Two tourism bits for your amusement
Tourism publisher Lonely Planet has put Montreal on a short list of cities to visit in 2013. There’s also a new 24 Hours in Montreal feature on their website.
Pakistan’s dawn.com has an insider’s guided tour of the city, lots of photos with captions obviously penned by someone who went to school here and knows the city quite well – but hasn’t heard that Crescent Street’s being gutted for a new development.
kam 06:51 on 2012/10/24 Permalink
Montreal is a nice place to visit (summer), but not a nice place to live!
Ian 08:46 on 2012/10/24 Permalink
Says you. I love living in Montreal.
Steve Quilliam 09:20 on 2012/10/24 Permalink
If Montreal is not a nice place to live, I wonder which is a nice place to live.
Daisy 13:34 on 2012/10/24 Permalink
I love living in Montreal too. Moved here in 1997 and still happy about it.
dwgs 13:48 on 2012/10/24 Permalink
I came to visit friends in 1989 and liked it so much I’m still here. Does it drive me crazy sometimes? Hell yeah but there’s still no city in Canada in which I’d rather live.
Robert J 14:14 on 2012/10/24 Permalink
Depends what you want. I’d say Montreal has a lot of variety because of the language thing. You can live in English or French, and mix in a 3rd choice if you can/want. No other Canadian city has two dominant cultures in this way. It’s also cheaper than any other large Canadian city, and has the best selection of apartment living. Transit is as good or better than most North American cities. The nightlife is certainly Canada’s best, and arguably the cultural scene as well (I’d say culture occupies a more central place in people’s lives here than in Ontario, even though the TO scene has really picked up).
What I don’t like about this city:
it’s just too small. I’ve walked the whole length of Ste-Catherine, St-Laurent, St-Denis, and Mont-Royal a thousand times. I’ve been all over Rosemont, Villeray, NDG, and most of the other central ‘hoods and I’m not into suburbs.
it’s isolated from other large size cities: 6 hours to NY, TO, or Boston. Quebec, Ottawa, and Albany are close but too small.
Quebec culture can be a little parochial/inwardly turned, while Anglo-Canadian culture is inconsistent and often indistinguishable from American culture.
There’s a pretty solid set of advantages. I’ve been here for 6 years and I’d say Montreal can wear out over time. If I can move to a larger, more connected city some day, I will, but I’ll certainly be back in Montreal very often, and will always call it home.
Ian 22:04 on 2012/10/24 Permalink
RANT WARNING:
You know, as someone who is neither from Montreal nor Toronto, I find the whole comparison thing silly. I was born in a small rural city/town in Ontario, and grew up in a really run-down industrial city near Toronto. While most of my friends aspired to moving the heck out of the industrial hellhole we were forced to exist in, most aspired to Toronto, or maybe Vancouver. I started hitch-hiking to Montreal when I was 16. Absolutely the place to be IMO; then and now.
All I knew about Montreal was Leonard Cohen, Mordecai Richler, and Bonheur d’Occasion. QC culture didn’t have much spread back then. Still, Montreal in the late 80′s was a mythical & magical land of ‘ash-coke & wanna-date … so seedy! So real! Replete with underage drinking and clubs that would rival the most edgy venues anywhere. So I moved here for art school, lived through the referendum, dealt with the OMG I hate Ontario bullshit, learned “real” French, and I’m still here, raising 2 lovely girls, and while I do have itchy feet this is the best place in North America to raise a family IMSO (in my sweet opinion). I have lived across Canada, and though I have lived in Montreal more-or-less since ’91, I get Toronto and actually lived there 97-01 working sweet technoboom jobs to pay off my fat student loan – and then I moved right back to Montreal because I missed the hell out of it… and whoah, now we have jobs! Yay!
Most people I know that are form here kind of loathe it. Familiarity breeds contempt, maybe. Small-town-in-a-big-city syndrome. I get it! If you greW up here and hate it, go somewhere else for a while! Travel! Spread your wings! Stop being a typical fucking Montrealer that never travels and hates every other place in the world (especially Toronto) and thinks the ROC gives a shit about the plight of Anglos – or even Quebec in general, for that matter.
Having spent lots of time amongst them English, when people from Quebec tell me Anglo Canada is just like the US, well, that’s bullshit. I have spent a ton of time in Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes, BC, and in Manitoba. I have hitched and road-tripped from Montreal to Vegas, I have been to Flagstaff, New Orleans, Chicago, SF, and frequent visits to NYC and they are all places that have their own vibe and frankly the only people that I have ever heard say that Canada is like America haven’t travelled much in either. Toronto is little bit like Chicago but is a much better walking city. It’s also a shitty tourist city, I can understand that – you need to know where to be, and pretty much every third place on any strip worth noting is incredible but if you hit every second your time there will suck. Montreal has a very few little clusters where you can go at pretty much any time and enjoy yourself but the vast majority of the city is as full of suck as downtown Toronto on a Sunday at 5 am. Let’s be honest.
The funniest thing about the Montreal-Toronto rivalry is that it doesn’t exist in Toronto. People in Toronto love Montreal. “You’re from Montreal? That place is so cool”. < typique. People in Montreal put so much effort into hating Toronto, and I don't understand why. Montrealers also have this funny notion they have a better variety of restaurants and nightlife than Toronto. Well, Toronto has a far wider variety of immigrant settlers and more than double the central urban population. You name the food, Toronto has a restaurant. Maybe even a neighbourhood. The variety of food from around the world there is intense – most Montrealers don't know that Toronto has more ethnic diversity than any city in North America. Fact. Montreal may have a jazzfest, but a jazz musician can actually make a living in Toronto as there are tons of clubs that are open all year, not just in the trendy tourist season – I know quite a few musicians that have moved to Toronto just to survive. Toronto has way more clubs, live theatre, and arts funding in general which lends to all kinds of cultural stuff.
To defend Montreal on the other hand, we have no funding, business doesn't invest in us and capital hates us – so whatever we do is from the heart, grassroots, and real. Except for the corporate events that even we locals mock in our heart of hearts. There is an honesty and ability to laugh in Montrealers that I don't see in Toronto. A sense of humour is our advantage – but we can't get caught up in hating Toronto because that's … well, pathetic. We're not shooting for tragedy here, we're shooting for comedy. Everyone loves a laugh and we certainly love to laugh at ourselves and that's only a small part of what makes us magic.
There's a lot more to Montreal than simply not being Toronto or Quebec City or Brooklyn or wherever… this is a REAL place, with REAL heart, and if you can't see it or can only define it in opposition to other places, you're maybe a little dead inside.