’t low at all like in Boston.
To be honest, all the excitement had started to lead me to ignore the fact that I was pretty hungry. Honestly, we could’ve just skipped dinner that night; I hadn’t eaten in nine hours, but for some reason I just wasn’t irritated. But our parents, who really wanted to eat something found a nearby place called Paradou and immediately told me and Casey to prepare to start walking there now.
Oh, and before I forget…
Rating for Experience #20, Montreal Hotel, B
Yeah, the hotel was definitely more interesting and better than the one we stayed at in Boston; but there was still nothing about it that screamed “incredibly exceptional”. The cookies, as well as the little gift of a welcome map, and the really nice design of the overall place definitely gave it an above-average review, and it wasn’t at all a bad hotel. If you ever come to Montreal, I greatly recommend visiting the Complexe Desjardins; it’s seriously good.
And it wasn’t just a hotel either; as we went down the elevator to the ground floor, we discovered it was much more than a hotel. It was an entire shopping center.
The whole place was just like a big, American shopping mall; while some shops were closed in the mall since it was late (by this time it was already about 9:30 PM in the night) but even with that we still had plenty of food options. My parents and grandparents, however, had already found somewhere that they thought was interesting a ten minute walk away, and we’d be walking right through the city at about ten o’clock.
Just like most very urban places, Montreal doesn’t seem to sleep at all. Even this late into the night, there were still hundreds of people walking on the brightly lit urban pathways, going about their daily business. As expected, I was hearing a lot more French on the street than back in New England. The place was really vibrant and full of life, so I’ll just let the pictures do the talking for our first walk in Montreal.
The restaurant that we ended up picking is called “RESTERAUNT PARADOU”. The immediate vibe I got when I first entered the restaurant was a very chill place with good service, decent food, and a very spacious interior. As we all took our seats at a table and began to look for our food, I surveyed the options; this place was most well known for having good pizza, but what I was really craving on their menu was the pita, which are these sandwiches with some really rich fillings inside of them. In addition, their menu also consisted of tacos, some nice burgers, and salads.
Casey, being the fast-food addict that he is, chose to get himself a large pizza all to himself. I, on the other hand, settled on this pita with some beef and cheese fillings inside of it. The taste of it was super rich, and it filled me up pretty quick. On top of this, I also got a little salad in a cup with about ten different veggie types in it; they all had their own flavors which blended together really nicely, and definitely helped to counteract the intensity of the meat that I was having at the same time. The rest of our family shared pizza and other meals as well. While it was definitely a good meal in a new city, there wasn’t anything too particularly special that made it an amazing meal, other than a pretty decent-tasting dinner. For that reason, I’m going to rate it a…
Rating for Experience #21, Restaurant Paradou, B
But with that, our super long, ten-hour road-trip from Boston all the way to Montreal was finally over. As we walked back through the shopping center into the mall, I found myself amazed that only ten hours ago we were back in Charlestown, still surveying the colonial architecture of the city. Now that felt so far behind, like it could’ve been in a previous life. This was probably one of the longest days of my life. It had taken over twenty pages on this document just to narrate everything that happened in the past ten hours, and we were still only on Day 3 of the trip.
But with Day 3 having now passed, we made the journey back to our hotel room and had a really long sleep…
Eleven hours and one quick breakfast later, we were back up from our hotel room and ready to begin our first and only full day of exploring the city of Montreal. Our entire party left our hotel room after having some of the hotel-provided cookies as a quick breakfast (me and Casey had woken up very late, so everyone agreed that there wasn’t really much time for breakfast and we were all eager to start exploring Montreal).
As we walked down the hallway of our hotel’s 9th floor and went to the elevators, I discovered that there was actually a really good view just outside of our main hotel room of the city.
And the views of Montreal only got better and better once we reached the ground and began walking towards our first destination. In a lot of ways, it was like being in America. You had your popular two-way roads with regular popular walking through it, going about their daily business and a large city. In many ways, it was different from Boston. You weren’t likely to find too many signs in French in Boston, and definitely not as many Canadian flags. I also noticed a lot of Quebec Flags (the province we’re currently in). If you’re wondering what the flag of Quebec looks like, it looks like this:
The city’s architecture itself was pretty old; just like Boston, it was made of these stone-brick buildings that mixed with a lot of these futuristic, sky-high glass buildings that you’d often see in Europe (particularly France). Montreal was actually founded in the 1600s by the French, so seeing this kind of architecture shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise. Our first stop in Montreal was a place called the Basilique Notre-Dame De Montreal. In English, that’s the Notre-Dame Basilica of Montreal. It’s one of the most prominent churches in all of Canada and definitely a place to consider seeing whenever you go on a visit to Montreal. I could tell our family wasn’t the only one thinking the same thing because as we got closer to the Basilica, crowds began to accumulate on the sidewalks nearby.
