Montreal is in Quebec which is a very French-Canadian province. It kind of felt like we were in Europe sometimes with everyone speaking French, big wide clean streets and lots of beautiful old architecture!
We spent a day exploring the beautiful cobblestone streets of Old Town and the many churches and historians buildings found down there! The Notre Dam church was pretty cool and had some beautiful stained glass windows, sculptures and a huge organ with 7000 pipes! (This of course led to you tube searches of organs and learning how to play them ... Which we still do not fully understand!) we also wandered down to the old port where we were sad to find all the coffee shops were closed! Our frown was turned upside down when we found a cute little hip coffee shop for lunch where we had some amazing salad and the best coffees we had had in a long time! Then it was off to the pub for an afternoon beverage while we watched the sun go down, rested our legs and planned our next day - the bike ride!
There were a few things on the outskirts of town we wanted to check out and knew the easiest way to cram them in was on peddle power! About half an hour into our ride though Rhys got a flat and luckily we had spare tubes in our cute little bum bags on the front of our bikes and had the knowledge on how to change them so we didn't had to call and wait for the 'emergency bus' from the bike rental place to come help us! It was a little tougher than we would have liked but got ourselves back on the road..with slightly dirty hands! Our first stop on our bike tour was the old Olympic park. Montreal had hosted the Olympics back in 1976 and were a still selling merchandise from the games..
There was a lot of construction going on in the area and although there were some cool buildings and stadiums over there everything was pretty old and worn out .. we weren't keen to pay te $35 to go up the lift to te observatory to look out over city so after cycling around the nearby park and botanic gardens we were back on the road to Mount Royal, a mountain (hill) to the north of the town.
The cycle pathways on the road were really well developed so we didn't have the same fear of riding on te road that we had had in Vancouver! The cycle way was its own separated 2 lane pathway down the side of the road and was separated from the cars by a little concrete barrier. It went sidewalk, bike path, concrete barrier, car parking then car traffic!! Something Brisbane should definately invest in!
After navigating our way up to the top of Mount Royal the clouds had decided to close in and our view of the city was somewhat limited. It was well worth it though as we were still able to get a pretty good view of the city! We got a bit lost on the way down the mountain as we decided to go a different way down, but after finding our way and turning the map up the right way we found our way down to the canal and the local food markets where we stopped to look at the giant pumpkins on sale already for Halloween!
We then crossed the water and over to (the islands) where we rode around the formula one race track (with all the pro cyclists on their road bikes), past 'habitat 67' (a block of unusual units designed by a 21 yr old architect for the 67 expo and still sought after real estate), to the biosphere (another structure from the 67 expo which had been turned into an environmental museum) and up to a castle before heading back across the busy bridges to return our bikes!
We chilled out that afternoon with a wine at a little jazz bar listening to some local live jazz
The next day our feet were sore and our legs needed a rest so we took it easy and visited the architecture museum and the art gallery. There was an awesome exhibition at the gallery by chilhuly who made these really cool pieces with blown glass. It was all so colourful and there were so many different shapes, from flowers to boats, to reeds, mushrooms, octopus and chandeliers! We even saw our first Picasso!
We were impressed with Montreal, we managed to find decent coffees (something we hadn't been able to do in a long time) and had had fun exploring the older city and marvelling over the architecture! It was even fun speaking a little bit of French!
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