On April 20, 2018, I flew to Montreal, Canada for a work meeting with the University of Montreal, along with Joe Martel and David Ouimette. Joe and I had never been there before, so we went early so we could check things out.
When we arrived in Canada, I texted my siblings with, "Ok, so like, good day and welcome to the Great White North, eh?" They told me to "Take off, hoser," and I let them I was going to do just that, in one hour, for my final flight to Montreal.
I thought it was cute that the art on the walls in the airport in Canada featured things like snow boots.
I had heard that they spoke French in Quebec, of course, so I learned a few phrases before I went, though I had also heard you could get around just fine in English.
When we arrived in Montreal, I could tell that the people were more French than I had expected, just from this guy's mustache. (I think he gives James a good run for his money).
Sure enough, everywhere we went, we only heard French, so it was "legit." I knew how to ask if they spoke English, so that I wouldn't be rudely presumptuous by just speaking English. Almost everyone spoke English reasonably well, but a few didn't.
Once we got settled in our hotel rooms, we enjoyed a nice sunset on the way to take a metro into town.
The metros were pretty full in the evenings, but got us around just fine. We each got a weekend metro pass for $13, which was great. Plus, all of Canada was having a 20% off sale! ($1 CAN = $0.80 USD).
We went to the "Little Italy" section of Montreal, and had some excellent wood-fired pizza.
The owner seemed like someone from the Old Country, and the waitress spoke English like a New Yorker. She was nice but had that east coast crass attitude that was funny. We talked about FamilySearch and she was very curious about her Italian ancestry.
There were cool murals on many of the buildings.
Here's the Cinderella movie poster in French that we kept seeing in the metro.
Saturday morning I had breakfast at the hotel, and the lady next to me said, "Bon appetite!" When I asked her, "Parlez vous anglais?" [Do you speak English?], she said, "Little, little English." But then she introduced me to her collegue (with the black and white hair), who spoke English pretty well, and we had a great conversation. (I saw them the next morning, too, and they waved excitedly when they saw me).
That morning I drove up to the Montreal Temple and did a session while Joe was out running in a 10k race that he had discovered.
All the street signs were in French (but of course).
Jared and Mikayla had a thing about answering people for prom using a pineapple, so I thought of them when this gal on the metro had a pineapple sticking out of her backpack.
Saturday afternoon, Joe and I made our way to Old Montreal, featuring buildings and cobblestone roads going back to the 1600s.
The Notre Dame ["our lady"] Cathedral was pretty cool, but we didn't make it inside that day.
For lunch, we found an outdoor café, and tried two famous Montreal dishes: the famous "smoked meat sandwich" (which was like pastrami), and the infamous "Poutine", which is french fries with gravy (and sometimes other stuff, like smoked meat on ours). The Poutine was pretty good.
We came across Place Jacques-Cartier ("Place" means "Plaza" or "Square"), where there were various street performers, including a balloon lady, an art dude, a guitar player, and a couple of magicians of varying quality.
This magician's trick was to swallow 17 razor blades, and then a string and then cough up all 17 razor blades, tied to the string.
Then I almost got eaten by a polar bear!
Actually, the bear was at a fur store, which had some beautiful and really expensive real fur coats and hats. (This coat is $8400, for example).
They also sold actual pelts. Half of all sales go to the native peoples who, I believe, hunted the animals.
(We talked about how PETA would be angry about a place like that in the U.S., and then, sure enough, the next day we heard PETA protestors angrily yelling in front of a store like that).
The cobblestone streets and domes and churches were cute. (But it was all mostly still in actual use as real shops and things).
We went inside Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours [Our Lady of Good Hope] Chapel (not to be confused with the bigger Notre Dame cathedral, which is not to be confused with the famous Notre Dame cathedral in France, which is the one with the hunchback).
The stained glass windows showed scenes from the childhood of Jesus.
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| Birth of Jesus |
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| Jesus with Simeon, at 8 days old. |
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| Jesus and his parents flee to Egypt. |
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| Young Jesus with the elders. |
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| Jesus helping with the carpentry. |
Here's the back side of the church.
