Our Trip to Canada: Street Art in Montreal and Quebec City

One of the things I like to do on trips these days is observe the street art that you find in different places. Most cities these days have realized that public art adds to the quality of life and they encourage it, which in fact does make for a better experience for both visitors and natives alike. It’s a bit of a hard sell in the US sometimes, but even here there are strides being made. Both Montreal and Quebec City had some really nice public artwork out there.

For one thing, there were a lot of murals in Montreal. Really, quite a lot.

We saw all of these just in our first day.

And all of these were in the neighborhood where we were staying.

This was the view from the window of the smaller family-run hotel we stayed in when we got back to Montreal.

And these were in the neighborhood as well.

This one towers over the city and you get a really great view of it from the Beaux Arts Museum. For those who aren’t familiar, it shows Leonard Cohen, a native son of Westmount.

I didn’t see too many murals in Quebec City, but this one was worth remembering.

In addition to murals there was art pretty much everywhere. The Ring in downtown Montreal I’ve already featured in this space, and the knotted streetlights in Quebec City as well. But there was definitely more to see in both places. Quebec City in particular seemed to focus on sculptures of varying kinds, though that might simply have been an artifact of where we were.

These two were right as you come up the hill and into the old quarter of Quebec City. They’re pretty much next to each other.

The top one below was further downtown, while the bottom one was next to the Ursuline Chapel.

We passed the statue with the rings on our way to the promenade by the Citadel and then found the next two in various places in Old Quebec City.

Montreal was not statue-free, however. This one we walked by on our first day as we headed over to the dumpling place. 

And this was on McGill’s campus, because education and art are things that go together well. 

This was sitting on the sidewalk as we headed downtown one day and it took me a while to get a good photograph of it because just as I was about to take my picture some Overentitled Influencer (tm) barged past me and spent ten minutes ordering her partner around while he snapped away. But eventually they floated off to plague some other quarter of Montreal and I got the photo I wanted.

We found these further downtown.

This one actually sat in front of a Chinese restaurant. For all I know it was an advertisement, but it seemed fun. Coffee cup for scale.

And this one was in front of the Beaux Arts Museum, I think. I like this style so I tend to notice it as I walk by.

There were definitely a few favorites that stood out. This one, for example, was also on the way to the Beaux Arts Museum. It is apparently one large collection of jokes for those who know, from the pear logo on his computer (a nod toward Apple and toward the fact that, according to a quick internet search that I just did, the French word for pear – “poire” – can also mean “a gullible person”) to the squirrel stealing his hamburger bun to the fact that if you go up and look at the computer screen it says “Steve Jobs Is Dead” on it.

This was on the mailbox just outside of our first hotel. Fuck that guy indeed.

And while this was not really meant to be art – just a warning sign for passersby – I have to admit it was one of my favorites. I fully intend to use it online whenever people feel entitled to throw rubbish into my open mind.

One must have standards, after all.

Our Trip to Canada: Exploring Montreal, Part 2

We left Quebec City fairly early by vacation standards, having tidied up the house and packed everything into the truck. It was a smooth ride back, punctuated by a stop for coffee (and in my case, chai) at a cheerful little place in Drummondville. When we got back to Montreal Geoff and Dave dropped us off at our new hotel.

Staying at the previous hotel again was not possible because a) it is right next to McGill and b) the Montreal Jazz Festival was underway, and lodgings get scarce with that combination of conditions. Instead we found a small family run hotel in what appeared to be an old house that had been converted into rooms. Or maybe it was always a hotel. Hard to say. We climbed up the steps to the entrance, thankful that we pack light, and took the room that was available rather than waiting for them to clean the one they were planning to give us since we were there a bit early. The available room turned out to be on the top floor, up two very narrow and steep flights of stairs (see above, re: thankful). It was small but perfectly functional and it had a television for World Cup viewing so we were set.

Eventually lunchtime rolled around and we decided to explore the neighborhood a bit, two activities that can always be combined in a city because that’s kind of what cities are like. We found a Lebanese restaurant a block or two away and eventually landed on a couple of menu items that they actually had in stock. This was a running theme in the Lebanese restaurants of Montreal, and I’m not sure whether this means that they’re bad at inventory or just so popular that they can’t keep up. We had a nice lunch by the window watching the good people of Montreal walk by.

A few doors away we found a paper store, one of those increasingly beleaguered shops that sells writing implements and everything connected to them, and you have to love these places. Four hundred kinds of pencils! Tiny sharpeners you could lose in an espresso cup! Pens you need a loan to purchase! Paper in every conceivable weight and color! The entire existence of such stores is a throwback to an earlier and more analogue time and there should be government programs aimed at preserving them for future generations.

From there we wandered through several different pharmacies looking for a particular brand of something, without success, stopped at the Place d’Art’s subway entrance looking for a way into the underground city that runs under Montreal, also without success, paused at a Tim Horton’s for donuts, because if you’re in Canada you are legally required to buy at least one item from a Tim Horton’s before you leave, and found a souvenir shop so I could get my keychain.

You can always spot the souvenir shops in Montreal because they are entirely festooned in hockey merch. Everywhere you look there are hats, flags, patches, magnets, mugs, and so on with the logo of the Montreal Canadiens plastered onto them. I know there is at least one other professional sports franchise in Montreal – a Canadian-league football team called the Alouettes – but they don’t seem to have made any dent in the collective conscious of the souvenir-buying public. There are more items representing the Quebec Nordiques – a hockey franchise that played in Quebec City, three hours’ drive to the north, and skipped out to Colorado in 1995 – than there are for the Alouettes. You have to wonder what the Alouettes people think about being the third franchise in a two-franchise town.

