Volume 6: Pete in Canada Part 3. Beaver Las Canada. 1 Continent, 2 Blokes, Infinite Weird Sh*t
Day 5 – Montreal
Today we decided to start the day by taking on Mont Royal, which while being a large gathering of dirt in the one spot, would be more aptly called a hill, only having an elevation of 233m. That said, it did take at least 30 minutes to climb (read walk up) where you are rewarded for your Hilary like climb at the Kondiaronk lookout with a great view of the city, and thankfully for us, 2 incredibly hot French chicks. On top of the mountain is a monument to Jacques Cartier, another European to “discover” a giant landmass, this giant landmass being Canada. It’s been a thing that’s dumbfounded me since I was a young boy, the whole European “discovering” of countries that have been populated by indigenous populations for thousands of years. I could just picture the conversations between Cartier and the indigenous population:
Cartier: I, being, the first person ever to come here do proclaim this land for the great France. I hereby call it Canada
Indian #1: Excuse me, what did you say?
Cartier: Oh sorry messier, I didn’t see you there. Oh, I’m glad you’re here though for this historical moment. You can bare witness to me claiming this new land for France. I shall call it Canada
Indian #1: No, this is India. We’ve been here for years
Cartier: Sorry old man, you must be confused from the long boat ride. This is Canada. Don’t you just hate boat food? And those small packets of peanuts? They can be a real bugger to open. That and you’ve always got a crying baby sitting in the seat behind you?
Indian #1: Hey Rajesh, this man here is be saying that we are in Canada
Indian #2: What? Did you tell him he is in India
Indian #1: Yeah I already told him
Cartier: Oh, Bonjour. I see there’s more than one of you. Welcome to Canada
Indian #1: Bloody hell Rajesh, he’s persistent with this whole “this is Canada” thing
And so on the conversation must’ve gone; until the Indians were convinced they were mistaken and weren’t actually living in India despite foolishly referring to themselves as Indians. At least, that’s my understanding of it all. There is of course some old theory about Columbus thinking he was actually in India when he “discovered” the Americas, hence calling the locals Indians, but that seems a bit far-fetched.
Anyway, getting back to Mont Royal, apparently Cartier climbed the mountain in 1535 under the guidance of the Indians of the village of Hochelaga (probably similar to the roles the Sherpa play when anyone climbs Everest, only the hike is about 8,0000 vertical metres longer), was pretty happy with the view, and promptly dubbed the hill Mont Royal. It is from this that the city of Montreal takes its name.
After escaping the heat for a while with some ice confectionary in the Chalet du Mont Royal, we made our way down to the city and to the tourist info building. Thankfully, the woman serving us was quite good at her job and told us in 5 minutes something that would’ve taken us about 5 hours to figure out. There was also an amusing moment when she asked our names and Brad said “I’m Brad and this is Pete”. She then, somewhat confused, yet excitedly responded “Brad Pitt? Like the actor?”. After I spelt my name out the confusion was cleared up and we all had a laugh an acknowledged that “Pete” did sound like “Pitt” especially when said by a middle-aged woman with a French accent.
Our heads now filled with knowledge, and with the idea of potentially taking a cruise to our next destination, Quebec City, we headed down to the ports situated in Old Montreal (old skool). It was during this walk I noticed Montreal locals take jay walking to new levels. Many are happy to walk halfway onto the street before even thinking about whether to see if there is a shiny object on 4 wheels about to hit them at great speed. As for the traffic lights, as soon as 1 goes red, the opposite one’s go green. In Australia we thankfully have the 2-second delay to avoid accidents caused by people treating the amber light as the sign to accelerate.
To get to the port we walked through Old Montreal, where we stumbled across a statue of John Young. I’d enjoyed Young Talent time as a kid, and it was great to see Johnny Young’s contribution to the arts being recognised overseas. Okay, it wasn’t the Aussie Johnny Young, with beard on the statue giving it away. That and the fact he died in 1878 according to the statue. Once at the port we checked out the cruise options with an info desk, before walking along the piers. At one pier, the area was semi closed for filming on a small boat. Brad and I would like to think they were filming a porno but we received no information to confirm this.
After what had been a long walking day in the hot Montreal sun, we headed back to Peels Pub for a late lunch. It was when we discovered they served $6.99 jugs of beer between 3pm and 7pm that we knew the place would have a special place in our hearts for the rest of our days. Brad went with the $1.99 spaghetti special, so he was pleased with his efforts of having about 4 beers and a good feed for under $10.
After lunch we headed back to Casa Bella, tidied ourselves up and headed off to Rue Crescent as the lady at the information desk had listed that as a street with a lot of pubs. Unfortunately it turned out that most of the pubs on Rue Crescent turned out to be Irish themed pubs, aimed mostly at foolish tourists who wanted to spend time in the English speaking part of Montreal. While I don’t mind an Irish pub, I was here to enjoy French culture so wasn’t overly primed to spend a big night in an Irish pub.
