We might have left our hearts in Montréal. We fell for this place like a high-school crush. The summer is so beautiful it tricks you into thinking you could handle the winters. (Almost. A fellow Preds fan we met on the street called the winters “life-changing” and I don’t think he meant that in a good way). But still, everyone is beautiful and speaks French, the architecture is nonstop, street festivals spring up everywhere all week long, art fills the streets in urban museums, everyone rides bicycles. The city is modern and romantic all at the same time. My inner French Furtrader felt right at home.
And as if all that weren’t enough, the food is phenomenal (thank you, Emily Konuchi and her coworkers for the great recommendations!). We offer proof from one of our favorite meals of the trip at L’Express:
Now that you want to visit, have we got the place for you! We found an incredible AirBnB with the most comfortable bed maybe in the entire world (which is saying a lot because we’re passionate about our California King Tempurpedic that is languishing away in storage deeply missed). Our hosts were super charming. This was clearly their beloved home that they’re AirbnBing while they’re on parental leave with their second kiddo (cause, you know, both parents get like three years of parental leave in Canada). It was a real showplace, a restored 1850’s Victorian that has been featured in architectural magazines (see Trent enjoying the porch below while he practices saying “mon sang court orange”).
Casey ventured into parts unknown of the deep internet to figure out a DNS swapping scheme that would BOTH 1) allow us to make the computer think we were in Europe for Titans-watching purposes AND 2) trick it into thinking we were still in the US for HBO watching purposes so we could lounge in the giant bed in our luxurious bathrobes and watch Game of Thrones. Want. More. Dragons. Always. More and more and more dragons. I want ten dragons (if anyone gets that joke, it will be Delaney—I want TEN!).
We revisited the Queen Elizabeth where I went with my parents as a teenager. They had remodeled it, but it felt the same to me. Thanks, Mom & Dad, for bringing me along.
But mostly, we laid around in that fat pad, healed our bodies in the deep soaking tub after our month of (incredible, but sometimes hard) travel (as Kam reminds us, travel is from the French word for work), and strolled the streets of Montréal, trying our best to look like locals. Only we could never really master the way locals both fully appreciated the splendor and also just expected it to be culturally extraordinary at every turn as a matter of course.
We miss you, Montréal. We’ll be back soon. Maybe we’ll even get a “goose” (thanks for the tip, Preds fan on the street) and learn how to survive the winter.
summartime.blog 