A week in Montreal
Oct. 12th, 2014 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missizzyBack today from a five-day journey that took me to Canada for the second time in my life, my first visit to Quebec, and the first time since high school I've been in a place where the principle language of the streets wasn't my own. My trip can be divided into two halves: before the Jane Austen convention I was there for really got underway, and after.
For my mother, it was actually two conventions in one: the Fanny Burney people continue to hold their own annual meeting in conjunction with JASNA's annual gathering, and that was all day Thursday and Friday morning. That necessitated coming in on Wednesday, and we flew in that morning, on the same plane as a few other JASNA people though we didn't really get a chance to talk to them. It was only just before we got on the plane that we were informed our carry-ons were too big to go in the overhead compartments and would be packed "on the side of the plane," except electronics and their cables were required to travel in the cabin, so we got on clutching our iPads with their power cords dangling down. After the plane landed we waited with a small crowd as all such bags were presented for pickup. Other than this mishap our flight was fairly uneventful.
Getting to the Sheraton hotel from there was a bit more eventful. We were initially given directions to a bus that took people to multiple hotels, only to be told when it arrived(after a wait) that we were being directed to the wrong Sheraton, and we had to go back the way we had come, across the airport terminal and back down an escalator that moved very slowly then speeded up when stepped on, just in time to see the bus we were supposed to take drive away. When the next one started boarding, ten minutes before departure, we learned we needed tickets to get on it, prompting a frantic run back into the terminal and a near meltdown when we couldn't figure out how to get the ticket-producing machine to accept a credit card; it was a good thing mom had exchanged some money while we'd been going through immigration.
From the lengthy ride from the airport to the hotel, and our adventures searching for lunch and a place to buy hairwash(the latter which we would not find that day), we discovered that Montreal is a city not in the best condition, filled with construction projects, graffiti, and lots and lots of homeless people. Later we would learn the locals joke about there being two season, winter and construction, and the construction projects were the results of corruption that drained the city's budget and resulted in cuts to all the things that actually do the citizens good. That day, we had much trouble finding a restaurant with both decent food and decent prices. We ended up eating in a pizzeria where they were likely appalled by how plain we wanted our pizza, while we were appalled by its low quality and their incompetence at providing customers with coffee.
Most of the afternoon after that we spent in our hotel room, recuperating, but meanwhile I noticed the Bell Centre was only a block away from the Sheraton, and we decided to check it out. We would eventually find a railway station, some confusing twists and turns of streets, and a couple of large restaurants nearby. That evening we would eventually return to one of them for dinner. There we enjoyed decent if overpriced food while TV screens around the place showed French-Canadian children's programming, including a sci-fi show called Les Argonautes that I suspect I would've enjoyed had I been a French-Canadian child, though when we saw the costumes and sets my mother talked about how absurd it looked. The theme song has since been half-stuck in my head, except I can't really remember how it goes...back in the hotel room I watched pieces of the Habs-Maple Leafs game, enjoying the high action at the end as much as I could when I really was too tired; I went the sleep immediately after.
Will continue my account tomorrow, hopefully.
For my mother, it was actually two conventions in one: the Fanny Burney people continue to hold their own annual meeting in conjunction with JASNA's annual gathering, and that was all day Thursday and Friday morning. That necessitated coming in on Wednesday, and we flew in that morning, on the same plane as a few other JASNA people though we didn't really get a chance to talk to them. It was only just before we got on the plane that we were informed our carry-ons were too big to go in the overhead compartments and would be packed "on the side of the plane," except electronics and their cables were required to travel in the cabin, so we got on clutching our iPads with their power cords dangling down. After the plane landed we waited with a small crowd as all such bags were presented for pickup. Other than this mishap our flight was fairly uneventful.
Getting to the Sheraton hotel from there was a bit more eventful. We were initially given directions to a bus that took people to multiple hotels, only to be told when it arrived(after a wait) that we were being directed to the wrong Sheraton, and we had to go back the way we had come, across the airport terminal and back down an escalator that moved very slowly then speeded up when stepped on, just in time to see the bus we were supposed to take drive away. When the next one started boarding, ten minutes before departure, we learned we needed tickets to get on it, prompting a frantic run back into the terminal and a near meltdown when we couldn't figure out how to get the ticket-producing machine to accept a credit card; it was a good thing mom had exchanged some money while we'd been going through immigration.
From the lengthy ride from the airport to the hotel, and our adventures searching for lunch and a place to buy hairwash(the latter which we would not find that day), we discovered that Montreal is a city not in the best condition, filled with construction projects, graffiti, and lots and lots of homeless people. Later we would learn the locals joke about there being two season, winter and construction, and the construction projects were the results of corruption that drained the city's budget and resulted in cuts to all the things that actually do the citizens good. That day, we had much trouble finding a restaurant with both decent food and decent prices. We ended up eating in a pizzeria where they were likely appalled by how plain we wanted our pizza, while we were appalled by its low quality and their incompetence at providing customers with coffee.
Most of the afternoon after that we spent in our hotel room, recuperating, but meanwhile I noticed the Bell Centre was only a block away from the Sheraton, and we decided to check it out. We would eventually find a railway station, some confusing twists and turns of streets, and a couple of large restaurants nearby. That evening we would eventually return to one of them for dinner. There we enjoyed decent if overpriced food while TV screens around the place showed French-Canadian children's programming, including a sci-fi show called Les Argonautes that I suspect I would've enjoyed had I been a French-Canadian child, though when we saw the costumes and sets my mother talked about how absurd it looked. The theme song has since been half-stuck in my head, except I can't really remember how it goes...back in the hotel room I watched pieces of the Habs-Maple Leafs game, enjoying the high action at the end as much as I could when I really was too tired; I went the sleep immediately after.
Will continue my account tomorrow, hopefully.