So, tired after a big days effort that saw us climbing mountains, potentially seeing porno filmed, we retired to Casa Bella for an early night.
Day 6 – Montreal
Today we departed the deceptively named Casa Bella, and made our way to the more budget friendly Lipotak hostel. While the lights on the businesses in this part of town were mostly neon pink, it would be fair to say they emitted a red light. The hostel was located a small walk from the Berri-UQAM metro station on Rue Sainte Catherine Est. The hostel was a genuine Hippy refuge, with us initially being served by some tall skinny white French Rastafarian with a giant tea cosy on his head to hold his dreadlocks in, before passing us onto someone who could confidently speak English. That guy told us “We only take cash”, which I figured was some piss weak anti-establishment thing to stop the evil corporations getting their hands on more cash to fund the destruction of the earth through globalisation and the same very corporations that prevented the liberation of whales being held as political prisoners after being convicted of Sodomy. The English-speaking guy just didn’t quite seem to fit as a true hippy, and he gave off an aura that he was still trying to figure out who he was. You just got the feeling if you saw him next month he’d be trying to fit into a different social group, I don’t know, something like Neo-Nazism. He tried to play the role of the cool hippy whilst taking us on a tour of the hostel by showing us the balcony (read fire escape) and saying “I’ve only got 2 rules here. 1st rule, don’t go down the stairs on the balcony. 2nd rule, don’t go up the stairs on the balcony. People live down there, we don’t want to piss them off”. That is so un-hippy like thinking; 1 you’ve got rules, 2 you actually care about what “the man” thinks. He tried to regain his hippy credibility by telling us he didn’t care if we smoked a few buds on the balcony (read fire escape) but for me it was too late, this man was no hippy. During our conversations Brad had mentioned we were big sports fans and were keen to check out the Olympic stadium to which he replied “I don’t know much about sports, but I can tell you about parks”. I thought of partaking in a cultural exchange by replying “We’ve got a phrase for that back home, it’s ‘you big poof’”, but thought better of it.
Settled in at Lipotak, and happy with the fact it only cost $20 a night for a room with only 4 beds, private bathroom and cooking area, we made our way out to Montreal’s money pit and testament to dodgy construction work; the Olympic Park. The Stade Olympique was designed by some stoned French bloke with 1 year left on his TAFE course. For what he showed in creative design, he showed an equal ineptitude in structural design and engineering. The Montreal tower which was initially designed to provide great views and to help remove the stadium roof, was not completed in time for the 1976 games. To compound that problem, when they had built the majority of the tower they recalculated the numbers (obviously never hearing the old building adage: measure twice, cut once) and realised the tower would not be able to hold the weight if they continued to build the rest of the tower with the same material. So if you look closely, you can see the last part of tower is constructed using balsa wood. Okay maybe not balsa wood, but a material that is bit stronger, steal. As for removing the stadium roof, the architect after getting really drunk on cocktails and drinks that have the small umbrellas in them, was inspired to design it to operate like a giant umbrella, with a series of giant cables attached to the Montreal Tower used to lift the roof. After the stunning success of the engineering associated with the Tower, it must have been with little surprise that when they first attempted to remove the roof it didn’t work as planned. Realising the stadium was taking on the properties of a dead horse, they stopped flogging it and instead settled for a static roof. The Stadium itself was originally dubbed the “Big O”, but after realising how much it was going to cost to build it’s now known by the locals as the “Big ooh!”, as in “Ooh shit! It’s gonna cost that much to build?!?”. To the joy of the locals, they will finally have it payed off this year courtesy of a “tobacco tax”. Which made me wonder what they did with the $9.90 I spent on the funicular ride to the top of the tower (hopefully investing it in building a new architecture faculty at McGill University).
After taking in the views at the top of the Montreal Tower, Brad and I took a guided tower of the stadium. It was there we saw the 3,000 seat pool stadium, and a pool that had the ability to make its’ depth go up or down. However, since the pool stadium has a roof on it, and due to FINA requirements requiring World Championships to be held outdoors, the swimming World Championships could never be held there, ever. Which essentially means they poured a whole bunch of cash into a facility that was only used for a single week back in 1976. Meanwhile, the swimming World Championships had been held in Montreal, just a few weeks earlier in a stadium other than the Olympic facility. It was also on the tour that the guide went to great pains to point out just how big a bunch of cheats the East German “women” were at the 1976 games. His favourite bit of evidence was a picture showing that the East German “women” had won the 4 x 100m freestyle relay by 7 seconds. It was also during the tour that the guide mentioned there was a Canadian Football game on tonight, so Brad and I did some enquiring and discovered it was going to be played at McGill University, and the game would not happen unless we were seated in the stadium watching it.
