#I've traveled across the United States and saw a lot of different places. So far

[apartofeverywhere]

[mollymoseys]

The Montréal Diaries

I'm writing this to you from a cabin in the woods. More specifically, the woods are in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia and the cabin is part of Brigadoon Village. It's been a whirlwind first few weeks, having started straight on delivering programs for groups who have come for the spring season. The great thing about this was that I'm learning how to do everything really rather quickly and already feeling far more confident than before I arrived. The other part of this means that I rarely have a great deal of time to sit and write this for any significant period of time. So, this is part one, the Montreal diaries, and then there'll be another post on starting at Brigadoon.

Montréal was amazing. Interestingly, there are more clear European influences in the city itself than in many other cities and towns I've been to and there's a hell of a lot to see and do as well. This is especially true if you're trying to walk everywhere to see the various different neighbourhood identities. I was lucky with the weather as well; just one day when it was overcast and rained slightly.

I stayed in a hostel called Auberge Bishop, which I soon realised was a good hub for travellers who were living in the city. I got to chat to folks from France, the Netherlands, Italy and Brazil. We had those conversations that constantly permeate through hostels, regardless of which continent they happen to be on. After you've had them in a few different places, they begin to take on a significance of comfort. You know what the contents of the conversation will start off with and how they tend to progress, the cadences of mish-mashed accents creating a music that your ear bends towards as a familiarity in a foreign land. It was refreshing to meet some other global folk, trade stories and tips for the city.

I'd raided my Lonely Planet guide, been given some excellent tips by an old friend currently living with a Montréaler, and went to the exceedingly good tourist information office. Those offices can be a real hit and miss sometimes but Montréal did themselves proud. I was given advice for the best locations to prioritise for a short week trip, including restaurant and café recommendations, as well as maps and a museum card, which gave me access to every museum and exhibit in the city. For a gallery and museum maven, this was fantastically handy. (I should point out that this last card was not free but I paid a total of $80, which included unlimited public transport as well as access to every one of their 51 museums/galleries. I didn't think that was bad value.)

For my first afternoon, I walked up to the Parc du Mont Royal, which is one of their largest parks in the middle of the city. It also has the highest viewing point of anywhere in the city. This is apparently fiercely protected by their planning department, as no other building is allowed to exceed the height of Kondiaronk Belvedere - the viewing point. Thanks planning department, because the view is pretty fantastic. You can see past the urban sprawl to the river and then out towards farming plains and a few mountains dotted on the horizon. The Belvedere is so named to honour the Chief of the Hurons, who was a great strategist and instrumental in uniting First Nations communities and the French to create The Great Peace of Montréal in 1701.

The park has sections of grassed lawns, large ponds and also expanses of woodland, left to encourage wildlife. There were a lot of squirrels, many of whom were almost totally unfazed by the big humans tromping through their habitat.

Once I'd walked the length of the park, I headed back into the city and onto Saint Laurent Boulevard, where I found Schwartz's. Famous for its smoked meat, it was very simply all about the meat, with very little deviation in its menu. There was a counter and then a small seating section in the back, with corkboards on the wall covered in napkins. All these napkins had signatures, pictures and messages written on them from visitors coming from all over the world. I saw Shanghai, Melbourne, London, Seoul, Mumbai, Toronto and Manchester, to name but a few. The smoked meat sandwich with mustard and a gherkin was toothsome to say the least.

On the second day I headed to the aforementioned tourist office, stocked up on maps and info and headed to the old town. The maps were especially useful as I'd managed to get myself thoroughly lost on the way to the park the day before. The detour had turned out to be rather interesting as I ended up wandering through what looked like Montréal's millionaire's row. Who doesn't love a nosey at the big, pruned houses?

The route to the old town took me past an enormous edifice that turned out to be the Sun Life Building. It was built in 1931 and was the largest building by square footage in the British Empire at the time. It's certainly incredibly detailed and imposing, although the mirage of extraneous impossibility was nicely marred by the employees who stood outside smoking in designated patches of pavement.

The handily helpful man in the tourist office had also recommended a café which was en route to the old town and also in an old bank. They’d kept all the grandiose decor of the bank, which included a long, wooden counter, a highly intricate, enamelled ceiling and golden section dividers which now connected panes of glass to create meeting rooms. It was, of course, pretty pricey but it was a nice space in which to have a cup of tea and do a little people watching. The clientele was pretty evenly split between students, freelance/non-office based business folk, and retirees enjoying a coffee whilst reading, doing a crossword or gossiping. As per a millennial coffee shop, there were plenty of succulents planted in hexagonal gold and white pots and an abundance of plug points.

