Violet Sky

Montreal! Let’s start with some story time. Back in middle school, 8th grade students with a GPA over a certain score (I forget what it was) were offered the opportunity to take Spanish a year early, getting a head start on the language requirements of high school. Every single one of my friends met that requirement and opted into Spanish, but my GPA wasn’t quite high enough and I was left out of that cohort.

Fast forward a year, and when deciding which language to take, of the three offered at my high school (Spanish, French, and Latin), I decided to do French. This was exclusively for ego reasons, as I didn’t like the idea of all of my friends being a year ahead of me in the foreign language we were all learning. It’s funny, the little decisions like that, based on oddly stupid reasons, that end up echoing throughout your life – because my French teacher was really good, a woman extremely passionate about the French language and all things French. I ended up taking French all four years of high school, even though only two were required for graduation, and loved it so much that my dream was to go to college in Montreal, at McGill University, studying International Business. In my mind, that was a way that I could get paid to travel and speak French.

Anyway, that didn’t work out, to say the least, but I’ve still wanted to visit Montreal for years so when we were considering which places to go on spring break this year, we basically focused on Montreal, Oaxaca, and Monterrey. With our trip to France and Belgium coming up this summer, it made sense to slot another French-speaking trip into spring break, so we pulled the trigger on Montreal and I deleted the price tracking for Mexico from Google Flights.

We were bringing our youngest along with us, which he agreed to, and had him plan a good portion of the trip with us. I won’t dwell on it in this blog, because suffice it to say that he did not want to go on the trip by the time it arrived and made that clear the whole time. So while he was present in Montreal, his participation in this blog post will be thin as a result of that whole situation.

Our flight from PDX had a one hour layover in O’Hare, which was nerve-wracking because I can’t say I’ve ever had a smooth layover at O’Hare. Somehow, we landed early, and our next flight was in the same terminal, so despite the tightness of the connection, we were still able to get dinner and relax a bit between flights. Landing at YUL was easy and so was picking up our luggage and finding the Uber pickup area.

We looked at hotels, but ended up with an Airbnb in downtown Montreal. It was an interesting space, part of a converted older row home, and while the location was excellent, there were some quirks about the space that I didn’t enjoy. I would easily stay on Rue Saint-Denis again, but I’m not sure if I’d stay in that particular Airbnb to do so a second time.

The day after we arrived was Easter Sunday, and a fair amount was closed, so we wandered around and found a few open places. Indigo, a book store chain, was open, and we started stocking up on French language books. I don’t have any children young enough for this book, but the color of the art was beautiful and it marries two of my interests (dragons and baking), so I bought it anyway.

There were several comic book shops open along R. Saint-Denis, both used and new, so my husband picked up some more comics for his ongoing French learning.

The next day, the weather was worse but more things were open, and our goal for the day was to make it up to Mount Royal via the walking paths we’d scoped out ahead of time. First, we headed down to the waterfront with our youngest, a frigid walk due to the cold wind blowing heavily through the downtown buildings. We took some tourist pictures with the J’adore MTL art and found a Beaver Tails store, where I split the cinnamon and sugar variant with my youngest.

The area along the waterfront reminded me of the old part of Québec City, with narrower streets and European style architecture. We stopped by their public market, where we bought a piece of art and a music box, then continued wandering past the Montreal Stock exchange until we found the church that is famous in the area. The church charged money to enter, so all I got was this picture from the outside.

After swinging by the Airbnb to drop off our surly child, we visited McGill, because it was on the way to Mount Royal. It was a little odd walking around the school that I had wanted to go to and had never seen in person, and while I didn’t have any expectations for how it would feel to finally be there, there was a sense of how much that particular dream never stood a chance against the life circumstances that followed. It was easy to move on to the walking trails, where we hiked up the provided stairs with everyone else and enjoyed the view at the top.

There was a lodge of sorts at the top, with places for people to sit, bathrooms, and a small store with concessions. We rested there for a bit, enjoying the chance to warm up and also the squirrel carvings in the eaves.

On the way back, my husband wanted to visit La Belle Province, as one of the French-language YouTubers he’d been enjoying said they had the best poutine in Montreal. I wasn’t originally going to eat, but ended up deciding to try their smoked meat sandwich because I was hungry from our hike. It was really good, as was the poutine, my husband reported.

The next day, it was hovering around freezing, with intermittent snow, so we decided to use a good portion of the day exploring the 21 miles of underground connected mall tunnels downtown. There are no pictures from this part of the day, because while it was a neat way to allow people to still shop and move around the downtown core during bad weather, it was still just a mall. A good portion of the tunnels are intended to connect office buildings, so it was not truly a 21 mile day for us, thankfully.

At the end of the day, however, we had a dinner reservation at Restaurant Beba. As usual, my husband and I took a spin through Eater.com and Montreal’s food subreddit, gathering a list of menus to look at. Beba won the vote between us and we were quite glad it did! The entire meal was excellent, from the drinks to the appetizers to the main courses.

Normally, I wouldn’t be drawn to what was accurately described as smoked fish on a small bagel, but everyone on Reddit agreed that it was the best appetizer and wow, it did not disappoint. We ordered the foie gras stuffed dates for my husband, but I agree to try half of one, only to discover that I really liked it – normally, I don’t love foie gras at all. The middle courses were good, but not as good as the appetizers, and there was so much food that by the time we got to the short rib and salad course, I could barely finish one short rib. No room for dessert, unfortunately!

Our final full day had us wandering around, checking off a few more things. My husband wanted to go to the CF Montréal team store to buy a jersey, so we took the metro out that way. There was no real signage telling us how to get to the store itself, so we ended up taking an extremely scenic route where we walked all the way around the entire stadium in search of it. But, mission accomplished at the end, and it was a nice day, so it wasn’t a bad walk.

We also finally tried a Montreal-style bagel. I wasn’t very hungry when I tried it, so I didn’t finish it, but it was fine overall. Nothing I’d rush out to get again, but also nothing I’d avoid in the future.

After how much I enjoyed the fast food smoked meat sandwich, we went in search of one of the more famous delis that serve smoked meat sandwiches, Schwartz’s deli. Now, we’d heard that there’s often a long wait for Schwartz, but maybe we got lucky because we just walked in and ordered, with only one other person in the store. This smoked meat sandwich was infinitely better than the fast food one, surprise surprise.

Plus they sold giant pickles to go with it. I fuggin’ love pickles.

Thus concludes our Montreal trip! While it was a short trip and the weather was colder than I would have liked, it was still quite enjoyable. I would gladly go back… without my youngest.