Lesson learned. Need more days in Disney!!! Aug 2010 (NEW 1/20-COMPLETE)

[YukiPhnx]

That's an incredible hotel for that price. I was floored when you told me the price. They even GIVE you a computer to use in the room?!?! That's insane! Wow, the next time I go to Montreal, I'm looking up this hotel! Great update Yuki! I'm excited to see what food you get. Oh, and about the subway...ANYTHING is better than Toronto subway because well, frankly Toronto just didn't get it right when they built it.

Yeah....I can't wait for them to increase the subway lines on the TTC.

I loved that it came with a computer in the room. The place was just incredible. I wasn't sure what to really expect when I saw the price, cause you never know with the pictures you see on their website. We were more than satisfied.

Your trip to Montreal looks like so much fun so far! The hotel looks great! Definitely a budget-price for much much more! The rooms looks fantastic and I can't believe you get a computer too! Sooo convenient. Will keep that hotel in mind for when we visit one day, and I'd really like to! Do people speak French mostly or do they welcome English as well?

Yeeeah, the hotel was such a great find! We were so happy with it.

Everyone in the service industry has to be able to speak both I think. I never had any problem with speaking English in Montreal. All the restaurants we went to had English menus as well. As long as I greet them with "Hello!", I never had much of a language problem.

The hard part is that most SIGNS are in French. So learning the most basic of French is needed to at least understand the signs around the city. They also use a 24hr clock, so that took some time getting used to.

 

[ImaDVCwannabe]

Just found your trip report and have really enjoyed reading it. Subbing so I can finish

 

[Cat0727]

Hey Yuki! I've fallen behind on your TR but I'm all caught up now.

Montreal sounds like a mini Paris. I'll definitely keep the hotel in mind if we ever go visit. Free computer, wifi and breakfast? What a steal! I can't wait for your food update.

 

[YukiPhnx]

Just found your trip report and have really enjoyed reading it. Subbing so I can finish

Hey there! Great to have you here!

Hey Yuki! I've fallen behind on your TR but I'm all caught up now.

Montreal sounds like a mini Paris. I'll definitely keep the hotel in mind if we ever go visit. Free computer, wifi and breakfast? What a steal! I can't wait for your food update.

Hey Christina!! It's ok, I've fallen behind on updating it, haha.

I think I actually did a better job on food porn for this mini TR than I did on the main one, haha. Well, of course it's cause I learned my lesson.

 

[englishrose47]

Hi Yuki!!!!!

 

[dizneeat]

That hotel sure is wonderful! Great room and the price is unbeatable! Thanks for sharing!

I really enjoy those little trips into your "real" life! So much fun to see people outside their "Disney life"!

Thank you and I cannot wait for more!

 

[jenbear123]

Hey Yuki!!! How goes your day? Wish spring would finally come! This rain is making me miserable

 

[YukiPhnx]

Hi Yuki!!!!!

Hey Rosie!!!

That hotel sure is wonderful! Great room and the price is unbeatable! Thanks for sharing!

I really enjoy those little trips into your "real" life! So much fun to see people outside their "Disney life"!

Thank you and I cannot wait for more!

Awww, thanks Karin! I love your mini real life updates too! It just makes me want to go visit you even more. One day, it'll happen!

Hey Yuki!!! How goes your day? Wish spring would finally come! This rain is making me miserable

I was planning on going to the ROM, but the rain was just....too much. I wish the rain would stop for more than one day already!

 

[YukiPhnx]

Montreal Pt.4a

At 4pm, we headed out to one of the places on my list. It was the closest place to the hotel and only took about 5 minutes to walk there.

One thing I loved about Montreal was that everything was so close together! I also loved all the one-way streets because it meant we didn't have to look both ways before jay-walking, haha, which happened a LOT.

Here are some pictures of our walk over. Before my visit, I've heard many people tell me how beautiful the city was. Jay Baruchel even called it the most beautiful city in Canada. I have to say...that I agree.

This city is GORGEOUS. Mostly because almost ALL of the old buildings in it have not been touched. Sure, there is wear and tear, but the architecture and the details are just...jaw-dropping. EVERYWHERE you walked, it was just....amazing. They also have these little cobblestone streets throughout the city that gives it a very European feel, which makes sense because the French settled here.

I wish we could've captured the city better, but our pictures will never do this city justice. I should video-tape myself going through a walking tour. That would be more appropriate. The only thing I can say is, you need to be there.

The restaurant we were looking for is in this building.

This is where it gets...complicated. It was only a little past 4pm, and the restaurant didn't open until 5:30pm... We thought that maybe it was because this place looks pretty fancy, so they're only opened for a few hours. So off we went to look for another place.

