Life in Montreal

Its always hard moving to a new city. I'd say it takes a good six months to settle in before you start feeling like your new city is home. We have officially been in Montreal for 3 months now and I guess we are still trying to find our way. We are living in a cute little sublet in St Henri, which is a one bedroom apartment. Luckily for us this area is actually our favourite area of Montreal. Unluckily for us, its only a sublet and we will have to start looking for a place for September. The idea of living with other people scares us. There are just too many horror stories of horrible housemates, or houses falling apart, or even horrible landlords. This coupled with the fact that I'm not sure how long I'll stay in Montreal for, makes househunting very hard.

But onto the positives. We found a great little cafe on the weekend, called Griffintown Cafe. It reminded us of a cafe we would get back in Melbourne, delicious food and a great atmosphere. So far we have yet to find a brunch cafe we absolutely love, but this I would say finally is our nugget of gold. I opted for the 'classic crab cake with pickled & smoked jalapeño remoulade, fried eggs, and bacon' (of course minus the bacon) and it was certainly tasty. I would not normally think of crab cakes for breakfast, but it was actually perfect and soft and the jalapeno remoulade definitely complemented it well. B went for the 'Poached eggs on home baked biscuits with hollandaise, potatoes & mixed green salad. With homemade bacon or peameal bacon' and he raved about it. Best thing about the cafe is they do live music on Thursday, Friday and Saturday which we are definitely heading back to.

Another highlight of the weekend would have to be the Festival du Monde over on Parc Jean-Drapeau. On Sunday night was the Latin American night, with Brazillian, Colombian and Mexican flavours dominating. There is something about Latin American themed anything that draws me uncontrollably and apparently everyone else in Montreal. We made the mistake of riding Bixis over to the island (which was a mission in itself, we were dripping in sweat as we took the longest possible route) only to find that the main Bixi station was not working. Frantically, we had to try to find another or we were going to go over our time limit. However, with the thousands of people there, this didn't happen. Battling through the throngs of people we finally found one on the other side of the island and had to make the long trek back to the festival. The atmosphere at the festival was electric, the smell of barbecue drifting through the airs, and everyone in high spirits dancing in front of the stages. I ended up getting some vegetarian tacos and B ended up with an arepa with pulled beef (his favourite).