At the water front was a big park that is very popular in the warmer months. Even now it was surprisingly busy. (Of course, in the summer the reflection pool is filled up instead of just being a mud puddle).
There was a big zip line.
And there was a large "ropes" course.
Montreal is a big island, with a river that flows around both sides of it. This huge bridge goes over to Longueuil, where our hotel was. (By staying across the river near a metro stop, we were able to get nice hotel rooms for $85/night instead of $250 in town).
There's a biodome on a little island. It was built in 1967 for the World's Fair, and now houses an ecological museum.
As we continued to wander the streets, we made our way to Chinatown.
In Chinatown, we saw some Chinese folks doing a protest for some reason.
I bought a sample of "Dragon Beard Candy", which looks like white whiskers and tastes like sugar and peanuts.
The Chinese buns were in cute designs like frogs or these pandas.
Later we were back over by the big Notre Dame Cathedral and the wedding bells were ringing to celebrate an actual wedding that had just happened there.
I was celebrating an excellent ice cream cone.
The Metro was more exciting that evening around rush hour.
While looking for some restaurant, we stumbled across a huge market, and ate there instead.
I got a crêpe for dinner. It was packed with cheese and mushrooms.
Last year, Linette and I spent one day in France, and there I experienced a pastry that changed my life. I didn't realize they could be like that, and so I have gushed about it ever since.
I figured that since the people in Montreal spoke French, perhaps they would know how to make a decent pastry. Indeed they did. A guy at work said to keep an eye out for a pastry called Millefeuille (pronounced "mill-foi"), so when I saw one at this market, I bought one to split with Joe. Once we tried it, we realized that we had made a terrible mistake (i.e., in splitting it), so we went back and got another one. It was amazing.
Guess how many miles we walked around town that day? None! But we walked a lot of kilometers! Jk. It was fun to see churches and stuff around town, even if my feet started wearing out.
The town had a lot of art, including this painting that someone nailed to a telephone pole.
My French isn't great, but it looks like this door at a church says, "Activities for losers."
(But, really, are we all not losers, in our own, special way? That's why we need the gospel.)
External, curving staircases were very popular there. I later heard that the government required taxes to start being paid on a house once its stairs are built. So they wait until the whole building is done and build the stairs onto the front at the very end.
Sunday morning we drove down to an English ward, and it was great.
There were 35 native languages in the ward, with members from all over the world. This couple is from Ghana. I complimented them on their beautiful, matching clothes, and their friend kept calling them "the lovebirds."
There was also a guy from Nigeria in a white robe, who spoke in church that day.
And this lady from Camaroon wanted help with dealing with thousands of names that she had collected on her family. She said she would be in Salt Lake City in May for a work trip, and we arranged for her and her niece to visit our family while they were in town.
I was extremely impressed with this diverse, vibrant ward--with their deep faith, powerful leaders, and obvious love for each other.
After church was over, a Spanish ward was congregating, and I had a nice chat with this guy from Guatemala City.
That afternoon, Joe and I wandered around a bit, seeing a couple more churches and a totem pole.
Then we caught a bus to St. Joseph's Oratory, which is the largest church in Montreal.
Inside, we enjoyed a free concert featuring a choir and organist who alternated performances.
I also liked the lifesize model of Jesus as a young boy there.
Then we walked up Mount Royal, which is the hill that Montreal is named after. Along the way, we saw houses that looked like castles.
Apparently, Montreal had received horrible weather the week before, with ice storms and cold temperatures. But while we were there, it was beautiful, short-sleeve weather, and everyone told us how lucky we were.
As we hiked up Mount Royal, however, we came across some trails that still had icy snow on them.
There's a huge cemetery that covers half of the mount, and wandering among the tombs was a Rodent of Unusual Size! It looked like a beaver but with a thinner bushy tail. (A couple of capybaras escaped the Toronto zoo a while back, but that's a ways away...)
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| Rodent of Unusual Size in Mount Royal Cemetery, Montreal |
As we neared the top of Mount Royal, there were more and more people out and about.
There is a chalet on Mount Royal, and hundreds of people were there to enjoy the view of the city below.
To get down the other side of the hill, we went down the wooden stairway.
...and down...
...and down.
