Montreal

Monday, March 01 2010 -

I’m wrapping up ten days in Old Montreal, hence the complete and utter dearth of anything. The old city is an amazing place to walk around. Much like Boston, you can be walking by a post-modern building only to stumble across an old stone church crouched in the shadows of the steel behemoths towering over it.

One thing that quickly becomes apparent when you come here is that an understanding of French is almost necessary. A great many things are translated, usually in smaller text, but some things aren’t. While most of the main tourist areas have bilingual people don’t expect it everywhere.

We went down to a food court in a mall below the hotel and there was no English to be found at a number of the “restaurants”. Of course if you turn that around, you will notice that in America we provide one language: English and increasingly in the south Spanish, but the expectation is English. We don’t even try.

We’ve become very accustomed to paying for everything with debit cards. Well, not here. You need a real Visa or Mastercard. A bank issued debit card will not work at the majority of places. You can get cash from an ATM and pay that way. In fact, I would recommend you carry enough cash to purchase any meals you might eat on any given day as many of the restaurants that aren’t catering to tourists will only accept cash.

The festival of lights was going on this weekend. Loreal put up an inflatable dome with a very cool 15 minute movie of time from future to past and of course a light show right below our hotel. That made for a very noise Saturday night as bands were playing until early in the morning.