Walking Montreal

Walking Montreal
Today we set out thinking we were going to bike the city. Montreal has excellent bike paths and we were going to bike to the Insectarium and biodome then to meet up with Terri and Dave in downtown Montreal. This plan was foiled, however, when we realized that Montreal’s really cool bike system only allows one credit card per bike. Given that the kids do not have credit cards, we could only get one bike. So we ended up Kesh biking while the rest of us walked, which was good because the minute we had to give up the bike (at the last bike stand before the park), Rakesh began complaining about walking.
Still, despite the consistent droning of the need to rest from Rakesh, we made it to the insectarium in the botanical Gardens. The gardens are beautiful. You enter the gardens through big fences and there are a multitude of types of gardens: Japanese gardens, rose gardens. Etc. To the south of the gardens is Montreal’s Olympic park. Right when you enter the gardens is a lovely, small café where we had lunch on the patio that overlooks part of the gardens. We ordered chicken, asparagus and brie Panini and fig and goat cheese Panini and a Caesar salad. The paninis were wonderful and quite a change from what we expected from a café (and what we got in the museum in Ottawa).
After eating we paid our entrance fee to get into the park proper (you can’t enter the park without paying a fee). The cost was $16 adult, $8 kid which seemed rather steep and did not include the biodome which we weren’t going to have time to do given that we were unable to bike. The insectariums was incredible but very small. It’s two floors filled with live and fake bugs. The live bugs are something else: there are giant tarantulas, beetles as big as my hand and stick bugs as well. Kesh loved this and we were sad when we visited all the exhibits. But, we now had time to whine back, I mean walk back, to Terri and Dave’s hotel.
The walk to and from the botanical gardens is not pretty. Montreal’s east side is pretty much an industrial, run down housing, graffiti place. It didn’t feel unsafe; there just wasn’t much to see. Downtown seemed like a typical big city downtown. The jazz fest is on so lots of streets are cordoned off and stages are set up all over. Hotels dominate the landscape with cafes and restaurants and shopping pretty much everywhere. It did not have much character. We did not get to old Montreal which I’m told is more interesting. We took the metro back up to our neighborhood. That was easy and safe.