We caught the metro back into the city and made our way towards McGill University to find the game. Thankfully, there was a mass of punters wearing Montreal jerseys so we just followed them through the school grounds followed by a long walk up the hill to the Molson Stadium. Along the way a scalper caught our attention and told us the match was sold out, and that we’d have to buy tickets from him. Somewhat sceptical (hard to trust someone performing illegal activities, which I suppose now also included me as I was about to buy a ticket from him) he picked up on that and asked me how much I was willing to spend. I said between $20-$25. When he suggested that was unlikely and that he was selling his tickets for $40, I then motioned to Brad to walk away. This was an act that caused the scalper to suffer a relapse from his Repressed Depreciative Memory Syndrome (RPMS) causing the ticket to depreciate in value by $5. Brad, getting more excited than I liked when negotiating a price down, turned to me like a child with eyes saying “Can we go dad? Can we go dad?”. I was still convinced I wasn’t spending more than $25 to see the game, so I again motioned for Brad to walk away. This caused another relapse of the scalpers RPMS and caused the ticket to depreciate by another $5, the ticket was now selling for $30. Unfortunately Brad suffers from Premature Purchase Syndrome (PPS) and before I could negotiate any further Brad had his wallet out reaching for his cash. I was a little disappointed that I hadn’t gotten the magical $25 mark, but that disappointment vanished when he handed over the tickets and they had a face value of $32.
Always the cons ament budget travellers, we figured the savings we’d made on the tickets would be easily eaten away by the cost of beer inside the stadium, so we then went on a search for a footy pub to get liquored up on the cheap. Well, after a long walk through what appeared to be an industrial zone, we turned a corner and there it was, like an oasis springing up out of the desert, a pub that sold $9.50 jugs of beer. “There’s always a bar around the corner” would be one of many slogans that stayed with us for the rest of the tour. Inside the pub full of Montreal fans we started talking to a local called Doug Wood who ran a website dedicated to his beloved Montreal Alouettes. He was pumped that’d we’d travelled halfway around the world to see a game of Canadian Football, so he took our photo and later put it on his website (thankfully just a football website, and not something else like a Gay fans of the Alouettes site).
Happy with our work we headed to the Molson Stadium after a couple of jugs to watch the game. In a classic “it’s a small world” moment there was a chick from Sydney sitting right behind us. We entertained her and her Canadian friend with a number of heated discussions about nothing, one of the benefits of the additional 4 beers we had at the game at the unhappy hour price of $7.50 each. The game somehow dragged on for 3 hours, despite the fact the game clock only goes for 60 minutes, leaving Brad and I convinced it was no coincidence the stadium was sponsored by a brewery (I mean really, stopping a football game so you can have people race carrying a 3 foot stack of pizza boxes leaves you with no alternative but to go buy more beer).
About 2 hours and 50 minutes in the game we decided to leave and head off to the Quartier Latin to party on. The Tourist Info lady had circled Boul Saint Laurent so we headed there. It was there we met 2 lovely French ladies waiting in line for a bar. The Aussie accent captivated them, the French accent captivated us, so we spent the rest of the night with them. It was when they left at about 2:30am, giving us a double-cheek kiss goodbye, then only to come back at 2:35am that I thought there was a solid chance of international relations between our 2 countries being greatly improved that night. Sadly, it was only about a half hour later that they gave us our final double-cheek kiss goodbye, leaving our lives forever.
Soon after we left the bar and got something to eat. As it was after 3am and we’d been drinking since around 6pm, I decided it was time to go home. Brad didn’t agree and wanted to party on. As he was now talking to some locals, and that I informed him that what he was talking was mostly shit and that he should go home, he didn’t concur and informed me that I would do best if I was to “fuck off”. I thought fine, accepted his advice and walked off hoping the lesson I was about to teach him that he had bugger all sense of direction when he was drunk would stand me in good stead for the rest of the tour and he would leave when I suggested he should leave. Normally I would never walk home alone in a foreign city after 3am when my accommodation was in a red light district, but as if by some divine intervention from Brad’s Virgin Mary medallion, fortunately the rain that night was incredibly heavy. That may sound stupid, but the fact that I was now walking home in a monsoonal rain meant that all the normal freaks and junkies that would normally harass you were all taking cover in doorways and none were to be seen on the footpath. As for Brad, he got in a taxi, fell asleep and was awoken and thrown out by the Taxi driver at around 3600 Sainte Catherine Est. According to his version of events the next day, he then walked up to some people taking cover and asked them where the nearest pub was. Found the pub, had a beer, then caught another Taxi to the hostel situated at about 200 Sainte Catherine Est. At which time he entered our room, woke me up, went through his backpack before readying himself for sleep, and then started freaking out about losing his passport. Knowing him and knowing he was exceptionally drunk, I quietly informed him he hadn’t lost his passport, he’d only misplaced it. Turned out I was correct and the silly drunken fool had just put his passport on the table as his first act of coming into the room.
Anyway, woke up the next day after minimal sleep thinking what a great day.
Comments