Boston area to Montreal, 5ish hours by car, plus a little extra time at customs. Beautiful scenery, you can’t beat it for a long weekend. The border changes the moment you cross the border, you know why they put it where they did. Vermont mountains immediately become flat green farmland with silos scattered off in the distance, an occasional stone house, the aroma of cow manure.

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Montreal celebrates summer with festivals every weekend including a twice a week fireworks competition. Each night features a different country - the Philippines for moi (for me). Metro stop: Frontenac - follow the families. Also my weekend, the “Just for Laughs” festival. In addition to whatever comedians were performing in venues for a fee, there were blocks and blocks in the “Quartier des Spectacles” of free street entertainment, street food, wine bars and beer gardens. As if that weren’t enough, just two blocks away the “Nuits d’ Afrique” featuring 3 days of non stop music. Remember, France colonized much of Africa, 26 countries according to Google, so there are many French speaking musicians of African descent to delight us with their music. One more, a gigantic film festival “Fantasia” that I didn’t come close to participating in.

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Montreal is truly multi-cultural. How does one know weather to speak in English or French? It seems you just open your mouth in your preferred language, and somehow things work out. A huge percent of the population is bilingual.

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One thing I could never get used to is the good manners of drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. For goodness sake, I’m from Boston via New York. Waiting for the light to turn green even if no car is in sight for blocks seems just crazy. Drivers who were turning actually waited until all pedestrians passed, even if they themselves missed the green light. There were no turn arrows on the light signals.

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I went on a food tour in the trendy “Miles End” neighborhood, super fun for a gal traveling on her own. This neighborhood has Jewish history and hence the great Montreal bagel rivalry: St Viateaur vs Fairmount Bagels. The rivalry should of course be Montreal vs NY bagels. it is comparing apples to oranges, but I most definitely vote for NY

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• Montreal: smaller, slightly sweeter (dipped in water with honey before baking), crispy, denser, not meant to be sliced.

• NY: larger, crisp outer shell, chewy inside, slice and load up with lox and cream cheese.

 

The weather was hot, half a day of rain, good for a museum visit. My AirBNB was just a block from the Musee de Beaux Artes featuring a huge Dale Chihuly glass sculpture outside in sisterhood with MFA’s Chihuly in the courtyard. Still, I opted for the McCord Museum based on a recent article by my favorite travel writer, Christopher Muther from the Boston Globe. The exhibit was of famous fashion designer, Cristobal Balenciaga on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It was cool - there were Xrays of some of the dresses so the viewer could see the underlying construction and also videos that showed flat patterns folding themselves into the shape of the garment. The videos were shown next to the actual dresses. That evening when I went to dance tango with the lovely Montreal dancers, I realized that the design of the dress I was wearing took a lot of inspiration from the designs of Balenciaga.

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I left the next morning. You can still get slightly mixed up even with GPS until you realize that “oest” in French doesn’t mean “east”, but “west”. The ride home was again beautiful. I stopped at the “Down Home Kitchen” in Montpelier, the capitol of Vermont and had a fried green tomato BLT for lunch. A great end for the perfect weekend.