OUR TRIP TO MONTREAL

I was going to do a series of short posts covering our weekend away but then I thought I might as well bore the shit out of a captive audience since I've got you here. Kind of like visiting those boring relatives in the 1960's who brought out their holiday snaps after dinner.

As I said earlier we travelled by train which is a four and a half hour journey. I won't go over the highlights of that basically because there weren't any.

WAKE UP!

We had booked on-line at the Labelle Suites which had good reviews (and was cheap). It lived up to the reviews being a comfortable suite with a kitchen and a full 'American" breakfast each morning but it was in the Quartiere Latin which is code for the gay, lesbian and red light district of Montreal. There were lots of 'colourful' people on the streets at all hours of day and night which made things interesting to say the least.

Churches

Montreal is certainly a city of churches with ones of different congregations almost on every corner.
We visited a couple - the outstanding Basilique Notre Dame and the smaller but beautiful Notre Dame de Lourdes

Notre Dame de Lourdes

Notre Dame de Lourdes

Inside Notre Dame de Lourdes

Basilique Notre Dame

Main altar of Basilique Notre Dame



Side chapel of Basilique Notre Dame


Vieux Montreal

The old part of the city is more interesting than the modern commercial part.
Honestly it is like walking around one of the smaller cities in France (Tours, Bordeaux, St Emilion etc). The buildings, streets, services etc are identical.

Museums and Galleries

We like to visit art galleries when we travel and Montreal didn't disappoint.
We went to the Musee du Chateau Ramezay, Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal and the Musee des Beaux Arts.

Musee de Beaux Arts

Rodin's 'Thinker'

Glass telephone box

Entertainment

It was a holiday weekend (Victoria Day was Monday) and so there was lots of street entertainment. We walked around on Sunday in beautiful sunny weather and watched buskers, acrobats and other performers.

River Cruise

The St Lawrence River runs right by Montreal. In fact Montreal is basically a set of islands in the river. We went on a tour of course and I took lots of photos.
Here is the first 200 of them:

Just kidding

Cirque de Soleil

Montreal is home to Cirque de Soleil and, serendipitously there was a performance on the Sunday afternoon which we went to.

This was named Kurios - Cabinet des Curiosities and was well up to the Cirque's standard. This was the fifth Cirque show we've seen and I'd recommend it to anyone to see at least one in their lifetime. Brilliant.

Dining out

Montreal is smaller than Toronto but there's seemingly better choices for dining out. We discovered cafes, winebars and decent restaurants in plenty and at and drank well.
I discovered the best Mille Feuille I've ever had. Delicious.

Anyway, we enjoyed the four days.