In and out of Montréal

We made a trip to Montréal last weekend to visit my brother-in-law, who's been living there since the beginning of the year, and I played a DJ gig on the night we got there. It was my first time ever in the city that was the biggest in Canada till the 1970's and it still is, obviously, the biggest French-speaking city here.

After just one weekend in Montréal it's, of course, too early to really call anything, but on the first look Montréal seemed a bit better managed and a bit prettier than Toronto. When the architects who designed Toronto's cramped and decaying subway stations were taking a longer-than-it-should've-been coffee break, architects in Montréal drew spacious stations that remind me of Helsinki and places in Germany (I'm not trying to suggest that subway stations in Helsinki are particularly pretty, but they are definitely roomier and better managed than the Toronto subway). And the city of Montréal seems to have the brain not to pour huge piles of salt all over the city's sidewalks and to properly plow and move snow off the streets, unlike the city of Toronto, which piles 130 000 - 150 000 tonnes of salt on the city's streets every year. Salt that then goes to the ground water, to the rivers and lakes, pickling whatever lives or would like to live in the water.

That kind of things that make Toronto often seem so dumb to me seem to be a bit different in Montréal, and that together with the more European-style structure, buildings, streets and planning got me thinking that (especially if I knew more French) if we were staying in Canada for years, maybe I'd feel better living in Montréal than TO.

I took lots of pictures, many of which aren't online yet, but some I've managed to put on my Flickr account. Have a look.