Touring Montreal
Please don't make me write in Franglais again.
We walked to the starting point of our bus tour this morning, stopping for a muffin and a coffee at Second Cup again. Montreal's larger Second Cup was a lot less organised than the smaller Ottawa counterpart we used yesterday.
The tour gave us exactly the whistle-stop tour of the city we needed.
A church...
A view from the side of Mount Royal (from whence Montreal gets its name)...
Another church...
The Olympic Stadium...
... and much more besides. The tour guide was a tight-fisted old miser, and was full of advice on how to look like a big spender without spending money. He pointed out a Gucci shop, and explained how to talk them out of a carrier bag, which you could then take home containing a t-shirt from Wal-Mart. He pointed out the Ritz Hotel, and explained how you could get in and buy an $8 coffee in the restaurant, then take a load of photographs and go home claiming you'd stayed there.
He explained how this church was an exact replica of one in Rome, so you could take photographs of it and tell your friends you've been to Italy (a big deal if you're American I guess).
The tour guide was also keen on explaining to the American tourists how a welfare state worked. The tone of the "ooh"s and "aah"s indicated that they thought it was a wonderful thing that health care was free, but a terrible, terrible injustice that contributions were based on income. Most of the Canadian laws revealed to us seemed eminently sensible, but one seemed bizarre: by law, all house moves in Ontario and Quebec must take place on the 1st of July. Apparently Montreal is quite a sight to behold every year, with all the removal lorries booked up and families moving their belongings using whatever they can get their hands on: he descibed to us one family holding up traffic as pushed their sofa, fridge and cooker across an intersection on foot. I suppose this eliminates chains to some extent -- but what to removal men do for the rest of the year?
Another thing about the tour guide was that he spoke English with a heavy French accent, and had a few little Francophone tics in his language: he never said "because", he said "par ce que" within an otherwise English sentence. There are plenty of good English speakers in the city -- I suppose he was good for his job because his accent added some local colour to proceedings, and he did have an excellent knowledge of the city. Things took a somewhat dubious turn when he explained that it was easy to find a Chinese restaurant in the city "just look in the Yellow Pages". Um?
After the tour we walked along the main shopping street towards the Chinese Quarter. We did this because it was the most direct route from where we were, but we were sucked into an HMV where we were forced to buy some DVDs.
A Simpsons season 2 DVD boxed set had two stickers on it -- a white one reading CA$72.99 and a red one reading CA$46.99. We puzzled as to what this might mean. CA$46.99 was clearly way too cheap for a 4 disk boxed set reasonably new on the market. We'd toyed with buying the same set in the USA for about $70, but it was sold out there. Things are cheaper in Canada, we reasoned. Maybe the red sticker was the price in US$, for Americans who'd crossed the border without changing any currency? We puzzled about this for a while, before asking a member of staff, who explained to us as if we were idiots, "yes zat is ze price -- she is on ze sale because she is new". We shrugged in as Gallic a fashion as we could muster and stumped up the money.
Things got seedy as we approached Chinatown, with the number of strip bars increasing the closer we got. There are strip bars right in the centre, mind you; just more here. Incidentally, our hotel room has an official magazine about Montreal, containing an article about the city's club scene. It lists various kinds of nightclub: jazz, dance, etc. before moving on to strip clubs, and then somewhat sheepishly lists some swinging clubs. As in swingers. Wife swapping, Mum, not groovy music...
I digress. The seediness dissipated as we went through an arch festooned with Chinese dragons into the tiny Chinatown district. We picked a Chinese buffet pretty much at random: our only doubts were whether a buffet was a good idea so early in the evening -- it was only 5ish -- with too few customers the food can sit around on the buffet for too long. It turned out there were plenty of customers in there, many of them Chinese, and we had a great feeding frenzy.
It was still early when we left the restaurant, but we were tired after a long and full day, so we caught a bus back to the hotel and watched Panic Room on the TV. It's great. It fizzles out at the end somewhat, but it's beautifully put together and it has some amazing long tracking shots (probably faked with computers....). I've heard criticisms that it's contrived. I like contrivance.
We considered seeing more of some of Montreal's attractions, but the big city doesn't agree with us any more. We're hot-tailing it out of here first thing tomorrow.