Cute Little Paper Blog

Tag: Montreal

  • Marche Jean Talon

    Marche Jean Talon

    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.

  • Mile End

    Mile End

    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.

  • Montreal Botanical Garden & Museum of Fine Arts

    Montreal Botanical Garden & Museum of Fine Arts

    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!