Day 2- Old Port and CCA

Last night involved a lot of walking around the Latin Quarter and the Gay Village neighborhoods (oddly, didn't spot any rainbow flags). A lot. Went to a few bars- one was a college hangout (the hotel is near U of Quebec at Montreal- UQUAM) and another was a wanna-be biker/rock/American dive bar. Both had pretty decent music playing, lots of mid-90's tunes, no crappy electronic music (which Montreal is apparently a center of).

Today we're off to the Center for Canadian Architecture and the Old Port area. Maybe there will be more things in English there, as I have yet to experience the Montreal where everything is in both languages. People do seem very nice and would rather speak English to us. It's like they can sense my nonexistent French and are not pleased by my traveling companion's Anglo-accented French.

Updated:
The Old Port was cute, but smelled like horse poop (think Central Park and its carriage rides). I do like how they turned the old industrial parts of the port into a park with bike trails and canals in teh old dry dock areas. Sort of like you tend to find in the old industrial areas of Germany.
The Canadian Centre for Architecture was amazing! The tour guide was great and very informative about both the museum building itself (hey, it is the architecture center) and the main exhibit- "the sixties: montreal thinks big", which is about the60's in Montreal and how Expo '67 lead to the city planning that makes up present day Montreal. Lots of politics and demonstrators and demolitions.
Dinner last night was at a cute tapas place on Rue St-Denis called Confusion. Tapas is all about sampling. I was brave and sampled my dining partner's venision carpaccio (essentially raw Bambi). I now know the meaning of the word 'gamey'. Food in Montreal is amazing in general. So many choices. A lot of Lebanese food- shwarma, falafel, and hummous galore!


This city puzzles me though. You can get perfectly decent shwarma or burgers at anytime of the night, yet the stores close at 5 or 6 PM. Insane. I've heard Montrealers complain about teh economy. Perhaps if stores stayed open later it'd bring a bit mroe money into the city.


{please ignore any spelling or format errors. the computer I'm using doesn't seem to like Blogger much}