Paris within Driving Distance!

Today was our one day in Montreal. The traffic into town went much more smoothly, and we parked in a public parking lot near the old city. We took a walking tour of Old Montreal, which is just a beautiful place. It’s like being transported to a few blocks of an old European city. Brian and I could walk around like that all day. Have I mentioned that we have children? Andrew, our budding architect, soaked it all up. He’s a city boy through and through, in spite of his love for the national parks. Natalie wanted to visit some of the art shops we passed. Allison, however, professed her love for the countryside and flatly told us how much she hated to walk around cities. Oh well.

The Basilique Notre-Dame glows inside with rich colors and a front wall that almost conjured up something a Disney designer would come up with, which I’m sure would completely insult anyone who loves that basilica. It’s not because it’s so tacky; it’s just that the lighting above the blue background, with the ornate nature of it all, it looks a tad like fireworks bursting in an indigo sky over Cinderella’s castle. I mean that in the best of all possible ways. It really is a lovely place. We were all in awe.

Other stops on our little walking tour did not capture Allison’s imagination, and we decided to cut our losses. We found a metro station, bought a one-day pass, and took the metro to the Olympic village.

Okay. The Olympic village is an interesting blip in Montreal’s history. They built up the city with lots of venues, as would any host city. The thing is, they ran out of money. I believe the Olympic games were held there in 1976. It appears they finally finished paying off the debt somewhere around 2007! In the meantime, they made some big investments in Montreal tourism.

The first thing we decided to do there was the Biodome. We got inside and saw the endless line, remembering then that the guidebook told us to avoid the middle of the day because of crowds. All right. Instead we went to a nearby restaurant where we plunked down $50 (yikes!) for club sandwiches, burgers and hot dogs. Oddly, they had a “hot dog Michigan.” I had to ask. The guy at the counter said that everyone does. And it just means a hot dog with chili on it. Huh. Just down the street was the Chateau Dufresne, where we turned in next.

Oscar and Marius Dufresne were two brothers who made a lot of money in the early 1900s selling shoes and concrete. They decided to build what the guy at the front desk called a “luxury duplex”. They built an enormous house, split in two, sort of like how the Brady Bunch kids put tape down the middle of their room. They each had a full house on their own side of the dividing line.

The thing is, these are people who had just come into money. They had begun to travel the world, and they wanted their house to reflect their travels. And so they mixed in Italian murals and fanciful French décor and lovely dark paneling. It is sort of hard to believe how much they fit into this one house. With no unifying “theme”, the house is a hodgepodge of decorating ideas and artistic philosophies. The house was built in the 1920s, which is about the time Frank Lloyd Wright was developing his style through his arts-and-crafts mentors, coming up with simplified, natural lines that fit the environment around them. It’s easy to understand why these modern art and architecture masters rebelled against the excess of earlier design when you see a house that defines over-the-top! Anyway.

We went back to the Biodome. The Biodome was an Olympic venue that held biking and judo events. It is now a sort of garden/zoo that holds four different ecosystem sections—tropical rainforest, St. Laurentian maple forest, the Gulf of St. Laurence, and the arctic. There were monkeys and caimans and beavers and porcupines and puffins and penguins. It’s a blast. We had a great time there, the perfect antidote to walking neighborhoods.

Afterwards we went up the Olympic Tower, an incline funicular, somewhat like the St. Louis arch; a big glassed-in elevator that makes it’s way up the inclined tower. From the top, in spite of the cloudy rainy-ness, we could see most of Montreal. Apparently, this tower was not completed until 11 years after the Olympics it was designed for, and I can’t say the tower itself seems to be in great shape, and so there’s something melancholy about the whole experience. But the view was fantastic—I can only imagine what it is like on a sunny, clear day.

We weren’t quite ready to call it a day, since we only had this one day. We sat on a ledge under cover from the rain as we figured out what was next. We really were a sight to see. Brian has not shaved a hair from his head since we left almost 2 weeks ago. Allison and Andrew have each grown about 4 inches this summer, so Allison’s ankles pushed out from under her jeans and Andrew’s wrists showed way too much skin below the sleeves of the only raincoat we have for him. Natalie’s fashionably faux-distressed jeans have developed some actual holes, and my clean but still unmanaged hair was straying and curling out of the quick bun I’d pulled it into, thanks to the humidity. Really, we didn’t look so good. But we persevered.

We took the metro across the city to the Marche Atwater, a market that happens to stay open later on Fridays. We hit the famous bakery, Premiere Moisson, for a “dinner” of pastries and a loaf of French bread for later. We picked up some in-season peaches and strawberries from a fruit vendor too.

By this time it was pouring rain again, and we made our way back across the city by metro, back to the parking ramp on foot, and back to the hotel on the highways. French bread never tasted so good. We polished off the strawberries, the bread and half of the peaches, and the girls went to swim while the rest of us caught up on Olympic news.

Montreal is beautiful. We had but a small taste of it. It’s like going overseas, but much easier. Because of some of the old architecture, the cafes, and the French language, we could imagine ourselves back in Paris. While I’ve not experienced Parisians as being rude in the way we stereotype them, I’ve not found them overly helpful either. In Montreal, we found that people went out of our way to help us if they could. The one exception would be any public plaque—French only. We were left to our poor translating ability to figure out why they put a monument here or why that plaza there was important. Oh well, small price to pay. I’m happy to find that I can drive to a friendly Paris from Grand Rapids in just over 12 hours.

Tomorrow, a taste of Toronto.