The people coming up were huffing and puffing. Fortunately, we had come up the gentle way and so had an easier time of it.
Here's a little video of walking down a few of the steps. You can hear conversations in French going on from the people around me.
We caught the Orange Line on the metro to get to our next stop. I had only to look down to make sure we were in the right place.
On Monday, we met with people at the University of Montreal, which was the original purpose of our trip. They have been working on a project to do "family reconstitution", where they took all of the records in an area (French Canada), starting with the earliest settlers in the 1600s, and grouped them by couple to figure out who all the couples were, and then deduplicated the children, and then moved on to the next generation, and so on. The result is that they have all of the families of the whole population figured out in a way that is harder to do if you try doing it one family at a time. We are looking at doing a similar approach at FamilySearch in some populations, so we wanted to learn from them how they went about it.
It was a successful meeting, and the people were delightful. Below are me, Manuel (a FamilySearch employee, originally from Chile, based in Montreal), Lisa (U. of Montreal), Bertrand (retired from U. of Montreal), Joe (my travel buddy) and David Ouimette (pronounced "we met", from FamilySearch). David was the main instigator of the meeting, and his job is to travel all over the world looking for records and getting archives to want to share them with FamilySearch. I call his group the "Raiders of the Lost Archives."
Oh, and the French desserts were outstanding.
David Ouimette chastised us for not having gone inside the big Notre Dame cathedral, so after the meetings were done (and David had flown off to his next thing), we took the metro back to Old Montreal and went inside the cathedral this time.
We had been inside a couple of cathedrals in town already, but this was was truly amazing.
Here is a beautiful statue of a nun, carved out of wood.
I thought the ceilings were really cool, too.
There was a big organ in the back of the cathedral.
At night they do a show of projected light and sound that is supposed to be pretty awesome, but we didn't get in on that.
And their pews have people in them.
Towards the more modern part of town, there was this multi-colored building. I like how it reflected color onto the street. (I wonder what it looks like inside?)
Montreal has a pretty extensive "underground city", which is below the streets and buildings above, featuring many shops and restaurants, as well as tunnels that connect the various parts. This is especially popular in the cold winter months, during which people use the underground city to shop and to get around town without having to go outside.
Some of the metro tunnels are cool.
Monday night we had kababs and shawarma that were probably the best I've ever experienced.
That night I drove over to the shore to take a picture of the lights across the St. Lawrence River. You can see the big bridge, lit up in blue, and the biodome on the left, lit up in purple.
On Tuesday morning, on the way to the airport, we stopped at a restaurant for an hour or so, while Joe and his cousin (maybe 3rd cousin) met and talked about their common genealogy. They had corresponded for years, but had never met in person. Joe's paternal grandfather was French Canadian (and his mom was Japanese). The gal was 83 or something, but seemed much younger and was sharp as a tack.
On the flight to Toronto, we were in a high-wing propeller plane, so I could see the landing gear out my window. It was exciting to see the wheels skid when we landed. (I also wondered why they couldn't attach some little fins to the sides of the wheels so that they spin at airspeed before landing, thus avoiding the unpleasant skid upon landing. It turns out that this was tried in the 1940s and worked well, but never caught on.)
I saw a sister missionary in the airport and found out that she was on her way home to Highland from being a missionary in Montreal. We coincidentally sat on the same row in the plane, so we had fun talking the whole way home. She had also spent 4 months in China teaching English, and when we compared notes, we realized that when I went to church in Beijing, she was probably in the same room at the same time. (But they were watching general conference from the week before, so we didn't get a chance to meet anyone at that time).
I apologized for not being someone she could give a Book of Mormon to, and she said, "That's ok. I did that on the last plane," and I told her, "Way to go!"
It was a quick trip to Montreal, and since I hadn't completely planned this one out, we spent a lot of time wandering around wondering where to go, but we saw quite a few things in our short time there. I could tell the city is really beautiful later in the season when the leaves are on the trees, but was pretty barren at this time of year. However, we apparently lucked out once again with the weather, dodging the ice storms from the week before and the rain that started soon after we left.
Linette was at the airport to pick us up that evening, and it was wonderful to be home.
Au revoir!
