North America 2022 : Saturday September 17 Day 19 Montreal Market and Dinner

It was another slow day in Montreal as we got up rather late and chatted over breakfast while deciding on what to do with the rest of the day. Renee and Henry told us they had two cats, though one was not seen throughout the three days of our visit. Even putting out food wasn’t enough to tempt it out into the world where unknowns were lurking. Each morning we’d get a report of where the “other” cat was lurking that day, usually under their bedcovers somewhere. Henry did send me a photo some time after we’d gone to show that the second cat was not imaginary. I’m not sure I’m convinced even now.

Prior to leaving Australia I’d bought myself an eSim mobile phone plan following Henry’s suggestion but seemed to be having some sort of trouble with it while I was in Montreal, I couldn’t seem to connect to the internet at all. Meanwhile, Robyn’s phone card – the sim that we had purchased from T-Mobile in Chicago that was supposed to be good for both the USA and Canada – was dropping in and out with no discernible pattern. I played around with it a bit to see if there were any settings that needed to be switched and something I did seemed to work. Mine, however, was being a nuisance.

I had purchased a standard plan of 200 minutes of voice (something I figured I was never going to use) and 10Gb of data. That seemed like enough when I was sitting at home. But I had forgotten that I have about 50Gb of data a month on my Australian mobile plan and so tend to completely forget that clicking on a video link somewhere and then moving on without stopping it properly tends to chew through data at a very fast rate. That and the fact that I had been running the phone as a GPS assistant in the car for a week probably contributed to the discovery that my 10Gb data had been eaten away, well before I thought it would. I needed a top-up on the plan, so I grabbed another 10Gb and figured it would all be updated later that day.

By the time I’d wasted an hour or so on all of this travel housekeeping it was off to the local produce market. Henry tends to shop there on his own during the week when it is less crowded and we were unsure if a Saturday late morning was going to be a good time. As it turned out it was fine; nothing like Melbourne’s Victoria Market at a similar time of week.

There is something very soothing about wandering around fresh food markets of this type, looking at what people are buying, selling and eating. I was rather surprised by the number of chillies and peppers on sale. Not so such the garlic, cheese and bread as we were in the province of Quebec with its heavy French influence. Some of the stalls reminded me of similar setups in the Budapest main market, which seemed to be full of chillies, garlic and salami.

We had a spot of lunch where I got completely confused by the description of the tacos on offer – was that one or two for $9.00? Did it come with salsa? In the end I opted to also pick up a grilled sausage in a bun with charcoal cooked bell pepper to top things off. I saw one stall holder selling grilled sausages wrapped only in paper! Surely an abomination.

Robyn had been the look-out for some maple syrup since arriving in Canada and Henry and Renee convinced her that the nest syrup, the darkest, was to be found in the eastern art of the country, namely Montreal. She found what she wanted and picked up two decent sized cans for a price that would be ridiculously cheap in Australia.

We then decided to walk home through some the local neighbourhoods, getting an idea of what Montreal did on a Saturday afternoon. Basically they closed off whole streets and turned them into local markets and pedestrian-friendly areas. It seemed a reasonable thing to do. There were a lot of people out and about, probably catching as much sunshine as they could before the winter weather started to move in.

It was also intriguing to note the number of murals painted onto the ends of rows of apartments. Henry has been finding a lot of these and posting them to his FaceBook page so I was aware they existed but it was very interesting to see what sort of styles the locals were using.

Robyn and I took Renee and Henry out to a swanky restaurant that night as a way of partially thanking them for putting us up during our stay in Montreal. And the night was still warm enough to stroll home afterwards.