On the 11th of July we
said goodbye to Rachel, our lovely host in London, and set off for Heathrow to
catch a flight to Montreal. After
an uneventful 7 hour flight on British Airways (during which, shock-horror, the
entertainment system went down for our entire row!) and a long wait to get
through immigration in Montreal, we were met by Steve Webber, who Abe and I
worked with at Beta Hunt mine in Kambalda. Steve and his wife Sue and their 9 year old son Cullen had
offered to put us up for the week that we are in Montreal – thanks heaps guys!
Our time in Montreal was great,
our hosts took us to see a whole lot of interesting sites like the downtown
shopping area, Mount Royal Park (where we got some awesome views of the city),
Old Montreal and the Old Port on the St Lawrence River, and I even managed to
fit in some shopping along Mont Royal Avenue, which has some great boutique and
factory outlet stores. We also met
some of the Webber’s friends, including Phillippe & Paole and their 3 kids
(Phillippe is from Montreal and works with Steve, Paole is from Chile and
cooked us delicious tacos one night!
I am stealing her recipe for guacamole), Bruno (who works with Steve),
and Pam & Dave (an awesome couple in their late 70’s who live up the road
from the Webber’s). Throughout the
week beer and wine flowed in abundance, and the food we had was exceptional
thanks to the cooking of Sue and Paole!
On our last night we went to an Egyptian restaurant in the Webber’s old
neighbourhood that had delicious food.
One thing we noticed is that everyone is very health conscious in
Montreal. People just generally
get out and do lots of exercise, and there is lots of healthy food around to
choose from.
During the week we also spent 2
nights in Ottawa, the capital of Canada and about a 2 hour drive away, as the
Webber’s have friends with an apartment there. Ottawa was really nice, and reminded us a little of Canberra
– quite clean with lots of parks and cycleways. We went to Parliament Hill to admire the architecture and
did a free tour inside the buildings, hired bikes and rode along the Riddeau
Canal (very pretty!), went to the Byward Market, and again had some great food
served by really friendly and helpful Canadian people! The Ottawa Bluesfest also happened to
be on while we were there. It goes
for about 10 days and has some big names play over that time. Kiss played on the first night we were
there, and according to the papers they were excellent, but we didn’t make it
to that one. We went on the 2nd
night instead and saw Busta Rhymes and LIVE. Busta Rhymes was a bit of a disappointment, after being an
hour late he played for only 25 minutes, holding up LIVE in the process (they
alternate the stages due to sound interference). LIVE were really good and played some of their classics from
the Throwing Copper days when I saw them play in Wellington in 1997. We unfortunately missed Xavier Rudd
(who played a few days earlier) and Green Day (who were due to play the day
after we left).
All in all our first experience
of Canada has been a great one, the people are so friendly! Our next stop is Calgary where we’ll
hopefully get to experience a totally different Canadian culture of cowboys,
big steaks and big cars!
