Martin Luther King Weekend (January 13-15): Montréal

As my new project is taking place in Boston, I have been travelling back-and-forth a lot over the last few weeks so I thought it might not be a bad idea to combine the travelling with another city than New York for once.



Montréal is a city with many faces and is absolutely fantastic (visiting it alone instead of with Anouck is somewhat less fun though...); on Saturday I strolled through the old part of the city (Le Vieux Montreal) which has some of the typical Parisian features; nature-stone mansions, rennaissance churches & little alleys... What struck me immediately was that, given the very low temperatures [-5°C to -20°C] there is not much life on the streets, everybody hides in one of the numerous coffee places [where, opposed to NY, you don't get kicked out after 30'] or in the underground city (the entire city centre is connected through well-lit corridors containing ~2000 shops, theatres & office/residential buildings -> it's perfectly possible to spend your winter in Montreal without ever going outside). A visit to the Downtown area & a fabulous diner at Brontë restaurant concluded the day

On Sunday, given the good weather in the morning, I decided to "climb" (big word for a 233m hill :-) the Mont Royal, Montréal's most famous landmark. Taking the walking tour that goes around the Mont Royal gets you going for a decent 8km walk & takes you to the Kondiaronk Belvedere (see picture 1), the Colline de la Croix (see picture 2) and the Beaver lake (see picture 3), which serves as an ice skating rink in winter and as a public pool in summer.

After that I took a metro to Montréal's most fashionable neighbourhood, the Plateau , a residential neighbourhood (see picture 4) with again lots of coffee places, side-by-side with fashion retail outlets. By the time I got there the weather had turned so cold that I decided that I had the choice between losing my fingers because of frostbite or buying gloves.... I chose the latter.... A visit to the Olympic Village (Montréal organised the Summer Olympics back in 1976) with it's famous skewed tower (see picture 5) concluded the day.

On Monday, I woke up in what seemed like another city; during the night, a blizzard had dropped about 1 meter of snow onto the city and the rest of the day, snow kept falling... which made it a good opportunity to explore the underground city...