Montréal

After a nineteen hour journey we arrived in Montreal amid a 28degree heatwave grateful to walk into an air conditioned room, hurriedly unpacked and headed out to explore the local area and find a bar for a cool beer!
Not as easy as we thought it might be but we did eventually find a nice little bar tucked away behind a micro brewery.

Our first outing was to the Botanical gardens which was conveniently situated on our doorstep and is reputed to be the third largest in the world. It has twenty themed and three cultural gardens with a large exhibition greenhouse building all set within a large park and arboretum area.

The highlights for us were the exhibition greenhouse collections and the Chinese garden.

We thoroughly enjoyed wandering around the rest of the themed and cultural areas of the park land and were captivated by the variety of birdsong captured on an app.

Day2

After a long lie in we took the Metro to an area known as the Quartier Des Spectacles to visit McCord Stewart museum which is Montreals history museum specifically to see the exhibition on the history of Canadas indigenous people.

The exhibition highlighted the ethos of the people, especially their nomadic lifestyle necessitated by the need to follow the source of food dictated by the changing seasons, this dependance on nature is summed up by the phrase “ Nomadism is the common factor of our evolution, a universal principal to which we, Indigenous people, often allude to in our stories, myths and legends” which at times becomes a conflict with other cultures who have become more settled.

Families were close knit and skills were passed from generation to generation. Sadly these skills have been eroded by the colonisation of the people. As recently as the 1960s children were being taken away from families to be “Westernised” many contracted illnesses and died, whilst others were subjected to physical and sexual abuse leaving mental scars resulting in a large number of suicides in later life. Today the people are living in settlements their nomadic lifestyle lost due to heavy deforestation and mining on their lands.

Last Day

For our final day we took a bus ride up to the summit of Parc du Mont Royal known affectionately by the locals as the mountain which was designed as a public space by the same designer of New York Central Park. We walked around the lake and through woodland to reach a viewpoint overlooking the city.