Some cities are synonymous with a certain kind of food. Philadelphia has their cheese steaks and St. Louis has their ribs, for example. Most of the time, these foods represent the traditional cooking traditions of the people who originally settled or immigrated into the area. Sometimes they are instead the product of recent happy accidents [...]
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Apartment Hunting Ads Lingo
Classified ads have always seemed more than a little cryptic for the uninitiated. Whether it’s SWF seeks BWMMFW or “Man with van and plan”, you almost need to have a decoder ring to make sense of the information that most people try to cram into the 25 words or less they get from the newspaper. [...]
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Montreal Major Newspapers
Montreal is a city of three million people, and with that large of a population there are many different view points screaming to be heard in the local media. There is also the added wrinkle of having two main languages spoken in the city, each with its own at times fragmented perspective. What this means [...]
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Montreal Underground City
For all of its charm, it is an inescapable fact that Montreal is located in a cold winter climate. It wouldn’t be a stretch to label the winters that hit the region as harsh, nasty and unpredictable. The misery of the cold weather is compounded by the mixture of slush, salt and ice that affects [...]
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The French English Dynamic
Montreal is the largest city in the province of Quebec, which is unique in Canada as over 80% of its population speaks French as a first language. The French culture in Quebec can trace its roots directly back to France’s first attempts to colonize the New World. While control of the region went back and [...]
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Montreal Transportation Options
The bane of any urban commuter is traffic. No matter how many new roads are built, traffic always seems to swell to meet the new capacity. Now imagine that you are living on an island, and there is no space or political will to build ANY new roads whatsoever. This is the situation faced by [...]
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Jean-Talon And Atwater Markets
There are many advantages to living in a large city, but there are also some sacrifices to be made. This is especially apparent to anyone who enjoys cooking for themselves. Since it is rare to be able to grow your own produce in the downtown core of any metropolis, those devoted to the gastronomical arts [...]
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Old Port Neighborhood
Montreal can trace its roots back more than 350 years to the first settlers who arrived here from France and established a port and trading post on this island in the St. Lawrence river. The port of Montreal had traditionally been one of the most important in North America, first serving the fur trade, then [...]
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Tallest Buildings
The city of Montreal cuts an impressive skyline when entering from the southeast, particularly while crossing the Champlain bridge. The sight of downtown rising up from the flat plain of the St. Lawrence Seaway, framed from behind by Mount Royal is truly beautiful, especially at night. There are several differences between Montreal’s skyline and that [...]
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Montreal’s Poutine Dish
Poutine. The very word can evoke sighs of imagined gastronomic delight or gags of disgust. Whichever side of the fence you sit on, there can be no denying that poutine, perhaps the only truly original dish to have emerged from the kitchens of Quebec is a polarizing culinary force. While some are entranced by its [...]
