Montreal bikes

Husband explored Montreal, mainly on foot, but also hired bixis, which a cross between bikes and taxis. You put your credit card in the machine and you can then pull out a bike to borrow. It costs nothing if you use it for less than half an hour, so great for commuting, then the cost goes up the longer you have it, so not for touring really. However, if you return it to a stand in less than half an hour, wait five minutes and you can take a bike out again. That way, keep borrowing a bike, and you can take longer to get across the city and explore.

Where NOT to stay

Here's where we shouldn't have stayed! It's next door to this Erotika shop, and there's a building site outside. The whole of the street, St Catherine's street was being dug up and rebuilt, so our taxi driver couldn't drop us off right at the door, which was probably just as well seeing as how horrified he was to drop us at the corner of St Catherine St and St Laurent. He'd have been even more upset to leave us in front of such a shop.

But the studio was big, and light, and the desk was manned 24 hours, so you felt secure. The bed was awful - you wouldn't want a bed like that for long, but tolerable and within work budget if I had to go again, and I was only there because work encouraged me to go to this academic conference. It was an opportunity too good to miss just because of low budgets and high costs.

Speaking French in Montreal

In Montreal, if you speak French, the francophones are pleased, yet if you get stuck and speak English, they are happy to speak English. And they speak English without the accent that French people have.

English is my mother tongue, but the reason I learned French is because of Montreal, and the story goes back over a hundred years to a little Scottish village where my great grandfather became "the carpenter who drowned in the moss".

This drowned carpenter left a widow with four children, two teenage daughters and two little boys. The elder daughter, Margaret Jean, set out at the age of 16 to find a new life in Canada, at Montreal with "a pound in her pocket". When she had settled, and found work, she sent for her mother and two little brothers, while her sister, stayed in Glasgow, looked after by her grandmother's cousin.

Some ten years later, friends of my Aunty Jean visited her when their ship docked in Canada, and she asked one of them to take a parcel back to her sister in Glasgow, another port. Thus, that ship's engineer met and married my grandmother.

My grandfather was a seasick sailor whose family hailed from Liverpool. At that time, his ship often went to Le Havre, a small port on the north coast of Normandy, too small to load and unload the ships very quickly, so he tended to spend more time in France than in Liverpool. So he moved his young wife and first born child to live at Le Havre for a few years before world war I, which is how our family came to know two sisters from La famille Moulin.

Half a century later, one of these sisters and her nephew's family taught me to speak French. What goes around comes around, and now I speak French in Montreal, where my grandmother's sister spoke only English.

Touring Montreal

Montreal is a nice city for walking round and lots going on. Today we paid a quick visit to the Adler art exhibition, where the theme related to business.

The conference organised a trip round three Montreal businesses, (see my Phd blog here for details) and in the evening husband and I went on a boat tour though it was too wet to see much out of the boat.

Seedy side of Montreal

Husband is discovering aspects of Montreal that perhaps the organisers of this conference hadn't intended us to discover.

For instance, he went out early Friday morning, early Canadian time, but we're still on UK body clock, to look for breakfast, when a black woman came up to him and asked him if he wanted 'company'.

Then, today, when he tried to negotiate the steps into the hotel, there were some youngsters sitting there smoking. One announced, "Hey man! We're just smoking a bit of weed." and the stubs on the step are the evidence of that activity.

So these stories tell of a more interesting side of the city.

Not salubrious

"This area is full of drugs and prostitutes!"

remonstrated our taxi driver as he dropped us off at our hotel, Abri du Voyageur

This is not an auspicious start to our stay in Montreal. we have a studio flat for a week. The flat is ok, (I have internet access on my eeePC) but it's the sort of area I wouldn't want my son or daughter to stay, but they are not with me. Daughter is alone at home - again a tad worrying and son is staying on at uni on a grant to build a fusion reactor this summer - quite exciting. Husband will explore, and cycle while I attend an academic conference.