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A very snowy rue Souvenir, 16 Dec. 2005
Photo: Rashed Chowdhury
I have lived in Montreal since August 2004, and my
wife, Katie,
joined me here in July
2005. This is a wonderful city; one of my favourite. Its multicultural,
bilingual population, its architecture and its parks are just some of
the things that make it a very interesting place to live in. If you are
new to the city, or would just like to find out more about it, I hope
you'll find some of the links below useful.
- For
those who
like ice skating, the Atrium
at 1000, rue de la Gauchetière, offers a warm and
cosy (but
rather small) indoor skating rink with a convenient downtown location.
- The Atwater Library
is Canada's
"oldest lending library". It is different from Montréal's
public
libraries in that the vast majority of its books is in English. Located
in a picturesque 1920s building in Westmount, it is a great place for
some quiet reading, and also hosts a large semi-annual used book sale.
- Basha,
a Lebanese restaurant chain, seems to be everyone's favourite place for
tasty, inexpensive, well made and ḥalāl
Middle Eastern food, served fast in generous portions.
- The Biodôme
is a zoo with a difference -- the animals and plants are
located in areas which represent four distinct ecosystems: tropical
forest, Laurentian forest, the St. Lawrence estuary, and polar.
- Like
other
big
Canadian cities, Montréal is full of good coffee shops. But
for
tea lovers, there's something special here: an inviting and very well
decorated tea house named Camellia
Sinensis -- which is the Latin
name for the tea plant.
- Watching a movie on a big screen in
Montréal is an expensive proposition, even with a student
discount. That makes the Dollar
Cinema quite attractive. You
heard that right:
this cinema hall (or movie theatre, if you will) only charges $1 for a
movie (and that includes the taxes).
Their website has a weekly schedule, and you can sign up to receive
schedule updates by e-mail.
- PBS,
the American public television network, offers a mix of great
documentaries, British comedy, BBC news, and other treats. With a
regular TV antenna, you can get two PBS channels from Vermont in
Montréal: Vermont Public
Television and Mountain
Lake PBS.
- The best way to get around Montréal -- apart from on foot -- is,
of course, the
Métro, and, in areas which the Métro
doesn't serve, the bus. You can find schedules and route maps for both
on the STM
website.
- Used bookstores are great places to find a
book
you haven't read by your favourite author -- in a 1950s edition, and at
a really low price. Montréal has a large number of
English-language
used bookstores, and you can find a directory listing about 20 of them,
along with pictures of their storefronts, at the Used
Book Circle.
- My wife
is
vegetarian, and we both find the experience of a good restaurant that
serves only one or two vegetarian dishes rather frustrating. I'm sure
there are others out there who've been in the same situation, so here's
a list of vegetarian
restaurants in
Montréal.
Tea at
Camellia Sinensis, a
Montréal tea house, 11 Dec. 2005
Photo: Katie Chowdhury
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