I find Brossard much more family friendly than Montreal. It’s easier to park and there are just as many food choices.
This is my favorite restaurant in Brossard. The shopping center it is in is scary but it is homey and cute inside this cafe. We’ve eaten here through various name changes, ongoing maintenance issues, and even a fire alarm going off. 😅
I feel like once you’ve tried the lamb shank you’ll understand because the food is truly incredible.
Another trip to our beloved Montreal. We’ve been living in Vermont for less than two years and we’ve been eight times. Each time, our heart swells a little more by how much we love Montreal.
Casey and I call our last trip our best trip, because we did it all right. We brought guests with us – two people who have never been to Canada. We parked in the right place. We mastered the subway by now and were able to seamlessly ride it to our destination.
My new favorite place is Marche Jean Talon, which my sister found on a map and turned out to a dream. Like a European market, it’s packed, bustling, so much going on, so much yummy food from around the world. It’s probably one of my favorite places.
We also went to the infamous spa on the boat of Vieux-Montréal, called Bota-Bota. It was amazing and makes me want to plan more trips to Scandinavian spas in Quebec city, which I’ve heard are more fun and less packed. I hadn’t thought that the spa and market could be topped, but we had dinner at Schwartz.
It was such a fun and unforgettable day. I’m glad I got to share it with my family.
This trip was our first time where we spent the night! And our first time using public transport. By now, we knew our way around and could lead others around the city. This time, we actually went into Notre Dame, instead of just hanging around outside.
The expected highlight of the trip was going to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts again which we’ve already spent an entire day at but also the Contemporary Art Museum of Montreal, or Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
First of all, it’s impossible to find. It’s underground, one tiny door in a weird closed/dead shopping breezeway kind of thing, but we found it. The entire museum was just three rooms, some installation art and short films. We got lost there for a while.
I really love planning Casey’s birthday. For one birthday while we were living in San Jose, we drove up to San Francisco and enjoyed a day of eating mushroom risotto at a fancy French restaurant. Foraging and identifying mushrooms was our favorite pastime at that point.
For this year’s birthday, I wanted to treat him to Korean food, his favorite cuisine. I poked around a few Asian Montreal Facebook groups to find out which were the best Korean bbq places in town and we drove up to have an amazing lunch. It rained a lot so we had to dash there and dash to a chocolate cafe for dessert immediately after, ha. We got so wet and so cold we bought all new outfits at Uniqlo, one of our favorite stores anyway.
We read books at two different bookshops, acted as bystanders during a protest, and found a bulgogi spot off of St. Catherine’s for dinner. The street is filled with shops and great restaurants.
Montreal is our favorite place to visit since we’ve moved to Vermont and we’ve visited three times in the span of a few months. It’s cosmopolitan feel gives us the comforts of all the foods we missed about California. It feels European in the way people behave and dress. We love spending weekends here.
We discovered a funky new neighborhood in Montreal. Mile End is where many Orthodox Jews live, so there are many bagel shops. There’s also a small little Lululemon store here. My cousin Molly and her husband visit Lululemon in every city they visit. We also stopped into what I thought would be an Asian snack shop with it’s pink walls and cartoon character murals – it ended up being “the only pink museum in the world” run by an eccentric dude.
Mile End is next to Mount Royal Parc, a random giant hill in the middle of the city. We hiked through it to get to Old Montreal, where we visited the Notre Dame square. I discovered an Arab diasporic bookshop. We happened to catch a basketball tournament with women in 3×3 teams from all over the world. We rooted for Latvia in a game against Spain. We bought baos The excitement of being in a big city was overpowering. We walked miles and went back to the hand-pulled noodle joint for dinner that Casey and I discovered on the trip prior.
Our first foray up to Montreal was with two of our friends from California. Surprise – the border crossing was extremely easy and it took only 1.5 hours to make it to downtown.
We walked around the Montreal Museum of Art and then the Botanical Gardens. Because it was our first time there, we chose easy destinations to drive to, nothing we had to navigate tricky parallel parking, obeying signs we couldn’t read because they were in French.
The Garden was huge and beautiful. We loved the themes and took so many photos. It was a rainy day, so we had to run under a Chinese pagoda or sneak into an insect exhibit to get away from the raindrops whenever it started to pour.
I bravely chose a poutine restaurant in little Portugal, also known as Hochelaga. We walked there from the Botanical Gardens and had our very first French Canadian meal!