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.
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| 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 19th-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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