I also got wandered through the World Trade Centre for Montréal, which is a beautifully designed building. I’m estimating that it’s about an eight storey building, if not more, with a glass atrium running through the middle. I was fortunate to be visiting on a beautiful day so the light flooded through. It was so serene, especially with the gentle bubbling of the fountain in the corner.

The route to the old town took me past the old Wall Street of Montréal and those bankers of times past really liked beautiful, ornate buildings. I also liked looking at those beautiful, old, ornate buildings.

They also took me down to the waterfront and more specifically the Pointe-à-Callière Museum - the museum of history and archaeology. Using my fancy new museum card, I shashayed through the doors and into a very cool presentation. Rather than just a video introduction to the museum, they had a room with sloped seating and exposed foundations of some of the first stone buildings built in the city. On three sides of the foundations, there were white screens built 8 foot high which then had animated video projected onto it giving an overview of the history of the city.

Then you walk through the rest of the foundations, which carry you through the history of French and British Canadian settlement in the city. They did touch on First Nations history and especially focussed on the Great Peace of Montréal, but in no way did I feel like I really learnt a huge amount about the peoples of Canada before westerners arrived or did I get a well rounded presentation of their role in the history of Montréal since then either. Instead, I considered it to be rather piecemeal and geared towards how to further talk about the role of white westerners. I found the skewed presentation of history incredibly frustrating.

They did have a guest exhibition on Egyptian queens which was far more rewarding however. It included a display of the Book of the Dead and a fascinating set of research into the details of the women who were directly related to pharaohs. There were funerary objects, jewellery, and sarcophagi - including Nefertiti’s! Which was made of pink granite. Really rather beautiful.

I left and headed to the nearest café for late lunch and a negroni d’ête. I sat in the window, where the floor length windows had been folded back so I was bathed in sun. I wandered through the streets and ended up at the waterfront, near a large ferris wheel. The sun was beginning to set in a rather timely fashion so I paid too much money for a spot on the wheel to watch the light weave between the towers and out across the water towards the mountains. Perfect set up to a night listening to basement jazz folk in a bar not too far from the hostel.

The next day was just as bright so of course I headed to the McCord Museum to spend a little more time indoors. It’s a good job I did because it was, quite simply, excellent. It’s not the biggest museum but the quality of the exhibitions is outstanding. I started with one called Wearing Your Identity, focussed on First Nations communities in Eastern Canada and it was everything that the archaeology/history museum had failed on. It looked at the role that clothing played as a part of different areas and communities and how it had been made and used over the years. Most specifically, it considered how the different patterns and techniques used by different communities shaped their identities. It also looked at how legislation and state created school schemes badly affected First Nations peoples, how their culture had been stripped for parts and manipulated for tourist and economic objectives since the Victorian times. It included work from the artist Mike Patten, who I would highly recommend seeking out.


The second exhibition was called Shalom Montréal, which examined how the jewish community had arrived in three major waves and then grown, starting from the 1800s, running until present day. It covered the antisemitism that has been shown towards them. It also showed how refugees found sanctuary from a number of regimes in the city and how they’d created a far reaching community that had brought about major influences in the city, advances in professional fields and thriving businesses in the locale. The Jewish General Hospital was one of the first in the city to accept people to their care regardless of social standing or religion. I learnt about Phil Gold who co-discovered, with Samuel Freedman, the carcinoembryonic antigen - basically they found the marker that allows us to blood test for signs of cancer. I also found out about Miriam Charron, who founded the Auberge Shalom - the first kosher womens' shelter in Canada for victims of domestic violence. (It obviously also accepts women of all religions and cultures as well.) It ended with a series of video interviews with milennial jewish Montréalers talking about their jewish identity, what the city means to them and their places in it. It was, hands down, the best museum I’ve visited in a long time and reinforced, yet again, that quantity does not necessarily equal quality.

