I awakened with loose sheets around 10:30am. Tony, ever the adventurer, had gotten up earlier, already scoped out the surrounding area and was ready to go.

Lam and I donned our vulgar American clothes (matching day-glo T-shirts reading “U Can’t Touch This,” large foam “#1” fingers) and the three of us ventured outside the hotel in search of breakfast. We’d overslept the hotel’s complimentary Continental rise-and-shine, which was probably nothing more than a couple bran muffins anyway.

“Is there a car wash around here?” I asked the hotel’s garage attendant. My intent was to leave the car in the garage for the rest of our stay here, but it was covered in salt and mud from the drive up, which can cause rust.

“We can wash the car for you,” he offered. How civil! Imagine having your car washed by people and not machines.


Vieux Montreal (Old Montreal, for those of you who opted for Spanish in high school) is, as the name would indicate, old. The streets are cobblestone and the buildings, all hewn from stone, seem to date to the era when it took fifteen minutes to shoot somebody because you had to stuff that long stick-thingy down your musket and pour the gunpowder in. I could almost picture Daniel Day-Lewis running down the street being directed by either Martin Scorsese (bad) or Michael Mann (good).


Vieux Montreal was old in a charming way, of course. The drag about New York is the old buildings are patently filthy. If you’ve leaned against the Woolworth Building then you’re not sitting on my couch. But here it seemed someone scrubbed the edifices on a regular basis. In addition, nearly all of the restaurants/cafes had large glass windows and warm, inviting interiors. We selected one at random with high ceilings and an overwhelming selection of pastries.


At the café counter I hesitated and observed the other customers, unsure if French would be the default language. It was. The counter-guy greeted everyone with “Bonjour.” I tried cobbling some French together in my head (“Je voudrais...er...Pouvez-vous me donner...goddammit...”) but then the counter-guy took one look at me and said “Hello” which isn’t French last time I checked. I asked for coffee and he gave me coffee.

One guy sitting in the café was reading a paper and seemed to be a local. Apparently unemployed, or somehow capable of holding down a job while haunting a café at 11:30 in the morning. Canada’s socialist so you never know.

The others appeared to be tourists, mostly older. I guessed Vieux Montreal was probably a part of town where few people actually lived, perhaps only the super-rich, as in New York’s SoHo, but tourists would flock to. I hoped to uncover something more “local” and populated with our contemporaries during the course of the trip but didn’t have the faintest idea where to start.


After coffee we went outside and walked through the neighborhood. The narrow cobblestone streets, the randomness of the layout and the architecture all reminded me of Paris, but something about the scene was clearly un-Parisian. Took me a moment to realize what it was: The abundance of large American cars. Absent were the quirky-looking and sensibly-sized Renaults and dented Citroens, supplanted instead by overweight Dodge Intrepids and bulky Buick something-or-others.

For some reason the parking meters, rather than lining the curb, were placed all the way across the sidewalk, against the buildings. A meter maid could rappelle down the building faces and check the coinboxes without having to touch the sidewalk.


“I checked out Chinatown this morning,” said Tony, referring to the neighborhood immediately north of us.

“Anything worth seeing?” I asked.

“It’s about three blocks long,” he said. Well, it could wait. I had gotten an internet recommendation to head to McGill University to pick up a free Montreal guidebook. The one I had purchased back in the ‘States was, I belatedly discovered, two years out-of-date.


We located a nearby subway station (“Place Des Armes”). It actually had doors! The ones in New York are just open stairways leading down, with the exception of the larger stations like Grand Central.

The doors are pretty cool, they are double-width and mounted on a center hinge, so when you enter the station by pushing on one half, people can exit the station through the other half and there is no interruption of flow. Clever design, unlike, say, New York’s Grand Central, where you yank open a one-way door and must wait for the tide of people to spill out before you can enter.

Inside the station we waited and watched people going through the turnstiles, to see how to do it. From behind I couldn’t see if they were using tokens, paper tickets like in Japan or Metrocards like in New York.

Tony went up to the guy in the booth and procured a green strip of tickets, which looked rather like the ones you get at a church raffle or carnival. He tore one off and slipped it into a glass box at the token booth, then the clerk hit a button and Tony went through the turnstile. Lam and I did likewise. The clerk also mentioned we could get a free bus transfer and described a procedure that I forgot almost immediately afterwards.


The subway platform was friggin’ spotless. No rats, no garbage and I even saw a girl sitting on the floor reading a paper. (I still wouldn’t let her sit on my couch though.)

In New York I always wait for the subway with my back to a column so none of the crazies will push me off the platform (a few people die every year this way). But here the ceiling was vaulted and had no columns holding it up. Some people waited along the wall and some along the edge of the platform. Crazies, like rats, seemed absent.

Presently a train rolled in, though it looked more like a bus to me--it had large rubber tires. The doors opened before the train had stopped moving completely, allowing people to hop out at a slow roll, like in Paris. I dig that.

We entered the narrow subway car, which was uncrowded but cramped in terms of design; the center seats, when occupied, preclude any movement from one end of the car to the other. As the train starts moving you can feel that the rubber tires have shocks--the ride is very smooth and there are no sudden jarring jolts. It occurred to me it would probably be really easy to drink a cup of hot coffee on this moving train, which is a learned skill in New York’s epilectic subway cars.


Yes, I have a tendency to interpret the experience of other cities by comparing it to the systems in New York. It’s a shitty habit but can’t be helped.


“You guys know anything about McGill?” I asked, as we walked through the campus. It seemed typically collegiate, with stately buildings and large swaths of grass (albeit frozen). All of us were freezing and bundled up but people were walking around with no hats. We even saw a girl wearing shorts.

“It’s a really good school,” said Lam. “Supposed to be the Harvard of Canada.” I had a tough time with this because every time I heard “McGill” it reminded me of ‘80s skateboard sensation Mike McGill, who had invented the McTwist. I think I had a poster of him when I was little. I pictured the diplomas here being emblazoned with a little skater guy doing a 540.


We located the student center with little difficulty, but the student guides were nowhere to be found. “We’re all oot,” said the guy behind the counter. “We ran oot of them in September. Should have more next semester.”

We went back ootside into the cold.