Montreal, jour un

I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve been excited to wake up at 6 AM. No matter how much sleep you get the night before or how much you’re looking forward to the next day, it just isn’t a fun thing to do.

This trip, though, cracked that list. Gina and I were up well before the sun rose to get on the road to Montreal, a trip we’ve had in the works for a few months now. We knew it would be cold once we got there and had come to terms with that, but had been dreading the chance of heavy snow making the 400-mile drive up from New Jersey a treacherous endeavor, certainly a plausible possibility given a venture through upstate New York at the end of December.

We were fortunate, then, that the only snow we saw in six hours was in patches on the ground in the northwoods of the Adirondacks and the farmlands of Quebec. After failing to go to Madison Avenue in New York City over Thanksgiving, I’m pleased to report that we did make it Madison Avenue in New York this time around – in Albany, the state capital, where we took a few pictures of the capitol building and stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts, where a homeless man asked how tall I was and if I played basketball…before proceeding to solicit me for money. And there I was, thinking I was something special. I even felt flattered for a minute.

The rest of the drive was uneventful, if not supremely picturesque. It must be absolutely gorgeous to head that way during autumn to see the full effects of changing foliage, but alas, we had to content ourselves with the relatively unspoiled forests and trees that make up eastern and northern New York. I had been eagerly anticipating the chance to drive in Canada, particularly in Quebec as French is the primary language of the province and would be all over its road signs (I don’t speak French, so this titillating sense of the unknown and the distinct possibility of committing some unknown driving infraction appealed to me greatly), but I’m here to tell you that it was a bit of a letdown. Yes, I was permitted to go 100 on the highway, and reaching that triple digit mark was exciting, but I knew from previous family trips to Canada when I was younger that it was in kilometers per hour and not miles per hour. The scenery into Montreal from Plattsburgh, New York was nothing to write home about – if you want to see snowy farms, Iowa is the place for you – and drivers in Quebec were just as terrible as they are in the US, even if it was a small sample size on which to judge.

Bonjour, Canada

The border, though, is where the fun truly began. To prevent from being charged absurdly high international rates on our phones, we turned our cellular data off. My GPS was handy for navigating us to Montreal itself, and to be fair you couldn’t miss its skyline, but when it said we had 23.5 miles to go to our hotel as we crossed the bridge over the St. Lawrence River and had downtown Montreal square in our sights, I angrily cast it aside. Fortunately Gina is conversant in French, but such is the spoiled life of young adults in 2014 that without phones for backup, doing a bit of old school navigating in a different country in which English isn’t the first language with only a map, street signs, and addresses as guides was a challenge.

I was very proud of us when we reached our destination, the LHotel in beautiful Old Montreal, only stopping once to pull over near the 19^th-century, Second Empire-style Montreal City Hall just a few streets away to consult our map. Montreal is the second-largest city by population in Canada and the ninth-largest in North America, so to get there and drive in the heart of a city of that size without really knowing exactly what we were doing or with any electronic assistance was an accomplishment.

Home sweet home

We picked a great location to base ourselves for the first couple days of our stay in Montreal. We were in walking distance from everything in the old part of town, which dates back to the late 1600s, and were happy to go off exploring and familiarizing ourselves with our immediate environs. We were one minute away from the Notre-Dame Basilica, completed in the Gothic Revival style in 1829. It was impressive during the late afternoon, but coming back at night to see the brilliant blues of the stained glass windows lit up was something to behold. We walked through the various little shops in Bonsecours Market, which was completed in 1847 and was the area’s main public market for more than 100 years. We strolled through Place Jacques-Cartier, a public square filled with lighted trees and hotspots – essentially small, controlled fires that people can gather around during the winter months – and lined on both sides of the broad, steep street by restaurants, a preponderance of which seemed to feature pasta and pizza.

As much as we love those two foods – and believe me, we do – we opted for something a bit more local for dinner. The four-course meal at Chez Suzette – Caesar salad, French onion soup with perfectly melted cheese on top, a dinner crepe with ham, Swiss cheese, asparagus, and béchamel sauce and a dessert crepe with vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, and Chantilly cream – was delicious enough, to be sure, and served by our terrific waiter Pedro, and though we were there for over two hours that wasn’t the highlight of the evening.

Time for dessert

That honor went to the young woman dining two tables down from us. I’ve never seen anything like it, and this was one occasion in which I had no shame in staring. She was eating by herself, which was interesting to me because even though I do it all the time, it’s rare to see a good-looking woman doing that, at least in my experience. She performed the sign of the cross before her food came, and I’m Catholic, so hey, that’s fine. Maybe a little much for me personally, but no problem there. She began taking frantic notes in a little journal, and hey, I get it, I blog, I love watching people, maybe it was a little excessive but again, I didn’t think it was anything over the top. But that’s when things got interesting.

Once her food arrived, she whipped out her small camera and began taking pictures like it was a runway in New York during fashion week. She arranged her napkin in three different places, the right side, in front of, and the left side of her plate, before finally deciding she didn’t need it all her for her pictures and putting it on her lap. Then she lifted the small bit of maple syrup in a receptacle similar to the one you’d find on cough medicine or Pepto-Bismol bottles, sniffed it, put it down, pulled it back up to sniff again, put it down, then reached up for a third whiff before drizzling some of it over her meal. Then she took her camera, tilted her head to the side, and took a multitude of selfies of the side of her head, which was covered in her long, black hair. Not even an inch of her face or cheek, mind you. All hair, and I promise that’s not an exaggeration. Then she took the rest of the maple syrup, sniffed it, put it down, sniffed it again, and then poured the rest over her dinner, as if in the five minutes that had passed before her previous sniff series that the syrup had been poisoned by one of those notorious Québécois. She took more selfies, this time managing to actually get her face in the shots, before closing her meal by taking several pictures of her empty plate and performing another sign of the cross.

That about closed our first night in Montreal, as we’re old and fell asleep watching the Steelers-Bengals game in the hotel. Unlike our New York adventures, my goal is to blog at the end of each of the three days we’re here. Today we covered even more ground – 7.8 miles of walking, to be exact – and witnessed some of the best views of the entire city. More details about that, and our escapades on the ice, soon.