Montréal is famous for smoked meat and bagels, and like I said, I'd already visited Schwartz's. So, after falling in love with the McCord, I headed across town to the corner of town that holds the two biggest contenders for the best bagel in the province, if not the country. They are the Fairmont and St Viateur Bagel shops. Each have been going for decades and people define themselves by one or the other. “I’m a Fairmont, hands down”; “I knew we could never be together when I heard she went to St Viateur”. So in the proper way, I visited each place, bought a plain poppy seed bagel and tried each at the same time. They were both good, but I think the St Viateur edged it for me. Having said that, if I’m completely honest, I was more fulfilled by the tangerine sorbet that I bought afterwards.

I loved just wandering back through the various neighbourhoods that took me towards downtown. The houses, many of them terraced, are all at least two or three storeys high, mostly with outside staircases. It gives the city a feeling of gentle familiarity. You can imagine people sitting on them drinking from mugs, talking about their days in late afternoon sunshine, or people struggling to carry sofas up their steep inclines, or someone storming up them in the middle of an argument and pausing at the door to turn and apologise. You can almost hear the grunt of pain as the inhabitants slip on the ice. You can see whole lives and stories in a set of metal steps.

I headed to St Catherine Street, which is the backbone of the lgbtq quarter. The central length of the street was covered with a canopy of bright, coloured plastic balls, of the kind that you’d find in a children’s play area. The separate sections of block colours created a rainbow that ran the length of the pedestrianised zone and made it feel like you were walking beneath a quilt that let all the light through. There were many bars and shops lining the street, which was crammed with people walking, talking, admiring the canopy and generally shooting the breeze. It was summery enough that the bars, restaurants and cafés were empty inside and people were spilling over the edges of their sun-soaked decking.

It was fortunate that I soaked the sun up when I did, because the weather was overcast and rainy the next day, so I headed to the Musée de Beaux Arts. It’s fairly large and had two major exhibitions on, in addition to it’s permanent collection and a few smaller exhibitions. There was a lot of modern Canadian art, which I very much enjoyed, across paintings, sculptures, installations, videos and holography. The two major exhibitions were Picasso and African Art, and Napoleon’s palace. The museum staff were not especially helpful and the signage on how to get around was close to non-existent so I ended up being shuffled into the Napoleon exhibition, which was interesting but not particularly what I really wanted to see. After having an argument with the front desk, I got a ticket to go into the Picasso exhibition, which was fascinating. It combined new work from a range of African and African-Canadian/American artists alongside Picasso’s work and art from African tribes and artists that he loved and which directly inspired him. It was unlike any other exhibition that I’d seen before and the parallels between the earlier African art and Picasso’s painting and sculptures were undeniable. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t known about this before! It was beautiful seeing the relationship in the light of day (although not in the light of the gallery, which was done in such a way that made it difficult to read the information panels by the works). Also, from that exhibition, I would massively recommend seeking out Zanele Muholi, Moridja Kitenge Banza, Samuel Fosso, Shanna Strauss and Achille Mbembe. Full nerd disclosure, I came out feeling excited to have learnt and seen so much and to have picked up information to look into to continue what I’d been able to experience.

I finished out the day at The Wiggle Room, a burlesque club which just so happened to be having a special themed evening of the Spice Girls. It was so much fun and if you’re headed to the city, you should definitely see what’s on there. Plus, I was lucky enough that the evening was hosted by Tranna Wintour, famous on the Montréal and Atlantic Canada scene. She’s a transgender comedienne and writer, whilst also being well up on the Spice Girls and burlesque.

For my last day, I decided to squeeze in the Centre for Architecture, which was so very quiet and peaceful. I learnt about the Florence Radicals, who were active during the sixties and seventies. There was work from the collective Superstudio focussed on Interplanetary Architecture, which I have to admit I found so complicated that my brain began to do backflips trying to comprehend it. I really liked the section on Gianni Pettena’s Grass Architecture and his work on sustainable material and eco-architecture. Whilst this is increasingly occurring today, his work at the time was far more cutting edge than it may now seem. He and his contemporaries worked on projects including nature into domesticity that were meant to be replicated on a grand scale. There was also another display of Pettena’s photographs from a series that he took on an American road trip during 1972/1973. It was focussed on desert landscapes, especially on ‘natural’ or ‘unconscious’ architecture - i.e. the way that the natural environment had shaped the rocks and valleys. He called it “architecture not made by architects”.

The train ride home felt longer than the train ride there, probably because I felt like I still hadn’t had enough of the city. However, I had camp to prepare for, which has proved to be one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time. Of which, more later.