Day 8 – Arriving in Montreal
September 23, 2008
We left our nice motel in Quebec today to head for Montreal. After a relatively short and especially boring drive there we arrived in the city, where the tourist information center is conveniently (not!) located right in the middle of this big city. This means driving through the whole of this loud and chaotic city only to arrive right in the middle, with one-way-streets in every direction, heaps of pedestrians and parking rates at about $6/hour…
So, we booked a hotel at the tourist information center which is located quite central (so at least we save the public-transportation). We have to pay $10/day just to have our car parked nearby on the hotel’s own parking lot and right across the street is a very fine selection of strip joints… We went down Sainte Catherine (the street our hotel is on), the main shopping street, and it was just awful. Not only are there only clothing-stores which repeat every 4 blocks, but the sidewalks are filthy, the streets are loud and lined with homeless people. To say the least, it was quite disappointing and I can only hope that the old part of town (and for our second full day here the Olympic Park) are better than what we saw today. Oh, I didn’t take any photos, partly because I was afraid my camera would get stolen, but also because there simply is nothing to photograph.
