03/06/10

reporting on 04/06/10

After a good nights sleep in an actual bed we set off from Sudbury out towards Montreal. The drive went fine apart from the petrol prices in Canada are pretty high in comparison to America. For comparison, a litre of gas in Canada is about 95c, whereas in the states a gallon is about 270c, at least it's not at British prices, which I hear is about 120p per litre at the moment. Margy was saying that at one point gas in Canada went over $2 a litre!

We timed our approach to Montreal perfectly to hit the rush hour, great. Although in comparison to LA or in fact London, it was actually not bad at all. Although our mobiles didn't work at all in Canada we successfully met up with Bob, Margy's brother who lives in the city. It's bizarre the way you can recognise someone after not seeing them for about 10 years, but we managed to recognise each other well enough to meet in the street near his apartment. After chatting with Bob for a while he had to go off to work pretty much through the night, so he left us his apartment, which was pretty cool of him. He also gave us some hints as to interesting things to see in the town. His apartment is in the plateau area of the city, which is a really trendy area right in between the main English and French speaking streets. Our first port of call was Schwartz's smoked meat shop, one of the most surreal places I have been to in a long time. The guys who worked in the shop were all really surly and aggressive and almost continually shouting at each other. The guy taking the orders was wearing a paper hat with “I hate smiling” written on it, and sure enough it wasn't service with a smile. We got a couple of their sandwiches to go, these were simple enough; two pieces of bread with a huge amount of this awesome tender smoked beef between them with a dash of some sort of sweet mustard. A great sandwich. What made this place especially bizarre is that despite the demeanour of the staff and the almost complete lack of decoration in the place to the extent that it looked straight out of the eastern block, it was incredibly popular. People were queuing into the street, standing in the rain to get in.

From Schwartz's we went on to grab a bagel from one of the couple of famous bakeries in the city. The most famous of which bakes it's bagels 24 hours a day every day and is still done all by hand in a little one room shop. At night they only sell the bagel rather than filling them so we got a couple and some Philadelphia cheese and did it ourselves, still a great bagel though. We did a bit more wandering in the rain before heading back for the night. One of the cool things that we noticed in Montreal is that they have this citywide pay as you go bike rental system. It looks great, no worries about buying a bike, maintenance or getting your bike stolen. I believe that they have this sort of thing in some cities in Europ , but this is the first example I have seen.

Montreal seems very different to most of the cities that we have seen on our trip. It has a very European feel, not just because most people speak French. It seems quite laid back and safe with people sitting outside of cafes and restaurants having a drink and just talking, none of the rowdyness that we get at home.

Cube out