A walk around some neighbourhoods

Good news: I was able to find a replacement cord for the camera in a little hole-in-the-wall store on the way out of the Peel Metro station. Hooray! I can post a few more photos of our our time in Montreal. I've gone back to yesterday's post and added some from those explorations.

These are from our jaunt today on the Metro. We got a three-day pass and are using it to its maximum advantage. First stop was Cotes des Neiges, where Harry lived when he first came to Canada in 1967. We found the street where he lived but he was unable to select which apartment in the many brick buildings on the street was his. Plus, he remembered the street quite differently. Now it's leafy and tree-lined but he recalls no trees at all. But of course it was almost 50(!) years ago.

This is Harry in his old neighbourhood in the Snowdon area.

Next we took the Metro to a different area--and by the way I love the Metro. It's so fast and easy to get around the city. Each station is different, some of them quite nice, and it's so much fun to come up and up from deep beneath the ground to find yourself in a completely different neighbourhood.

Outrement is a varied area with many old buildings and different Ethnic groups. We walked down one street that appeared to be completely occupied by Orthodox Jewish families. It's so fascinating to see this neighbourhood where people wear clothes from a previous era, especially the men in their long black coats and top hats and fringes and the darling little girls in their school uniforms. I felt a little guilty taking photos but I really did want to remember this. It's so different from our homogenized population in Victoria.

This woman was clearly not happy with me taking a photograph.

An interesting feature of this area (as well as others in Montreal) is the outside staircases leading up to the second floor. Apparently they were outlawed in the 1940s but then in the 1990s they were allowed to be built on streets where they already exist to keep the look of the neighbourhood. I remember these from the only other time I was in Montreal when I came out on the train for Expo '67.

Here are a few more pics of some of the areas we visited today....

This family sat down beside us at a little sidewalk cafe on Rue Saint Denis this afternoon. It was such a lovely day, the temperature got up to 24 degrees and families were everywhere on the sidewalks enjoying an unseasonably warm Thanksgiving.

We also saw many families this evening at the Botanical Gardens where they feature a lantern show every evening in the Fall. It was so warm tonight that most people were still in short sleeves even as it got dark. Here are a couple of the lanterns to show you what it was like. They were a bit to Disneyesque for me but the kids loved them.

We finished the evening in a Brew Pub near McGill where I enjoyed the first beer I have ever ordered in Canada. It was very blond and light and went beautifully with the Margherita pizza. Tomorrow is our last day in Montreal and then we're back home. It's been a long and fascinating trip and we're ready to get back to our real life.