I wasn’t sure before I arrived if I’d been to Montreal before. As soon as I got into the immigration hall I remembered that I had been. The taxi ride into the city didn’t ring any other bells. And no more have been rung since.
Searching my calendar, it turns out I was here back in May 2005 for a conference on global governance, and staying pretty close by. Ahh, the memories!
Anyway, I might as well be coming here for the first time. And on that first pass through in the taxi, the city is pretty unprepossessing, looking like many other relatively run down north American cities.
But there’s so much going on, and walking towards the old port there are restaurants and cafes out on the pavement, the temperature is not too hot and there are people everywhere.
It’s the Just for Laughs festival right now, and there appears to be a festival of either African music or African art more generally. This latter, on walking past seems to be playing too much on Africa as exotic for my taste. I passed a building with images of sinuous dancers wearing outlandish hats, and there was lot of tie dye print type material on sale. But, I can’t claim to have seen much.
My run this morning down to the harbour was nice enough. But overall my impression so far is of a city of culture rather than a city of beautiful old architecture. It’s also clearly a city built for the car, which always rather puts me off.
[I’ll update this later if this afternoon’s walk throws up any more (more?) interesting insights] [Edit:9 Nov 2014, turns out there weren’t and I didn’t!]
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