The Eye of Patrick

It was after my return to Halifax that I was able to make my way to Montreal. Montreal has been a city I wanted to visit for a long time. Just for the longest time it was too far for me to think of visiting (when I lived in Calgary) and then during my university days I never seemed to have the time or people to visit it. But when i went looking for tickets to return to Toronto I noticed many of them had a stopover in Montreal. It was that stop-over that got me thinking of maybe making a trip to Montreal as the time to get to Toronto then get downtown and then to Peterborough was almost the same amount of time needed to go from Montreal to Peterborough.Plus this was going to be one of my last opportunities to see the city. Montreal is a city that for many Canadians is like a trip to a different country. The reason is that while most of Canada was controlled and influenced by England, Quebec and the city of Montreal had French influences. This has resulted in my opinion of a city that is more European then other cities in Canada.

When I arrived in Montreal I made my way to my hostel “Sunset” I checked in and made my way to the dorm room and settled in. This was not my first experience at dorm living as I had spent 3 months backpacking through SE Asia. At first I had taken the bottom bunk but realized that the noise below was going to wake me up so then i moved to the top.

After settling in I went exploring, the location of my hostel was near St. Laurent Street, which is a unique street in Montréal as it is filled with edgy cafes and unique restaurants and bars. Considering I had not eaten all day I had decided to settle down and get something to eat. Seeing as this was the time of the world cup I made sure to select a place that contained a TV showing the Swiss vs. Ukraine play off game. When I had thought I found the perfect place I had settled down and ordered and watched the game. But as the meal progressed and the game looked more and more as if it was going to a shoot out, the TV started to blur and fuzz out. So in the end I was not able to see the shoot out. But it being Montreal I could hear the noises of other people watching the game and heard the result that way.

I realized when traveling, sometimes it is good to leave the guidebook out, so that the waiter has something to say. I thought at first that my waiter was French, but as the meal progressed and she saw my guide book about Montreal, she asked if I was visiting. I had told her yes and we had a small discussion about what to see and visit in Montreal. Which was nice, as you never know when you are going to meet new people. And never knowing who you are going to meet is what leads me into my next story.

I was walking around downtown Montreal and feeling a little blue as I was lonely and felt disorganized in the city. So I was walking around trying to locate one of the builds in my guidebook when I noticed or thought I noticed someone I knew. We looked at each other, hesitated then looked again and realized that we indeed knew each other. It turned out that out of the million or so people that live in Montreal that I had ran into another Kansai Gaidai former exchange student. At first we were just stunned to imagine that we would run into each other.

But it was like a gift from God that I had ran into him, as he mentioned that he was not suppose to be here on that day and was actually suppose to be back in his hometown planning his trip to Japan or China. But by chance he was still in the process of moving his stuff back from University and he mentioned that he was free to hang out. So I asked him what are some of the things that I just must do to say I went to Montreal and saw Montreal. The things that he listed ranged from culture to history to food, and seeing I had not eaten yet that day we decided to go for some Montreal smoked meat. I had heard of this wondrous food, and I wanted to try it out. We went to an eatery called Dunn’s and ordered a Montreal smoked meat sandwich. It was interesting as I was asked to select the fatness of my meat, so seeing that I had no idea of what was a good portion of fat I decided to go with medium. Medium is the perfect answer to anything I realized, it is the moderate answer.

It was during this meal that we had time to catch up and discuss what had happen since we both left Gaidai. It seems we have similar ideas about the future, as both of us wanted to return to Asia and possibly pursue a career in law. It was nice to be able to click so well with a person that you had not talken to in a long while. I think because we clicked so well we decided to continue or tour of the city and after the meal he took my on a tour of this city.

In my next post I will go into what I saw and how it was. But in the mean time I will share some photos.