"Montreal" a Montreal Travel Page by Dabs

I think the entire summer is a festival in Montreal, maybe to combat the long winters spent indoors or underground. Our first day we caught the tail end of the Jazz Festival, when we came back the "Just for Laughs" festival was starting and in a couple of weeks Montreal's version of the Gay Games was starting. Non stop fun!

Montreal is a great place to visit in the summer, my husband kept exclaiming just that with a long dramatic pause "Montreal is a great place to visit............ in the summer" I doubt I'll ever prove or disprove this theory, I'm much more likely to be hopping on a place to Mexico or Jamaica to escape Chicago's winter than going to spend time in some place that has equally bad or worse weather.

Montreal residents seem to really get out and enjoy the warmer months, miles and miles (I guess kilometers and kilometers would be more appropriate) of bicycle trails, beautiful parks and a very lovely Botanic Garden, the 2nd largest behind Kew Gardens in England not to mention lots of al fresco dining and people strolling the streets until the late hours.

One of the things I was most looking forward to in Montreal was the food, Montreal has around 5,000 restaurants that pretty much cover the globe. Walking down (trust me, better than walking up) St. Denis or St. Laurent or rue Rachel you'll find fancy French restaurants mixed in with all night places serving the artery clogging Quebec favorite poutine, bistros, crepes, Jewish delis and bagel shops, Portugese, Greek, Spanish, Lebanese.

I was eager to try those things that I couldn't get back home in Chicago:

poutine-french fries, covered in gravy, topped with cheese curds and anything else fattening that you can imagine

smoked meat sandwich-reminds me a lot of corned beef

and some of the French foods that I really enjoy, moule frites (mussels and french fries), crepes (banana and nutella-yum!), steak frites, fondue

Wish I had more time to try some of the other ethnic foods, boy did some of those places look good