Montreal Day 1: Food Tour and Park.

Oh what a beautiful morning!  Not a cloud in the sky.  Of course the fact that I was up to see this was the down side because sunrise was around 4:30 am.  

We had all brought some breakfast food to tide us over until we could go grocery shopping.  After breakfast, Jeanne and I went to the Complexe Desjardins to the IGA to buy breakfast food.  The complex or mall is only about a block and 1/2 away.  It is huge. The IGA was near the front entrance. 

We left the apartment about 9:45 am to head up to a place where we could buy our metro pass.  It is good for 3 days and it also gets us entry into many of the things we want to do.  Right in front of La Vitrine (where we bought the MTL Passeport) we hopped on the bus #55.  This would take us out to our first activity.  The Secret Food Tour of the Mile End Neighborhood.   My pass did not work on the bus so we had to all get off.  I went in to get another pass.  We had to wait for the next bus. Luckily, we had built in some buffer time in our schedule.  This pass worked.

We met in front of this old church, the l'Eglise Saint-Enfant-Jesus du Mile-End.

Donna-Lynn Kovic was our fabulous guide.  

First stop was Guilliaume's for a french tart/pizza.  They had bacon ones for most of us with mushroom and cheese for those vegetarians.

Here is the owner of Drogheria Fine.  He makes Della Nonna tomato sauce which he sells by the jar and for people who just want a snack he sells small containers with gnocchi and tomato sauce.  The containers they get are larger than our tastings.  Yummy.  The sauce is just 5 ingredients:  tomatoes, olive oil, basil, roasted garlic and caramelized onions.  His Grandmother's recipe.

One thing we have noticed is there are a lot of places around for people to sit outside.

From Fairmont Bagels we got fresh, hot, soft, sesame bagel.  We got to watch them make the bagels as well.  That was fun.  I, unsuccessfully, tried to take a video of them throwing the finished bagels into a basket.  

Colleges are really high schools.

I am not sure why they need a nice seating area with the bank.  Maybe this is an Internet cafe.

At Poutineville's we got the local traditional poutine, pronounced pu tin'.  It is french fries with a non-meat based gravy and cheese curds.  It is like nachos with all the various toppings you can have on it.  We had a meat dish to add.

Then came dessert  We went to Juliette and Chocolat for crepes.  We had 3 types: banana, strawberry and a combination.  Of course it came with ice cream and whipped cream

Not sure if this place was an art installation or a car wash place.

Next stop was Dieu du Ciel! for our beer tasting. Everyone could choose the three they wanted to try.  I had 3 sort of fruity beers.  I like the raspberry one the best.  They also had a cheese plate of 3 different kinds of cheeses and a charcuterie board.  

Well, that ended our tour.  We left the group and went to the metro to go to the Jardin Botanique.  Donna-Lynn was going in the same direction so she went with us and helped us with our first use of the subway.  Very nice.

The Olympic park is right by the garden.

The garden.  This was one of the places on our MTL passeport.

The garden was beautiful but most of the flowers were not in bloom yet.  

We went through the Japanese garden area

By this time it was getting uncomfortably warm and we were getting hot and tired.  So we headed back to the subway to go back to the apartment.

Interesting doors - so people can go in and out at the same time.

A lot of art in the subway stations.

Once we got back to the metro station near us - the Place-des-arts, Kris and Jeanne headed back to the apartment and Sharon and I stopped for wine and cheese.  We got the cheese and crackers at the IGA and the wine at the SAQ.  

Cool fountain in the mall.  It kept changing.

We went back to the apartment for our Cinq a Sept. This is what they call happy hour around here.  It means 5 to 7, happy hour times.  We used it as a sit-down, relax time.  Kris got her power nap in.  We had an 8 pm reservation at L'Express Restaurant.  We headed off to a different metro station.

Very busy restaurant

We ordered the steak frites.  That was one of the recommended dishes.  It was a Parisian-styled bistro.  

More art. 

We changed trains so that we could get to the closer metro station.  By this time we were all ready for bed.