Montreal, June 2017 (Part 2 - Bus Touring)

When we woke up on Saturday morning, we quickly got breakfast near our AirBNB and walked to Dorchester Square to hop on the Gray Line double decker bus tour.

Most major tourist destinations have these double decker tour buses and they’re a very convenient way to get from landmark to landmark. The one in Montreal was easily the worst one I’ve been on. The buses are old, small, and cramped, the ride is extremely bumpy and the schedule was very unreliable.

That being said, we took the Gray Line through the city. Montreal is a beautiful town where the present is integrated with the past. One notable example was St. George’s Anglican Church in the heart of downtown. Behind St. George’s is La Laurentienne, an office building completed in 1986. The land on which La Laurentienne is built on is actually owned by the church meaning that the rent paid on the land goes straight to St. George’s coffers.

The first stop on the route was in the part of the city simply known as Vieux Montreal (Old Montreal).

We first strolled down Rue Saint-Paul, which, since its completion in 1672, is the oldest street in Montreal. Shops and restaurants line the street giving new life to buildings that have stood for centuries.

Getting hungry, we decided to look for something to eat along the street that we were on. Be advised that restaurants in this part of town are pretty pricey, after all, location is everything. Practically every restaurant has outside patio seating to take advantage of the beautiful weather.

Eventually we stumbled across Les Pyrénées, a restaurant named after the mountain range in northern-Spain which separates it from the rest of Europe. Keeping up with the name, the restaurant specializes in northern-Spanish cuisine, particularly from the Basque and Catalan regions.

In front of the restaurant one of the cooks was cooking a two-foot diameter wide pan of paella loaded with shrimp, mussels, and chorizo.

The food was all beautifully plated and although my pork loin was very under-seasoned and a little overcooked, Audrey’s codfish was flavorful and cooked nicely.

The next stop on the Gray Line was Le Notre-Dame Basilica. Since we just went to the more well known Notre-Dame in Paris back in March, we definitely had to check out its counterpart in North America. A stark difference between the buildings is the simplicity of the building itself. While Le Notre-Dame de Paris is littered with carvings from head to toe, the Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal is a much cleaner, straightforward structure.

There was so much to see in the little amount of time we had in Montreal that I don’t want this post to get too long so I’m going to end this one here and finish the rest of our day in the next one.