We went to another restaurant on my list, but this place was PACKED to the gills and had a long line of people waiting for seats. We were on a street that was lined with restaurants, so we decided to try our luck with them.

We saw horse carriages go through!

More horsie!

Hmmm, this place looks interesting.

When does it open?

5:30pm???

Ok...let's keep looking...

There's a dragon sculpture in there that we loved.

This is just a pretty sign.

We were starving, but we passed by about 5-6 restaurants that didn't open until 5:30pm!! What is going on?? None of my research told me that Montreal restaurants are not open the whole day. Many of them open for breakfast or lunch, close in the afternoon, then re-open in the evening.

It was no wonder that other place was so packed. They were the only place open!

I'm not sure if it's because of the season, but we found it very weird. It was cold and windy, we had walked for an hour, and we were very hungry and freezing our butt off.

Around 5pm, we got to a Crepe place on my list, but it closed at 5pm. I was very ready to give up at that point and just turn back. But we had already walked SO FAR away.

We ended up in Old Montreal and happened upon an Ice Festival they were having. I remember looking for any sort of event going on during my visit, but didn't hear about this one so I was very surprised.

You could buy little hotdogs from a stand and roast them over these pits of fire, but I wanted more than just a little hotdog.

They had an ice slide for kids to go down.

The scaffolding here totally reminded me of the way Disney covers their buildings.

Instead of freezing some more, we decided to head to the nearest subway station and figure out what to do then. On our way there, we saw this rose on the sidewalk.

I wonder if there was a reason it was placed there.

Since it was already 5:15pm by the time we got there, we decided to just head back to the first restaurant and eat there. It was already dark when we got there.

Food report continued in next post!

 

[Lifelong_Dreamer]

Nothing worse than being hungry and nothing being open! At least your quest for food allowed you to explore the city and you found that neat little festival.

 

[YukiPhnx]

Montreal Pt.4b

The restaurant we ate at was called Holder.

If you looked at their menu's cover page, you would not have thought this place was as fancy as it is. I was about to take a picture of it, but I think I forgot...

The service here was excellent. We had no language problems at all. I greeted them with a friendly "Hello!" and they asked if I'd like the English menu. All the restaurants we visited had an English menu so ordering should not be a problem at all.

They asked if we'd like to start off with wine, but we just wanted water because we were so thirsty from walking so much. They brought us out a basket of sliced bread. Andrew looked the crunchy ones but I prefered the chewy baguette.

The ambience was also very nice.

We started off with a bowl of soup that we shared. This is the cream of asparagus soup with ham and crab.

It tasted like home. I've never had this soup before but it just completely warmed me up. It tasted very...comfortable...if that makes sense. You could taste hints of crab and ham, but there were no bits. We loved it and finished every last drop.

For our main, I ordered the preserved duck leg with roasted potatoes and arugula with white trufflie oil.

I LOVED my meal. The white truffle oil was extraordinary. Normally, fresh arugula is very bitter. It had the perfect amount of oil to make it sweet and savoury. The potatoes were crisp but not crunchy. The duck leg was very tender and fell right off the bone and was perfectly seasoned. Everything tasted better with the truffle oil.

It was so good, that Andrew suggested we buy a bottle when we got home. Which I did just a few weeks ago. I made linguini with alfredo sauce and a touch of truffle oil and it was HEAVENLY.

For Andrew's main, he ordered the hangar steak with potatoe puree (mashed tators) and grilled onions.

He loved his meal too. We've never heard of this kind of steak but it was delicious. It was very tender and it had a smoky taste we've never tasted before. The mashed potatoes were pretty average.

Overall, we had a great meal at this restaurant and would definitely recommend it for those that are not afraid to try new foods. The menu was pretty limited, but everything looked REALLY good. Andrew and I have pretty open taste buds and are always trying foods we can't get at home. Their dessert menu was MASSIVE though. Took up half a page. That's so unusual to see because most restaurants I've been to usually have up to 5 desserts max, and it's usually just some sort of apple dessert, an ice cream dessert, one or two types of cakes, and one or two types of pies.

At the end of our meal, we learned our server's name. I had to share this with everyone here.

"Vous avec ete servi par: Giuseppe" equals "You have been served by: Giuseppe"!

We finished at 7pm, so we walked back to our hotel to digest our meal. We were hoping to catch the planeterium show closeby, but it starts at 7:15pm so we wouldn't have made it in time.

When we got back to our room, I made sure to look up the hours for the other restaurants on my list. Many of them were open until late at night, but none of them mentioned being closed during the afternoon. I also looked up a mall so I could buy myself some warmer clothes. I was NOT prepared.

