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Published: March 19th 2006
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1976 Olympic Stadium
Siska, I and Fitria in front of the 1976 Summer Olympics Montreal Stadium. Montréal: Je me souviens Montréal is great for any tourist standards. The city is nice, with integration between the old European style architecture, and the modern contemporary structures around the city. This is one of the reasons why we chose Montréal as a start point for our small reunion. Flying from Chicago, Sisca and I touched down in Montréal Dorval airport around 7pm, and tried to locate Yusuf, Johnschen and Fitria that had arrived from Baltimore two hours prior our landing. This is a French territory, as I reminded myself, as we saw many European looking people walking all around us speaking French. It doesn’t feel like we are still in North America; after all, Québec is trying to liberate itself from Canada, with the failure of 49-51 votes several years back. This is the reason why there are two official languages in Canada: English and French.
Vieux-Montréal (Old Montreal) consists of many interesting older structures, and becomes the heart of Montréal tourism. Top of all is the
Le basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal (Basilica of Notre Dame - Montreal), with its famous altar of the cathedral that is significant with blue backdrop that reminds everybody the existence of heaven
La basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal,
In front of the Notre Dame Cathedral - Montreal. somewhere beyond our comprehension. I could stare at this marvelous altar for hours, contemplating, but unfortunately we had to move on.
On the other hand, Montréal has many contemporary structures, such as the Montréal Casino where we gambled. I finally had an opportunity to legally gamble, as I pulling down the slot machine handle. I probably lost 26 bucks there, but no sweat, we were just having fun. Montréal built an underground city which mostly consists of shopping stores, and we enjoyed each others company here by watching a group of Canadians talking in sign language.
We managed to check out the Montréal Biodome, a city “garden” with many exotic plants and animals, including the arctic region. Tropical forest region, with many orchids and colorful parrots was my favorite; as soon as we stepped into the humid controlled area, I felt right away like in the middle of Borneo rain forest. Montréal hosted a summer Olympic Games in 1976 and built an interesting stadium structure to host the opening ceremony.
Montréal Chinatown is an interesting place, with many stores are showing bilingual languages for their signs. The problem is that the two languages used are Chinese and
Casino
Busy playing slot machine here, lost some bucks. French, which neither makes sense to us. Finally we settled down in a buffet place, where all-you-can-eat Chinese food were served non stop in the bar. As hungry as we were, we were pilling up our plates with many food, without realizing that there would be a Can$2 fine for any unfinished food. But it was too late; we saw the sign on the wall after we were bloated up, and unfortunately we were too stingy to pay the fine, so we had to sit down for another two hours, trying to finish up the food on our plate. It was a disgusting feeling, just like having a eating contest on Chinese food.
We continued our journey to Québec City, and that is even French-ier area!
Québec City, the capital of Québec! Québec City is developed from a quite village town by the Lawrence River. A very noticeable landmark of Québec is Chateau Frontenac, now serves as a luxurious hotel in the heart of the city. I wish I could stay there during our visit in Québec, but instead, we were staying at our modest hostel.
Whale watching is an interesting event, and we had
Fairmont Le Château Frontenac
Big tall hotel in the background. Maybe next time I'll be staying in this hotel, but for now it's too expensive for this budget trip.
an opportunity to do it at the Ste. Catherine by the North Point. This is the farthest north I’ve ever been in. Even though it was in the middle of the summer, the air in the open sea was chilling, and I had to borrow Sisca’s sweater.
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