Here’s the 12 Monkeys theme for July: Describe your first impression of Montreal.
If you’ve never been to Montreal or have no idea about the city, or if you were born in Montreal and have no sense of a “first impression,” then describe your first impression of another city — preferably one you went to live in.
Here’s my monkey:
Montreal: Three First Impressions
(1) When I was a kid I passed through Montreal a couple of times while on train trips with my parents. My only recollection of these brief visits is the awe I felt at the cavernous inside of the train station. In particular, I remember repeatedly running up and down the escalators, to the chagrin of my mother who wanted me to behave. But what can you expect? My hometown of Sydney, Nova Scotia was utterly devoid of those hulking and rattling contraptions. Montreal was like a futuristic science exhibition, except we were allowed to touch the displays.
(2) Years later, when I was about 17, my brother and I took a road trip to Ontario. He lived there at the time but had come home for the summer. One day he announced that he had something to do back in Kingston so he tossed me in the car, deputized me as co-pilot, and off we went.
The car was a Ford Pinto, 1974 I think, so it didn’t go very fast. Sydney to Kingston was about a 20-hour run and we were determined to make it without stopping to sleep. By the time we got to Quebec City we were exhausted and needed a break, so we did the most irrational thing imaginable — we drove into Old Quebec and went into a bar for a beer. It was a hip place called Le Balzac — all dark and foreign and every table had a telephone and an illuminated ball with a number.
Then we grabbed some coffee and hit the road again. We passed through Montreal at about 3:00 AM, and because we arrived on the island via the Lafontaine Tunnel I didn’t get to see the city’s skyline. We traversed the city via the Trans-Canada (aka, the “40”) and I was shocked at the amount of road traffic on the highway at that time of night. I was also baffled at the signage; signs over the service roads said “40” with an arrow pointing straight ahead — but to my naïve eye that meant Hey, the 40 is over there, on the other side of that guard rail! My impression of Montreal that night was of a city of cars and confusing road signs.
(3) When I was about 20 years old, I took a train from Sydney to Ottawa to visit my brother. There was a problem with the tracks near Trois-Rivieres so everyone had to get off the train and wait while busses were rounded up to take us to the train station in Montreal. Finally, I got to see a view of the city, as it was still daytime when the bus crossed the Jacques Cartier Bridge. It wove through downtown and deposited me at Place Bonaventure, where I walked through to the train station.
I had missed my connecting train to Ottawa and had to wait several hours for the next one. I decided to use the time to look around the city a bit. I was still very much a small town boy, and was well aware of it. Although I had a burning desire to explore, I was intimidated by the huge scale of everything, the lack of English being spoken, and the awareness of my own naïveté. Regardless, I exited the station and walked up the hill towards the biggest thing I could see — Place Ville Marie.
By the time I got there — some two blocks away — I was already worried that I would not be able to find my way back. Clearly, my current uncanny sense of direction had not yet matured. As such, all I did was walk around the outside of Place Ville Marie a few times, making a vow to come back some day to really explore this place. Then I made my way back to the train station and hunted unsuccessfully for the escalators that had provided so much amusement some ten years previous. That day, my impression of Montreal was of a place that I needed to come back to, to explore.