Fun has a French accent in Montreal
Forget what you think you know about Montreal, that laid-back, European-feeling city within a day's drive of just about any urban center in the northeastern United States.
The real Montreal, as I found during a weekend visit, values tolerance between French and English, native and tourist, worker and student.
Montrealers are a cheerful lot, happy to greet American tourists, happy for any reason to go out in their short May to September summer season.
The other eight months, much of Montreal lives underground, in the city's famous network of shopping malls, entertainment centers, subways, and apartment complexes.
If your stay in this city is going to be brief perhaps just a weekend a good place to start is at one of the many food markets.
One of the largest, the downtown Faubourg Market on rue Ste-Catherine is like a food court on several stories.
It offers everything from special thin Montreal bagels with local cream cheese to Mexican food.
The Atwater Market, one of the city's oldest, is alive with flowers any day of the week. Inside, bakeries fill the air with the smell of sweet pastries. But don't overlook the pâtés of veal or beef a throwback to the hardy breakfasts of Montreal's dockworkers and lumberjacks.
After filling up, the best way to get an overview of the city Canada's second largest is from the riverfront. The city has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to turn an abandoned industrial area into a green space for locals and tourists to walk.
The Lachine locks so named because early St. Lawrence explorers were looking for a waterway to China have recently been restored for pleasure boats to use (and tourists to watch). It's also the site of the popular 7-mile-long Lachine Canal bike path.
While you're on the river, get your bearings: See where Montreal's permanent attractions are and how they relate to one another by taking a ride on the Bateau Mouche.
This flat-bottomed boat is the only thing bigger than a motorized dinghy that can ply the "non-navigable" waters of the St. Lawrence. The city sprang up here because big ships could travel no farther upstream before the Lachine locks were built in the early 1800s.
Going under one bridge, the water level drops four feet as it races around the bridge pilings. The triple-engine, 1,200 horsepower boat makes almost imperceptible headway upstream.
From here, the city has a fascinating skyline, which includes Mont Réal, the mountain after which the city was named. City laws prohibit any skyscraper from being taller than the summit 764 feet above sea level.
Don't miss the famous Biosphère, Buckminster Fuller's giant geodesic dome built as the US pavilion for the World Expo in 1967. Also interesting architecturally is Habitat 67, an apartment complex of randomly overlapping blocks like Legos, built by architect Moshe Safdie for the 1967 Expo.
The skyline also includes the 350-year-old buildings of the walled city and several industrial monoliths, including a defunct grain elevator and a cold-storage warehouse being converted to condominiums. You'll also see the Montreal Tower, which looms like a giant praying mantis over the stadium in Olympic Park.
Finally, along the river, are the Formula One racetrack named for native son Gilles Villeneuve,;and iSci, Montreal's state-of-the-art science center.
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