The trip up yesterday was blissfully uneventful. We drove through some very beautiful fall scenery along the New York Thruway. Here's a blurry view from the passenger seat:
We left Philadelphia around 9 and arrived here at around 6, which included a quick stop for lunch in Albany at an Indian buffet. I didn't get a picture of it, but downtown Albany has a strikingly large and very strange sculpture that is quite conspicuous from the highway. Does anyone know what the heck this is?
It looks like a giant UFO crash-landed in the downtown area and then built a number of large white monoliths, Planet of the Apes-style. Not necessarily unpleasant-looking, just...weird.
We also stopped at one of the most attractive rest areas I've ever seen, somewhere in upstate New York:
And the hotel we're staying at is nicely appointed and well-located, although the parking is exorbitant and the lobby is under construction. Oh, and it's overrun with several thousand philosophers of science, but that's not its fault.
It is its fault, however, that it and the surrounding two blocks are under construction and that it's located at the center of a gigantic underground mall, making it absolutely impossible to exit the hotel in a normal manner or to find one's way once free of the labyrinth of shops and eateries on the two ground levels. It feels a bit like a Las Vegas casino: brightly lit, weirdly organized, and very coy about the location of the exits. So, okay, it's a city where it gets cold, so they have this enormous indoor, underground space for food and shopping. I found this a little depressing, but not excessively so. But then it got stranger.
The original plan for last night was to have dinner at a noodle place in Chinatown, which was within easy walking distance of the hotel. But when we got to the designated address, it looked like a high-rise office building. There was no sign on the street beyond the number of the building, and certainly no indication that this might possibly be the location of a restaurant. There were quite a few businesses on the tenant list outside the front door, but none of them were what we were looking for. We stepped tentatively inside to find a marble-floored lobby and a night janitor mopping the floors in front of the elevators --- in other words, something that now looked exactly like a high-rise office building and even less like a restaurant than before. A brief exchange with the janitor in a mix of English, broken French, and gesticulation informed us that there was indeed a restaurant upstairs. So we headed around the corner where he had indicated, towards a set of stairs to the mezzanine level. There were several stores there and even some restaurants, but they were all closed, probably because they catered more to a lunch crowd. The office building had turned into an indoor mall, but we were still no closer to dinner. Then we ran into a crowd of people coming down the stairs, who confirmed the janitor's directions. And sure enough, there was a rather large Chinese restaurant tucked into a corner on the upper level.
At this point, being quite hungry, we gave up on finding the noodle place that was our original destination and ended up having a generally pleasant and very large meal at this place, and then wandering back to the hotel, the only entrance to which was through the parking garage. All in all, it felt more like a sad Midwestern suburb than like the vibrant hub of culture and cuisine that it promised to be. Maybe I'm just in the wrong area? Or maybe this is a weird Montreal thing that I need to get used to?
After all that, I was quite curious to get out this morning and explore further, figuring that I could get a better handle on the city in the light of day. The plan for this morning was to seek out some of the famous Montreal wood-fired bagels for breakfast and then possibly take the metro over to the biodome --- yet another enclosed indoor space, but this one promised penguins.
But things didn't go quite as planned. Michael and I did locate a bagel place: Fairmount Bagels, which claims to be the original, so we had to check it out. It's located about 3 km from the hotel, so we thought that we would get in a good walk along the way and see some of the city. This was a good idea in theory, except that the neighborhoods we were walking through really weren't anything to shout about. They were mostly residential, with the occasional shop thrown in, but nothing particularly interesting. They did have some good examples of the local apartment architecture, though, whereby the second-floor apartments have their own entrances from the street:
We hadn't expected it to take over forty minutes to walk to the bagel shop, which it did, and we had expected there to be somewhere to sit and eat when we got there, which there wasn't. So that was a bit frustrating.
The bagels, luckily, were not. They were a bit smaller than their New York cousins, unsurprisingly, but they were made by hand in a traditional wood-fired oven, and they were fresh and delicious. Almost the entirety of the front of store was taken up by floor-to-ceiling pallets of packaged bagels, and, with the exception of the counter, the back of the store was devoted exclusively to making the bagels. Here's a slightly blurry view of the operation:
We got two with cream cheese for today's breakfast (really, lunch by this point) and a half-dozen with a tub of cream cheese for future breakfasts. But there wasn't anywhere to eat, as I said before, so unfortunately we ended up on a bench in a bus stop. Did I mention it was raining, too?
Rather than reverse our walk, we took the metro back to the hotel. I thought there was nothing quite as ugly and depressing as the Broad Street Line in Philly, but I have since been proven wrong. The metro stations in Montreal are entirely made of concrete, giving off an unfriendly vibe, which is helped along by the low-watt institutional lighting. The station that we were waiting at used to have some stone paneling on the walls, but every third panel or so was missing, revealing pipes and electrical wiring beneath. And it shouldn't be surprising at this point that when we got off at our stop, we could walk through an underground concourse directly through the mall and the food court to the hotel without ever seeing the sky. Maybe "Montreal" is French for "dystopian futuristic city of shopping malls where the human race has been forced to live underground"? Or maybe it's just that I'm feeling a bit down because of the gray weather?
At any rate, I'm in the process of formulating my plans for the rest of the day and the next few days here. What I'd like to do is rather humble, I should think: I want to find a good bookstore to purchase a copy of some of J. R. R. Tolkien's literary works (more on that later), and find then a good cafe so I can get some good writing done. I definitely want to see the biodome, although that might have to wait for tomorrow at this point because there isn't quite enough time to do it justice before Michael's session. I want to find some vegetarian poutine, since what could possibly be bad about cheese curds and gravy on French fries? That also might have to wait until tomorrow, since tonight I'll be going out with Michael and the rest of the participants from his session, at a very promising-looking French restaurant.
So for now, it seems like today and tomorrow are fairly well set. Beyond that, there are a few things in the works, though I'm not exactly sure how they will play out. I've gotten in touch with an acquantance of mine from graduate school who works at McGill, and we have some tentative plans for Saturday. And one of my collaborators is unexpectedly here, so I'm going to try to get myself onto her busy schedule for a drink. Other than that, who knows? Maybe I'll take a bus tour to get acquainted with the major sights. Maybe I'll track down some separatists and practice my French. Heck, maybe I'll even attend some talks at this conference.
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