Ville Time in Montréal

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As a family, we do a lot of state and national parks, camping, hiking…  We don’t always visit cities.  First of all, we have a penchant for the outdoor adventures.  But also, we have a large family and cities are expensive.  So from a practical sense, we just don’t always choose cities.  When we do, we try to take them to cities that are somewhat different from our own.  We also are choosey about what we do when we are there.  Of course, we are budget-conscious.  But also we want to get the biggest bang for our buck in terms of culture.  What are the things we want our kids to learn and experience being somewhere different?  Montréal was no exception.

First of all, this was our first trip as a family of six to another country.  So we definitely tried to give them a sense of the Eastern part of Canada.  Montréal is very unique.  They speak another language and culturally the lifestyle is different as well.  You really do get a cosmopolitan, European, French-y vibe in Montréal, so we definitely wanted to play that up.  We also always use public transportation if possible when we are in the cities to help our kids get a sense of that as well since our own city doesn’t have as integrated public transportation as many others. We stayed in a small cozy place in the city near a subway station so we would have quick access to public transport. We had a balcony, and the kids really enjoyed this. We also, apparently, stayed in a party area so there were lots of restaurants nearby (more on food later!).

We rode the city bus and the metro in Montréal.  This was thrilling for all of them!  Nick and Lucy have lived experience with subways in other cities, but Nick and Rami were new to this.  The sights and sounds were very exciting to them, and we taught them how to use the map and let them figure out the routes when we could. 

It didn’t look like this most of the time. Most of our trips, the bus was super crowded.

We also took a day to just enjoy the city.  Our visit to the Parc Olympique was not a whole day event.  We took just a part of the morning doing that.  So we decided to take the rest of the day to enjoy Montréal.  We went to the Marché Jean-Talon which is a famous open-air market in the city.  The sellers were so kind to our kids.  Many of them did not have great English, and so it was fun to get to practice our French.  We encouraged our kids to say bonjour and merci throughout.  They tried to read the signs and figure out words for the fruits and vegetables, among other things.  We had lunch at the market and bought some fruits and things for later in our day.

We then took the city bus to a park.  We climbed a hill and enjoyed a playground.  There were many kids around- we were not sure if it was school or camp.  But the kids enjoyed playing here for a long time. 

We had a snack in the sunshine and then headed over to a small lake where we rented a couple of boats and paddled around.  We were the only people on the lake.  We had girls in one boat and the boys in the other.  We tried to compete!  The girl boat had the easiest start but a disappointing finish.  The boys had some infighting, but ultimately gave up paddling and made Kareem do it.  😀  We had a delightful time on the water!  In the wintertime, Beaver Lake is used as an ice rink!  We went inside and saw where they rent the skates and there was a little café in there as well.

We visited Parc Jean-Drapeau on the St. Helen’s Island in the Saint Lawrence River to close our evening.  I had heard that the sunset from here is especially nice with the city in the west and the sun setting behind it.  They weren’t lying- it was spectacular!  We explored the park before the sunset.  We skipped the Biosphere, but did take some pictures around it. 

While taking pictures, we had a very nice Québecois cyclist stop to offer to help us.  He did not speak English really at all, and I was glad I was able to understand him and use my French.  He complimented me on my French which always feels good, even after all this time.  The Canadian accent is quite different, so I was pleased that I was able to communicate with him with ease.  He told us about a fireworks show off the bridge and a number of other cool things about Montréal. 

We sat by the river and just enjoyed the waves and the sunset and the togetherness.  It was a great evening in Montréal. We really lucked out with the weather. They had been calling for rain for our whole trip there. We got one downpour and we happened to be inside a museum for it. The rest of our few days there were absolutely gorgeous.

The next morning, we ascended Mont Royal, the “mountain” or hill for which Montreal is named. It was very cool because we had heard lots about it through our times in museums in Montreal and the origin of the city. We had a lovely view of the city for saying au revoir to Montreal!