Minnie’s Musings

Montreal is a delightful, modern city with lots of skyscrapers downtown and a decidedly cosmopolitan vibe. We stayed in an aparthotel with a washing machine (hurrah). We got there late and every shop and restaurant we tried was shutting up shop for the night. Pizza it was and jolly nice it was too.

Then we discovered there was a nightclub next door. Now I am all for people having fun so tolerated one night of thump, thump, thump… but on a Sunday. FFS?!

Our day for exploring Montreal was a Sunday, so we strolled through the old town admiring the architecture and reading the various explanatory plaques. I had realised by this point that my carefully purchased guidebook was not in my bag but still on my bedroom windowsill. I hate being without a guidebook.

What an interesting place Montreal all is. Particularly because of its position on the St Lawrence where it played a significant role in opening up the Canadian interior to European settlers through trade.

If you had asked me as a teenager, or even as a history student, whether I would find the ins and outs of dredging marjor arterial rivers and building mechanisms to divert ice flows fascinating, I would have scoffed (more interested in the murderous tendencies of your average Roman senator or Tudor monarch than anything socio-economic).

But it was soooo interesting. Particularly as the river flowed past in stately grace with mighty power (more on the power of this river to follow). It was particularly interesting to Best Beloved as his grandfather had sailed up the St Lawrence when he emigrated to Canada prior to the Great War.

As with many metropolitan cities there were Sunday demonstrations including a Quebec separatist gathering and Pro-Palestinian march past. This kind of sums up the city. At once parochial and at the same time international as Canada has absorbed numerous diaspora for several hundred years.