Jananas

I spent two-ish days in Montreal this week, leaving Monday afternoon and returning to Toronto at 3am on Thursday morning. The reason? I got a $30 roundtrip ticket through Coach Canada. Its a good enough reason for me. I arrived Monday evening and my friend Sebastian picked me up at the bus station. We grabbed some food and then headed back to his place for an early evening.

Tuesday morning we got up and Seb was nice enough to play tour guide. First we headed down to Old Montreal to look at all the lovely old buildings. We also found Notre Dame de Bon-Secours Chapel (aka the Sailor’s Church). Seb didn’t know it existed, so it was neat to get to look around it. Its a highly decorated church inside, but I really did like the style of the paintings on the ceiling.

After wandering around the church, we followed the footsteps back to the Marguerite Bourgeoys Museum, which is dedicated to her life and the early history of Montreal. First, we walked the 69 steps up the tower in the church. The steps were a little scary, mostly because the wasn’t really a handrail and when there was it was so low my fingers barely touched it! The view from the tower was pretty awesome.

There are some lovely statues of angels, made of beaten copper over wooden cores. This was taken from the first stopping point. We went up the last stairs and made it to the top of the tower – we were at the same height as the roof of the church! Sadly, from that vantage point we couldn’t get good photos of the statues (even though we were at the same level).

We then made our way back down into the museum. This included going on a little section of spiral stair case that was suspended over the roof of the church in order to get to the stairs. From there we went through the crypt, the special exhibit on pilgrimage, and then through the sections on Marguerite Bourgeoys. Which led us to a room of dioramas of important parts of her life. Women from the church had made all the scenes themselves and for the most part they were well done (or at least not laughably bad). Until we found this one of the stable school she started…

First, why are some of the children dressed like elves? Use the young sir in the front row wearing a white shirt and a red, pointed hat. Yup, elf. We laughed about this for a little bit until we noticed something much, much worse. Why is the Amerindian woman in the doorway have a green face? Green. Green. Green. Ooops.

We wandered around Old Montreal for a little bit longer, poking around in shops when they were interesting and avoiding anything related to Souvenirs. By this time we were starting to get a little hungry. I put in a request for poutine and we ended up at one of Celine Dion’s Nickels restaurants. As far as celebrity owned joints go, not bad! I had decent poutine, although I am a little sad that I didn’t go to any of the places that were recommended to me. We then wandered along China Block, where we picked up some Dragon Beard candy which was delicious (and vegan!). I brought some home to Jason and even though it didn’t survive transit & two days very well it still tasted delicious.

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