Montreal is a cool city! And we liked visiting it. But…it also just made us so happy that we lived in Quebec City instead. In our humble opinion, Quebec City is way more beautiful, way less congested, and just more charming in every way. Quebec City feels so much more foreign and European, too. In Montreal, everyone speaks English! Lots of people know English in Quebec, but they start in French and usually let you persist in French, if you want to. But I don't think anyone spoke French to me in Montreal at all! When we left Montreal we were so happy to get back "home" to Quebec!
On the way to Montreal we took the slower drive along Autoroute 138, the Chemin du Roy that goes along the Saint Lawrence River. It's a really beautiful drive through pretty villages, each with a village church, of course! It was the prettiest time of Fall.
Daisy and Junie played "invisible basketball." It didn't end well.
Montreal is on an island in the St. Lawrence. There are a few different bridges and a tunnel to get onto the island, but traffic is still just so, so terrible. The missionaries told us to always allow 30 extra minutes beyond what you think it will take to get anywhere, and if anything that wasn't enough. Trying to get to the temple one evening (which is on the other side of the river from where we were staying, so you have to go onto the island, through Montreal, and across another bridge or tunnel) it took us AN HOUR to go 9 kilometers. It was terrible! (Luckily we still made it to the temple on time. But without dinner!!)
In spite of the traffic, though, we braved downtown Montreal a few different times, and more than one of those trips involved getting bagels. Have you heard of "Montreal bagels"? There is a big Jewish community there and they are famous for their bagels, a bit different from the typical "New York-style" bagel. The Montreal bagel is thinner and denser, and usually covered with sesame seeds and cooked in a wood-fired oven. They are delicious. They are usually made without salt, and you can taste that difference—it tasted weird to me the first time I tried them, but the sweeter/maltier taste grew on me after a while, especially when they were fresh and hot out of the oven.
This is one of the famous bagel places. I don't like this hole-mouthed bagel guy.
It was super cool to watch the bagels being made, though. They go into these huge deep ovens on a long (like 6-foot-long) wooden board, and then the worker pulls them out and dumps them into huge metal bins, probably a hundred at a time. (See the guy waving at us inside the bakery? All the workers were pleased to see our many kids all crowded around the windows watching them. We could see them elbowing each other and pointing at us. "Look at that crazy family with all those kids!")
YUM.
Even just driving down the street was beautiful.
Another fun thing we did in Montreal was the Biodôme, which is basically like a zoo. There are four different ecosystems (Tropical Rainforest, Antarctica, Gulf of St. Lawrence, and Laurentian Maple Forest) with different animals in each. There aren't tons of animals, but the habitats are cool and it's fun to feel like you are visiting each different place!
The biodome is in a big complex with the botanical gardens (which we wanted to go to but didn't, sadly) and the planetarium (which is why Clementine is by a sign that says "nétarium"). It's where the Montreal Olympics were held a long time ago.
The highlight of the Biodôme for Gus was that he got to see, for the first time, REAL CAWS. (Macaws, you know.) They were just flying around in the trees, and Gus thought it was so cool!
And there were some cute monkeys
And bats! We love bats!
And the highlight for Daisy was the penguins! She has seen the gentoo penguins at the aquarium in Utah, and she loves them, but seeing these King and Emperor Penguins felt like seeing real penguins to her. They are so cute! We could barely drag her away. In fact, we couldn't drag her away! She kept slipping back into the Antarctic habitat and we had to keep going back and getting her.
There was a friendly little puffin that kept coming over to the glass and quacking (do puffins quack?) and looking at the kids. Clementine just loved him. She called him "my friend puffin" and talked about him for the remainder of the trip. As you can see here, she is trying to give him a kiss.
Happy Daisy!
We walked around Old Montreal for a bit and saw the Notre-Dame Basilica. We have another Notre-Dame in Quebec City, an older cathedral-basilica, but this one is big and pretty too.
However…I have a grudge against this cathedral because it cost SO MUCH to go in! None of the other cathedrals we saw cost money at all, and it really doesn't seem like they should! "Is my Father's house an house of merchandise?" There is a ticket office and everything. Not very church-like if you ask me. Then, there was a "group rate" advertised on a sign, about $15 for a group of 10 or more, so we finally decided we'd go in and see it. But then they wouldn't give me the group rate because—"your group includes children," and this group rate was just intended for tour groups. What??? I was so flustered by this nonsensical rule, and trying to argue against it in French and then English to no avail, that I finally just paid what they were asking, which ended up being like $80 for our family to go in. Needless to say, I did not feel much holiness inside this place. I like St. Anne de Beaupré, and our Notre-Dame-de-Québec, so much better!
This basilica was very magnificent, decorated, and beautiful inside. (It's being restored right now on the outside, so it had scaffolding up.) There was a huge pipe organ and the ceiling was so pretty, painted blue and covered with gold stars. All around inside were posters advertising some event, "Aura"—which is some kind of concert, "an immersive experience" "using state-of-the-art projectors and lasers" inside the Basilica. HMMM. Again I must ask: is this the way to make a church a holy place of worship? A place to remember God?
Okay, I will stop complaining.
Very ornate pulpit!