The other thing we found at the souvenir shop was a magnet in the shape of a Quebec license plate with the Nuclear Bomb of Québecois profanity printed on it. The word is “tabarnak” and apparently it means “fuck you” and not in a good way. You know how sometimes, depending on intonation and familiarity, “fuck you” can be a sign of affection? (No? Is that just a Northeast Corridor thing? Maybe?) This does not work with tabarnak. Don’t try it. You will not succeed, and you will not succeed in a very dramatic sort of way. But you can get it on a fridge magnet if you want, a situation so patently absurd that naturally we had to do that. It is stuck on our fridge even as I type, cheerfully broadcasting its message of obscenity and antisocial graces at anyone who walks by. Je me souviens indeed.

Later in our wandering we discovered a giant mall that actually did have an entrance to the underground city so we poked around for a bit. The underground city has shops and restaurants and long walkways from one subway station or other entrance to another and you can pretty much get to most of downtown Montreal without going up to the street level, which is probably handy in February. It was one of the things we wanted to see, and thus we checked it off our list.

We also found the Jazz Festival grounds and explored those for a bit before returning to the hotel to hang out for a while.

Our plan for the evening was to go back to the Jazz Festival at a time when the music was playing, and at some point Dave came by to collect us and we walked over. The Festival is spread out over a couple of city blocks that they close off so you can walk around without dodging cars, and all the concerts within that perimeter are free. There are apparently other shows around town in other venues where you need to buy tickets, but that was not on our agenda. We walked over to a fairly good-sized stage at one end of the Festival and found a clear spot in the grass to sit, and eventually Mei Semones and her band came out to play.

After the show we found Geoff by a different stage and then went in search of dinner because it was about that time. There were a bunch of booths to choose from and we took our food over to a seating area next to the main walkway. Eventually these guys wandered by:

The big stage had a concert going on when we walked by and we stood there for a while taking it in.

When they finished we went over to a smaller stage and found a picnic table where we could sit, but after a while it became clear that the guys onstage were just farting around without any particular goal in mind and that gets old quickly so we headed out back to our hotel.

The next day we met Geoff and Dave at the Café Mintar, a great little place with exactly one table big enough to seat four people. It’s way up in what is effectively a loft at the back end of the place, and it actually seats about 8-10 so eventually we had another group join us and that went well.

From there Dave walked us over to the Montreal Beax Arts Museum, completing the set of Beaux Arts Museums for this trip. It’s four floors of art arranged with the oldest collections – medieval and Renaissance – at the top. I hared off on my own to see what there was to see and quickly decided just to head up to the top and work my way down. There were some lovely things to see.

As I got closer to the present the styles changed, of course, but there were a bunch of things there that I liked.

This piece was located in one of the stairwells on the outside of the building, and the part that isn’t obvious is that it came with a soundtrack – a slow, melodic sort of ambient music that worked pretty well in the large open space.

Across the street there was a design exhibit that was interesting.

It is very strange to go to a museum and find bits of technology on exhibit that you remember purchasing new. Old, old, old.

From there we met up with Geoff on McGill’s campus and hung out there in a light rain for a while before heading back into the city to have lunch at a place called the Flame Grill and then walking back to our hotel for a siesta. We have discovered in our travels in recent years that it is good to have some downtime in the middle of the day, especially if it is a particularly hot day. The hotel was air-conditioned and the World Cup was on and thus it was a good afternoon. We watched Belgium make an astonishing comeback against Senegal and I ended up essentially liveblogging it with Fran, who came to the US as an exchange student from Belgium way back before the pandemic and lived with us for almost a year. We were both pleased that Belgium had won, though their subsequent dismantling of the US team (while appropriate, given Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s corrupt interference on behalf of the US) was disheartening from my perspective. Hey – 48 teams and all but one go home early, and all that. The Belgians went home in the round after that one.

Afterward we walked over to Geoff and Dave’s for dinner and watched the US defeat Bosnia in World Cup action. It was here that Geoff and Dave got confirmation that their house in the US had officially sold, so there was some celebration, as appropriate.

For our final full day in Montreal Geoff and Dave picked us up at the hotel and took us to Westmount, where we revisited the bagel place and found some lovely bread and pastries at a local bakery before heading over to the Atwater Market.

The Atwater Market is one of those big, mostly open-air places where vendors set up stalls to sell everything from produce to cheeses and meats to flowers. There are a bunch of stalls ringing the building, and some storefronts inside the building as well, and we had a grand time exploring and wishing we could get things back into the US. I found a place that sold the cheese Geoff likes, and both Kim and I separately found the place that sold the Florentine toothpaste that is her favorite as it comes in many interesting flavors unknown in the US. I found olives and chinotto and a very good chocolate bread and if there is a better way to spend a morning than in a market like this one I haven’t found it.

We spent the afternoon mostly hanging out with Geoff and Dave at their apartment not doing much of anything, which is a great way to spend time on a vacation. Eventually their friend Pinar came over and we headed out to Behesht, an Iranian restaurant where we met Pinar’s mother Meral for dinner. They are lovely people and were happy to hear of Lauren’s visit to their home country of Turkey last year. We will definitely have to see them again next time we’re in Quebec! The waiter came over to see if we wanted menus and Geoff said no, here’s what we want, and it turned out he was absolutely right about that. Everything on that plate was delicious and it was more than enough to feed the lot of us.

We got up way too early the next morning. Geoff and Dave picked us up and took us to the airport where we said our goodbyes, sailed through both Security and the US Customs station there without issue or delay, and waited while our flight was delayed by an hour or so. It was the All Baby, All The Time flight (including a cat in a little pink carrier) and this time my window seat actually came with a window. It was an easy trip home.

We’ll be back, Quebec!