I recently had the opportunity to travel to Montreal to visit a friend. While Montreal is close to Toronto (Five hours by train) I had only been there twice before, once at the age of 8, and again at 18. The first time my memories are marred slightly because I caught the flu and threw up all over the city. The second time I also threw up all over the city, but for different reasons. (Kidding! I got the flu again, but having Margarita lunches on an influenza-ridden stomach is not a good idea.) This would be the first time I would see the city as an adult, and the first time I would see it not covered in a meter of snow.
I stayed with my friend Patrik from Sweden in the neighborhood of Le Plateau. Le Plateau used to be the Jewish neighborhood of Montreal, home to Leonard Cohen, and still has the delis to show for it, but more on that later. Le Plateau then welcomed Portuguese immigrants, and subsequently, hipsters. (If you want to know what the next big trend amongst hipsters will be, look first to the Portuguese.) Le Plateau is somewhat like Trinity-Bellwoods is like in Toronto, with a similar mix of old Portuguese women in housedresses and young bohemians, wearing those same housedresses, but ironically. What separates Le Plateau from Queen West, Williamsburg, or Sodermalm is the savings!
First of all, everyone in Le Plateau brushed the mothballs off their Grand-mere's mounted antelope collection and put it on sale. If you ever wondered where your Grandfather's old jacket is, the one that was knit and had a hunter shooting a duck on the back of it, and it smelled like DuMaurier's and Molson, well that's here. And remember that World's Best Dad plaque you made when you were 10 and you hot glued macaroni to a piece of plywood, and there's a bloodstain on the top-left corner from where you cut yourself with the saw? It's there too. All the stores of Rue Saint-Laurent are full of tacky old crap. Gems, but also lots of weird old shit, and you can pay by the pound. (Don't load up on paperweights, they're heavy!) Still, Montreal is cheaper than any other major city I've been to, save Berlin. Drinks can cost as little as $2 and a meal perhaps $5. Berlin has an unofficial motto, "Poor, but Sexy". The motto could apply to Montreal as well, which along with it's Dollarama savings, is certainly the sexiest city in Canada.
Montreal, home of "Le Super-Sexe" is very much a party town. Perhaps it dates back to its bootlegging heyday, or the French culture's "joie de vivre", but Montreal kicks Toronto's ass on the party front. The city is teeming with bars, cafes, and restaurants. Along Rue Peel or Rue Sainte-Catherine, everything along street level is some kind of drinking establishment. Everyone in Montreal must constantly be out all the time to keep these places in business, and it's great they are. Toronto has a few areas of nightlife: College Street, Queen West, Church Street, and the "Entertainment District". Montreal spills forth with nightlife options everywhere, with every kind of experience available. I was also surprised that Montreal's Le Village, the gayborhood, was much larger than its Toronto counterpart. I figured that Church Street contained all the gays in Canada, but it appears as though Montreal has gay people too, only they call them, Les Gays. (No, that isn't a portmanteau of Lesbian and Gay, it's "The Gays" in French)
We also witnessed part of a Canadian Football game. It's almost the same as American football, but they measure in meters instead of yards, or something like that. Above are some prominent Canadian feminists celebrating their freedom! This was Patrik's first glimpse of cheerleaders, which don't exist in Sweden, or if they did they would be a coed troup and wear unisex unitards and just encourage everyone to play fairly and practice good sportsmanship.
Montreal also provided me the opportunity to view some art, such as the above sculpture of two emaciated chimpanzees killing an obese one. The above piece was in La Musee des Beaux-Arts, one of two museums Patrik and I visited - for free! Like a DG sorority girl, Montreal shows you all it has for free, unlike a DG sorority girl, you don't even need to ply her with jungle juice. The Beaux-Arts was the better of the two museums we visited, and it had an impressive permanent collection.
Above is a painting by Canadian painter, Dorian FitzGerald, of the Portuguese Throne Room in Lisbon. The painting is very striking to see, it is all flat, two-dimensional fields of color that together give the illusion of incredible depth. The painting was made in an unusual way, it was laid flat and had the pigment poured over it in countless layers, each layer flat against the previous, all done without a brush. The effect is something like an obsessive-compulsive's paint-by-numbers, but it is staggering to see.
The Beaux-Arts also had a piece by Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Black Andy Warhol and one of the coolest artists to ever have lived. He was a master of street art who took on the gallery world, was friends with Bowie and Warhol, AND dated Madonna! The above piece contains a Madonna reference.
Of course, everyone's a critic. As you can see above.
Most surprisingly, Montreal is a surfing destination! Well, it's not quite Maui, but there is a standing wave that you can ride continuously forever. It does require a wetsuit though, and there isn't much of a surfer culture - no beachy surfer dudes or bikinis - but it is certainly the only Canadian city with surfing in city limits! (Toronto, get one of these!)
To make a long story short: Europe > Montreal > Toronto. It's the best you can do with out getting a Trans-Atlantic flight, and for myself, Montreal is a fantastic place to be enjoyed on an unemployed person's salary.
