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
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| Notre Dame de Lourdes |
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| Notre Dame de Lourdes |
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| Inside Notre Dame de Lourdes |
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| Basilique Notre Dame |
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| Main altar of Basilique Notre Dame |
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| 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.
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| Musee de Beaux Arts |
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| Rodin's 'Thinker' |
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| 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.
6 comments:
Very interesting post, but I shouldn't have read it before school. Reading about your holiday break from your usual days of unbridled leisure doesn't make my trip to yet another day at the chalkface seem in the least alluring ...
Hey, where are the other 198 shots of that river?
I lit candles for my mother in both churches.
I lit candles for my mother in both churches.
I lit candles for my mother in both churches.
One must do religious things in threes. You should know that Second.
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