For some rea­son, Mon­tréal has never been one of my favorite city.

Right after arriv­ing in Canada for the first time in 2002, Feng and I took a road trip. We had landed in Toronto, went through Ottawa, and then Mon­tréal, Québéc city and the sur­round­ings. It was Feb­ru­ary and it was cold, bru­tally cold, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that we were com­ing from Brazil, had no win­ter clothes and that I had never seen snow before.

I had been very excited to go to Mon­tréal for two main rea­sons: first, I had heard about it a lot since French seemed to love that city. Sec­ond, I would finally have the chance to speak French again.

I wasn’t ter­ri­bly dis­ap­pointed but I found the city odd. First, it wasn’t very pretty with its long straight end­less streets, exposed tp wind drafts. I had expected some­thing more… Euro­pean. Sec­ond, like many French, I was under the impres­sion that Que­be­cers were like long lost cousins, basi­cally French peo­ple lost in North Amer­ica. And oh boy I was wrong… As I soon dis­cov­ered, the rela­tion­ship between French and Que­bec French wasn’t that easy and except for the lan­guage, we didn’t have much in common.

I had loved Québec city back then, though. It was pretty, espe­cially under the snow, and it matched the men­tal pic­ture of French Canada that I had in my head.

I went back to Mon­tréal sev­eral times after that, still not in love with it. I find the city con­fus­ing, espe­cially the mix of “old Europe” and “North America”.

This time was bet­ter though. We had gor­geous weather and explored the old part of the city. It actu­ally looked good, in the late sum­mer light…

Montreal’s Har­bor	Boat­ing Around
Dome of the Bon­sec­ours Market	Murale and Blue Sky
Boats In The Harbor	Around The Old Port
Old Mon­treal	Train Track
Artists Street	Along The Water
Three Women	Bicy­cles

Related posts:

1. Mod­ern Montréal
2. The Killers In Montréal
3. In the Heart of Montreal
4. St Cather­ine Street
5. Deux-Rivières and Matawa