Montréal - ville mondaine

About two hours by car separate Québec City and Montréal. This trip can also be done very nicely by train or bus, which many students do on the weekends. During the summer, Montréal is very much "festival city". In our first day here, I counted five different festivals currently advertised for this month, including an international film festival and two different ones about music. Unfortunately, along with the summer festivities comes road construction - a common phenomenon in Canada when you have to take advantage of the warm, dry weather to do as much as possible. This makes driving and parking quite a challenge, especially in a large city like Montréal. We were lucky to find a central spot today and kept returning to it to feed the metre every 2 hours. Much like any big city, Montréal has its blatant contrasts - rich/poor, old/new, dirty/clean and of course English/French. Walking down the streets, you hear an equal amount of French and English, although most all of the signs are French since we are still in the unilingual province of Québec. Because of this widespread presence of English, coupled with the large size and more "international" flavour of Montréal, I would not choose this city for a study abroad program, although I like it very much. The Mérici College program in QC offers an excursion to Montréal and I think this would be good, but optional, as the $$$ here are very steep. Students who want to take in some of the world famous Jazz Festival may want to spend the bucks as well as those who want to bask in the big city atmosphere and check out the famous McGill University, Notre Dame Basilica and the Vieux Port. From a language point of view, however, it is completely possible to spend time in Montréal and not speak any French at all.

The Olympic Park is interesting, but too outdated now to hold a lot of appeal to the younger generation. The same goes for the Expo '67 site.

The main (interesting) streets are all worth a look at: Rue St. Denis - unique restaurants, shops, and echoes of Leonard Cohen and Mordecai Richler; Boulevard René Lévesque - large hotels, office buildings, head offices; and Rue Ste Cathérine - runs for kms and goes from seedy districts to the main shopping areas downtown. I would recommend a visit to anyone coming to the Province who has not yet seen Montréal.

We are staying in the western suburb of Vaudreuil which is quiet and easily accessible to the highway. There are many types of hotels (budget as well as university residences available during the summer months) so students who want to take advantage of the widely acclaimed nightlife can stay right in the heart of things. I feel old just writing about it...