And after a short walk, we had finally arrived at the basilica. Let’s just start by saying it was much larger than it looks in the photos. I mean, just look at it compared to the people below;
In front of it included a statue as well as a fountain and a large square for people to take pictures in and interact. Dozens of people went about doing their business. I took as many pictures as I could of the intricately directed exterior of the church, finding dozens of different statues, crosses, and patterns on the outside walls of the cathedral. There was one side on the left that was undergoing renovations and made the whole structure a bit unpleasant to look at, but it was still a pretty interesting structure nonetheless.
Rating for Experience #22, Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica, B+
Yeah, this was definitely one of the best structures we’d seen so far on the trip. While it wasn’t my first time seeing a Notre-Dame structure, it was certainly large and really showed the Christian side of Montreal. And just like with the State Capital Buildings of New Hampshire and Vermont, it wasn’t only the monument itself that was the attraction; the entire city around the Notre-Dame structure had this very distinctive “older” style of architecture to it, like the buildings from the 1700s in this place hadn’t gone through much change since then.
Following our quick visit to the Notre-Dame Cathedral was a near two-hour walking tour of the main part of the city of Montreal. The entire place, I quickly noticed, looked a lot like an old European City. Some of the pictures I took really could’ve just been from somewhere in England in the Victorian Times, or maybe a street in Paris today. It was sort of like a juxtaposition; there was a mix of much older architecture with the modern buildings and road that we would often see in another American city.
It turned out that the Notre-Dame Basilica was actually pretty close to the shoreline of this little lake in the middle of the city of Montreal which produced some of the best views that the city had to offer. We ended up heading to this nearby pier to check out the view for a bit, which was conveniently next to the Centre Des Sciences De Montreal. We spent a few minutes just taking a look at the view through the lake, and from my view of the place, I spotted one of the most famous landmarks in all of Montreal. I’d often see this place when scrolling around in my phone in the past, and to be honest, I didn’t even know it was in the city of Montreal until about now.
Here’s a picture of it from the view I had (Bottom left corner)
Can you recognize it? Do you know its name?
It’s called Habitat 67. Six Sevennnn. I didn’t make up the name. It’s the true number; and it’s one of the most famous apartment buildings in the world. The place is actually a really massive housing complex (private property, so we sadly can’t go in) with a very unique architecture. In fact, the architecture was so good, one of the fantasy sci-fi novels that I wrote about younger in my childhood (which may soon be posted) actually contains a fictional city whose structure is inspired off of the one at habitat 67.
Rating for Experience #23, View from Viuex Port, B
The view itself was a pretty majestic one, but it was certainly carried by the fact that Habitat 67 was there.
But the walking tour itself was still far from over. We soon left the dock to continue exploring Montreal City. We went around, and I took a few more interesting pictures here
Before we decided to take Montreal’s metro station and head to a different part of the city about a mile away. The metro ride ended up being a lot like the way we did in Boston; it was a pretty large subway ride underground, had a lot of stations spanning the majority of the city. We ended up in a district right in the middle of all the crazy buildings; once again, that juxtaposition between old European architecture and modern European metropolis really showed. We spent about an hour just taking some time to sightsee around the city and found statues, churches, massive views, and large buildings that rose hundreds of feet above the ground.
This offered some of the best sightseeing that the city had to offer; we were right in the middle of all the action in all of Montreal. It wasn’t just the large, extremely famous buildings we were passing by. We were also going by all these hidden gems, too; there were some streets that the average tourist might not find that we were able to pass by and see. This was us really getting to know the city of Montreal, and seeing it less for its single famous landmarks and more for the average street and its views. If you really want to get to know Montreal, I think you should try walking through the streets for at least a little while, just to see the contrast between modern and old a little bit, because it’s something that’s pretty unique and really differs a lot from city to city. Even between Boston, which had a similar contrast, most of the buildings looked a lot more colonial in their architecture while Montreal’s city looks more like something European.
Rating for Experience #23, Montreal Walking City Tour, A
But this is everything that you’d expect to see above ground. One of the most famous parts of Montreal is its incredible shopping complex, and that’s underground. In a place called the Underground City.