This is a pretty little plaza outside the basilica
After our annoying experience at the basilica, this day had the happiest of endings, though! We wanted to try some smoked meat (another thing Montreal is famous for) so we headed to a Jewish deli we'd read about, Snowden Deli. When we arrived, the worker informed us (in English; everyone here was English-speaking) that the grill and restaurant part was closed and we would just have to pick up our order from the deli counter. That was fine with us, but when we got up to the counter, a super nice man (the owner, we learned later) called out to us, "What a great family, go ahead and sit down!" So we sat down and got served, and the owner came over and chatted with us while we ate. He was so friendly and interesting to talk to! His uncle came over from Poland, fleeing the Holocaust, and started this deli, and he's lived in Montreal and worked there his whole life. He had the perfect stereotypical Jewish mannerisms and the easy friendliness to go with it (he kept apologizing for talking so much and not leaving us alone to eat, and we kept assuring him how much we were enjoying the conversation!). He spoke perfect English, perfect French, Yiddish of course, and told us he was married to a woman from Peru so he spoke Spanish too!
It turned out this guy had visited Salt Lake as part of a movie crew and visited Temple Square and Welfare Square—"I just love your people; so friendly; doing so much good!" he said—and he was so happy about our big family. He and his wife were expecting their second baby in just a few days. We had a great conversation about faith and prayer and living in Montreal, and we just loved it so much. What a joy to find a kindred spirit—especially someone else so committed to his faith—so far from home!
Oh, and it turned out the food at Snowden Deli was the best we'd ever eaten in our lives.
This is the smoked meat sandwich. It was AMAZING.
Smoked meat omelette (the "Eggs Benny" was even better)
Daisy's favorite pancakes ever!
When our meal was almost over our new friend brought out a huge plate of desserts ("On the house; if you don't eat it all we'll wrap it up for you!")—rugelach and apple strudel and cream cheese danishes—and we left just feeling so so happy and grateful for the good people in this world. We ended up going back to Snowden Deli twice later that week (and brought a baby gift!) and it never diminished in quality. We bought a bunch of smoked meat and brisket and coleslaw from the deli to take home, too, and we ate meals fit for kings with it! We didn't get to see our friend again (he was home with his baby!) but another gruff-looking guy that served us one of the times saw me eyeing the pastries and threw about ten of them in a bag for me at no charge, so maybe everyone there has the owner's kindness.
The streets around the deli were in their finest Fall colors!
Another thing we did near Montreal was visit this Benedictine Abbey out in the eastern townships. It's on the other side of the river, about an hour out, and I wasn't sure the rest of the family would want to make the drive—but the monks do real Gregorian Chant there and I really wanted to see if we could make it to Vespers so we could hear it! So after going to the temple one day, when we were on that side of the river anyway, we headed out to Saint-Benoît-du-Lac.
Before we went to Quebec, I bought this book and loved looking through it at the beautiful places in the province. When we got to the Abbey, we realized that it was the place shown on the cover! It is so beautiful!
This was a little chapel on the grounds
I went to a monastery up in Huntsville, Utah once (it's gone now) but I haven't ever seen any others. You couldn't walk all over the site of this one, but I would have liked to! The monks make cheeses and honey and cider that they sell in their gift shop. (This doesn't bother me like the charge for the Montreal basilica did. They are just supporting themselves, and they don't sell it IN the church—or charge to go in the church!) We bought some of the cheese, and some jams and mustards and things, and all of it was really good! I think I would like to be a monk and live here and make cheese and sing the Mass in Latin.
A glimpse of the lake—I wish we could have walked through here and seen more of the grounds, but they only do public tours in summer.
I was happy that we got to the Abbey in time for Vespers. I haven't ever heard Chant in person before, but boy do I remember it from my Music Theory classes! I attended Mass several times in Quebec City, but none of them did the Latin Mass—it was always in French. Here at the Abbey, they had little books so you could follow along with the Latin (or read the French translation). Teddy followed along with the whole service in Latin, and was able to find his place several times when he got lost, which impressed me greatly!
The chapel interior was kind of austere and modern. Interesting.
We were basically the only people there for Vespers! I think one other man walked in a little late. The monks don't give the sense they are chanting for the audience (and they aren't, obviously) but I wonder what they thought of our big group trooping in to listen to them. Did they like having us there listening? Being the only ones in that big silent chapel definitely made it feel like we had to keep the kids very quiet, and that was a little nerve-wracking. But I still really liked hearing the Chant. It felt ancient and holy.
To our great surprise, after the service as we were taking the kids to the bathroom, one of the monks came up to us in the hall. "You guys were very well-behaved, considering," he told Ziggy in New-England-sounding English (haha, I love that qualifier "considering"), and then told us to wait there because he had something for us. He went down the shop and returned to give us a big bag of monk-grown apples and a box of chocolate-covered marshmallows! So nice!
I was so glad we got to visit this beautiful place!
It's funny because I totally agree with Quebec City being the much more beautiful and charming place, but looking at these pictures, I'm struck with how charming of a place Montreal is! I guess it's one of those things you'd only notice by seeing the contrast. Thanks for writing up all these posts!
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