montreal?

[ayabai]

ok people looks like im going to be celebrating america in french canadiaaaaaaaa. jetting off to montreal for 4th of july weekend?! help me, canadians! basically the only thing i know about canada is that you have moose. mooses? meese? ok see i am already lost and that is just in wordplay

Comments

[tarysande]

Oh good lord ;) I give you my personal guarantee you will not see a moose on your Canadian vacation to Montreal ;) Or an igloo. You might see a Mountie though. Mmm, Mounties.

Montreal is a great city!! I spent three weeks there when Carl was at McGill. Of course, they were three weeks in the dead of winter, and mostly we ended up seeing movies in an attempt to keep warm, but...

If you intend to stay in and around Montreal, you won't need a car -- they have a pretty good metro. Plus, Quebec drivers=scary!!! I don't know much about the neighborhoods, but try and stay near a metro station. As always, downtown is downtown--central to everything else. St. Catherines St is a major shopping street. Mont-Royal park is beautiful and gives pretty great views of the city.

Montreal is pretty Anglo... meaning, mostly people speak both English and French, so if you can't make your way in French they'll immediately jump to English. (Sometimes even your accent in French will be enough to cause them to switch over.) But, it's still a French-speaking part of the country, so... you'll hear a lot of French. And it will be Quebec French, not pretty-France French. And some people won't speak English to you.

You will be there for the last few days of the Jazz Festival -- apparently it is one of the best ones in the world.
http://www.montrealjazzfest.com/Fijm2008/accueil_en.aspx

Anyway. Carl lived there for a year, so if you have any specific questions (not about wildlife...hee) email me and I will ask him!

[ayabai]

<3 i will probably bug you about this later hehe