Marc's Public Blog - Trips to other locations

The next two days, I spent to visit Montréal.
So, I was up by 10:30, which considering the previous night, wasn't too bad, and since I didn't have a guide or anything else, I cheated: I took the hotel map, and a tour on one of those double decker busses. I've always felt that tourists in them look silly, and I actually still do, but it was just a very convenient way to get a quick tour and know what places I should go back at. Most of the pictures I took from there were lost too, but that's not a huge deal, they were not the best ones, and many I was able to take again, later.
When my tour was over 2H later, I took the same bus again, and dropped at the bottom of the Hill with the cross, and hiked all the way up. There were boring paths going all the way around, but I went for the straight up "make your own" path through the forest and boulders (good exercise) and somehow managed to end up at the bottom of the said cross (I was climbing blind since it wasn't visible from the forest). The way down was even more dicy due to the grade and very limited grip (i.e. I was somewhat sliding down).




Overall, I'd have to say that Paris doesn't have a whole lot on Montréal: the city has some beautiful areas, and old city corner, very nice churches everywhere (Montréal is very catholic), and overall the city really reminded me about Paris, especially when they have french names like Champ de Mars :)






lots of nice houses, try finding that in Paris



Oh, did I mention churches? :)


believe it or not, they were celebrating the sunset :)


The nicer part however was that they have many festivals, and I thought I was just lucky and hitting the best parts and time of the city, but while a little luck was involved, I was also told "oh this is like this almost all the time".
I finished the afternoon/evening walking through the Juste Pour Rire festival, which had taken over multiple city blocks, and of all thing was able to enjoy a real Mergez with Harissa (Tunisian specialty I hadn't had in ages)


Saturday night, I had dinner with my buddies, watched some fireworks by the river, and we then wasted money in a bad copy of the gold club (no contact dances, sheesh...), which was kind of silly, but San wanted to go there for some reason, so we followed him, and finished the night in his bar and club (many more people that night). For the occasion, I had another table massage (it was probably 30mn, and it's interesting to swap the usual Enya-like music and light candles for club lighting and music :)



Sunday, when I got up noon-ish, I went to visit their Centre de Sciences , and used the rest of the time to visit the city with my rollerblades (that's the one time when they came in handy): Old Montréal, and the Marché Bonsecours before having dinner, trying the local métro, and catching the 20:30 bus back to Ottawa, where I just crashed, exhausted.


I obviously have lots of other pictures of Montréal, which you can all find here