Montréal Moments

When I first moved to Montréal, it was solely to attend school. I had every intention of knowing the insides of the libraries by heart, but none of the tourist destinations. After growing up outside New York City, I entered Canada with the knowledge that most of those locations never live up to the hype. So for my first year, I studied. I went to classes and made new friends, but I never really left the university "bubble".
Finally, in my second year, several friends from New York came to visit. They asked me to show them around the city, but I had so little to show them. The campus, the student bar, my experience didn't span much further. So we decided to 'play tourist' for the week. We looked up the prime tourist traps of Montréal, and headed straight for the Old Port. Right on the water, the Old Port looks and feels like a piece of Europe. Streets are paved with cobblestones, and the buildings dripping with intricate design. Every other shop is a souvenir shop, yet somehow it still feels like an authentic piece of history.
We finally wandered into a shop without the gaudy t-shirts in the windows. And of course, being that this is Canada, it was a maple syrup shop. Bottles upon bottles of every shade of syrup lined the shelves. There were paper shot glasses on every counter, waiting for you to test every flavor. And the smell.....I decided then and there that there had never been and would never be a better smell than a maple syrup shop.
Every door we stopped in was another discovery that I had previously thought unworthy. Ever since that week, I make sure to wander the streets of Montréal that I've never seen before. I chat with strangers, and find new places. Because, after all, there is nothing like the feeling of discovering new places.