Canada Trip: Montreal

After the conference was over in Quebec City I headed to Montreal for a stay of roughly two days.  The first day there, I was so exhausted from the conference I did little more then catch up on my sleep.  The next day I got out to do some souvenir shopping and sight-seeing, but not as much as I wanted.  I mostly just walked around the canals to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, taking pictures as I went.

I had hoped to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art, but it was closed on Monday, the day I was there. There were several construction crews there working on some stages.  Initially, I thought they were tearing down the stages and that they were for some event that had been held in conjunction with the Grand Prix, which was run the previous day.  I started cursing myself for having stayed in that night when I could have been attending that event, but then I noticed they were putting the stages up, not tearing them down.  I started to get excited there might be something happening that night, but when I saw the signs for the event, Francofollie de Montreal, I saw the event was several days away.

That night there was a Stanley Cup finals game, so I went to a sports bar thinking it would be packed and raucous.  Instead, it was so dead that when I initially walked by, I thought the place might be closed.  As the game hadn't started yet, I went in anyway thinking the crowd had to come sometime, but nobody came.  I was sad to see Canadians not living up to their stereotype.