Arrival

My flight to Montreal went smoothly, although I gave myself way too much time to get to the airport. I left Ferndale around noon on the #27 bus, caught the Bolt bus about one-thirty at the Cordata transit center, and arrived in Vancouver BC in the late afternoon, with five hours to kill before my flight. So I enjoyed a light dinner and some idle-time at a cafe, before catching the SkyTrain to the airport, where once again I had a few hours to wait for my 8:55pm flight via Edmonton to Montreal.

The view from my room at the hostel

I don't like rushing around, or taking a chance on missing a connection, but the consequence of leaving so early was that by the time I arrived in Montreal, I'd been travelling for about eighteen hours with only two hours of sleep on the plane. Luckily I found a regular direct shuttle between the airport and the hostel, the #747 bus, but when I got to the hostel and found I'd missed my check-in time, I must have alarmed the young woman at the desk a bit. I was so tired and disoriented from the time change and jet-lag that I wasn't sure what day of the week it was. I managed a "Bon jour," then had to go on in English. But we got my room assignment sorted out soon enough, so I could go have a nap before getting out to walk around a bit and find dinner.

I stayed two nights at the Residences Universitaire (UQAM est), a former dormitory of the Univesity of Quebec at Montreal (there is a second, newer UQAM ouest building, but it closes during August). It was clean, convenient and very cheap ($90cdn/night). Montreal in August is hot and humid, but I was comfortable enough with a ceiling fan and windows cracked open at night. The rooms are arranged in two-story clusters; you enter a small living room with bedrooms and shared baths down a short hallway, and a metal spiral staircase leading up to a kitchen and another set of bedrooms and shared baths. I heard male voices in my cluster at night but never met anyone until just as I was leaving. I didn't see any other guests at all, although one night there was a party in the courtyard below my 8th floor window until after 2am.

The hostel is on blvd Rene Levesque, one of the main streets heading to downtown from the area of the university, which parallels a couple of other streets full of restaurants and shops, so I learned to navigate a bit by walking up and down the major streets, sometimes zigzagging between them. There are tree-lined residential streets just off busy commercial streets, with small multi-plex buildings, often with picturesque spiral staircases leading to upper floor apartments - easy to sweep off snow in the winter, I was told.

New & Old

The French Poodle & the English Bulldog

As in most major (and minor) cities, summer is the season for construction and street improvement projects, so there were many detours and barricaded sidewalks. The weekday traffic was busy and confusing, and I was kind of glad my bike was still boxed up at the tour group's hotel, so I had an excuse to go on foot rather than risking bike-riding. The city is a fascinating jumble of old and new, French and British influences, along with many other nationalities. Near the university and the Place des Spectacles, the streets were thumping with music events day and night. There was some sort of anime or cosplay convention going on, with groups of young people dressed up in steampunk-manga-Star Trek-vampire-fairy-Hello Kitty-style wandering everywhere.