Around 8:30pm, I had a hankering for dessert, so I found a highly reviewed dessert place on yelp.com (thanks to Su Lynn!) and headed out.

This is the little indoor path we took to get to the subway station close to our hotel.

They looked like veins...which were pretty creepy. Hey Jen, I'm carrying the bag I bought during our Dismeet!

There was an arts store right there too.

Man, look at how spacious their tunnels are!

This is one of the murals we found.

A rare photo of the two of us on this trip!

So when we got to our stop, we weren't very sure of which direction to go...so we just headed this way.

These chess sets were very cool. I haven't played chess in a few years now...

When we came out, it was very pretty with all the lights.

We got a little mis-directed though and were walking the wrong way.

Being mid-directed happened a lot during our trip when we exited the subways. All the signs were in French and they pointed to the buses that were close to the station, but it was never clear to us which direction we were facing. I even tried to use the bus routes to figure out our location but we would always end up walking a block or two to see if we were going in the right direction.

When we had finally found the right intersection, we heard a loud "creeeeaaaak!" and then a *BUMP* sound. We had (sort of) witnessed a collision! There were scraps of the car covering the intersection. A police car showed up within seconds, because we were outside one!

We found the place I was looking for, but it was super packed. I guess that's what happens when you're so highly rated on the internet. We decided to just go to a bakery nearby and have dessert there.

We came upon la brioche.Lyonnaise. It was much less crowded and had a lot more space inside the cafe.

I ordered a non-alcoholic pina colada and one of their chocolate cakes, but they didn't have either. So I ended up going for a custard-layered cake and a mango smoothie.

Here's me writing down trip notes!

The cake was very yummy. It had a light coffee flavour to it that Andrew and I loved. It was basically a napoleon without the chocolate. The mango smoothie was very fresh but it was not as large as we expected for a $4 drink. It also had too much of an orange juice flavour.

The person next to us had ordered a crepe and it smelled really good. I definitely want to come back to this place to try their other cakes and their crepes.

I wish we had places like these in Toronto. A cafe that serves baked goods, desserts, sandwiches, tea and coffee and other drinks that you can just hang out at. With such variety too! With everything made by the cafe and not bought somewhere else like a lot of cafes that sell those Dufflet cakes.

It was already 10:45pm by the time we finished eating so we just headed back to our hotel for the night.

What adventures await our heroes on Day 2???

 

[jenbear123]

Great restaurant reviews. Did you end up trying the coveted Tutti Frutti?? I'll have to see if I can dig up some of my photos of the food we got there. It's like Cora's only BETTER.

 

[YukiPhnx]

Nothing worse than being hungry and nothing being open! At least your quest for food allowed you to explore the city and you found that neat little festival.

Yeah!! It was also so cold that I couldn't feel my legs anymore.

That festival was very cute. If I weren't in a skirt, I would've gone down the slide!

All this wandering also helped us find the travel information centre, where we picked up a booklet with little maps of Montreal. It turned out to be pretty helpful.

 

[YukiPhnx]

Great restaurant reviews. Did you end up trying the coveted Tutti Frutti?? I'll have to see if I can dig up some of my photos of the food we got there. It's like Cora's only BETTER.

Ohhh, no we never did. Some places were just too far for us or we just didn't have enough time. Maybe when it's warmer and nicer to walk outside.

I love Cora's!

 

[englishrose47]

Great Update of Montreal Yuki!!! Hmmm I was also there when you purchased your purse

Andrew's steak looked yummy, so did the soup, duck scares me !!!I know I am sooo boring !!But I do eat black pudding

Montreal looks inspiring , my favorite pix was the lights at night , sooo purty!!!

 

[YukiPhnx]

Great Update of Montreal Yuki!!! Hmmm I was also there when you purchased your purse

Andrew's steak looked yummy, so did the soup, duck scares me !!!I know I am sooo boring !!But I do eat black pudding

Montreal looks inspiring , my favorite pix was the lights at night , sooo purty!!!

Yes, of course I remember you were there too!

What's black pudding? I love duck. I don't get to eat it often, but this dish was just SOOO good. I've never had preserved duck before.

Yeah, it's spectacular at night with all the lights!

 

[englishrose47]

Black pudding is also called Blood pudding !!It's on the Mighty Grill at Raglan Road and was delish !!!

 

[YukiPhnx]

Oooh, that sounds pretty good! I'll have to try it on my next trip.

 

[Pyrate_Pryncess]

(((((YUKI)))))))))

 

[YukiPhnx]

(((((YUKI)))))))))

REBECCA!!!