Montreal day 1
2011/09/05
Today Gaëtan and Claudette gave me a driving and walking tour of some of the scenic parts of Montreal. We started out with a drive-by of my grandparents’ old house on Rue Sicard, which is where my mother and I lived with them for a month or two one winter.
The place has been partially renovated at the front but is much the same as then. When we were there, we stayed in the room at the back behind all the stairs. Aunt Winnie and cousins Tanya and Angela Rose lived upstairs, their place reached by the (treacherous in winter) outside front steps or a very tiny, cramped spiral staircase at the back – typical for old Montreal houses.
Next we headed over to Ile Sainte-Helene to look at the giant Buckyball left over from Expo 67:
Lovely piece of architecture, that dome. We also were going to go to the fairground called La Ronde, which occupies half the island, but the parking, admission etc fees came to about $75 so we decided to skip that.
Next stop was the nearby casino, which it turns out is also a leftover Expo building. It’s a huge casino – mind, I’ve never been in one before so I have nothing to compare it against. I wasn’t allowed to take pictures inside, unfortunately, but it was very nicely decorated and there must have been nearly a thousand various kinds of slot machines in there. They also had poker, blackjack, baccarat and roulette areas. I saw people laying down rows of hundred-dollar bills on some of those tables. The slot machines ranged from two cents to two dollars per play.
The casino experience set my mind working in two directions.
The first is that my aunt and I observed that most of the people playing the slots didn’t seem happy. Many of them were very old and were in there blowing their pension checks; others were spending their welfare checks. They were sitting there pressing buttons and receiving bad news, but they kept pressing the buttons all afternoon. They reminded me of lab rodents pressing a bar for food pellets, except in this case they rarely received a reward for their actions. Honestly, people. Go sit in a park. Read a book, develop some artistic skills – all cheaper and more rewarding ways to spend time.
The second thought is how nice it would be if this were an arcade. The place was full of shiny machines with video screens and bright, colorful flashing lights. I’m not kidding that there were hundreds and hundreds of them. It looked very much like an upscale arcade, yet sadly there weren’t any fun games; just machines that ate cash and hope without providing any but the very rarest excitement. Ripoff and waste of space combined. But I sure would like to build an arcade that looked like this.
We then went and drove by the third remaining Expo building, Habitat 67. It’s still in pretty good shape and fully populated with tenants. It was considered ugly when it was built, but up close it’s actually not so bad – I wouldn’t mind living in it.
Then we parked downtown and walked around Old Montreal for a while, looking at the old and well-decorated stone buildings. I had my smoked meat sandwich – not from Schwartz’s as planned, but it was still pretty good.
I think this is the McDonald’s where my mother bought me my first Chicken McNuggets (just weeks after they were introduced, as I recall) with the last change in her pocket, starting a junk food craving that lasted a good twenty years:
The highlight of the downtown trip for me was visiting Notre Dame Cathedral. It’s nice on the outside, but inside it’s one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen.
There are something like seven thousand pipes in this organ, and it has four keyboards plus a zillion other controls. I’ll have to beat that when I build my science-villain pipe organ:
Check out this kinky staircase:
On returning to Gaëtan’s van, he discovered a mechanical fault and we had to drive to the garage without power steering (I had to help steer since he’s recovering from a shoulder operation) and with failing electrics – in fact the vehicle died just as we pulled into the garage lot and stopped behind their tow truck. Very elegant; any difference in traffic or signals and we would have ended up pushing it the rest of the way or getting a tow. But on top of that, there was a priest there who asked us for directions, and he ended up handing us the keys to his car so we could drive ourselves home from the garage – he rode along to get his car back afterwards. Very generous of him.
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