Tag Archives: rue st Denis

Monday 17th August 2015 – LAST NIGHT …

… could have been a night just as good as the previous one, and that’s exactly how it was heading. And then it all came to a sudden halt at 01:30, for Bane of Britain here had forgotten to switch off his European alarms.

If I had had a quid for every time that I’ve done that while I’ve been in North America I would be dictating this to half a dozen secretaries draped all over my knee and thereabouts. You would think that I would have learnt by now, wouldn’t you?

To make matters worse, I was away with the fairies somewhere at the time, and by the time I’d composed myself afterwards, it had all gone.

I was still up before the alarm at 06:00 (I’m doing my best to keep to some kind of semblance of time) and after breakfast cracked on with a few things.

And here I am, on the bus heading towards the railway station. First stop is Namur and the Walmart, which comes up with a cap at $5:00, a big bottle of water, and 150 sheets of A4 paper at just $0:10 in the back to school bargain sale and you can’t say fairer than that. A useful thing to have around seeing as how I’ve forgotten my graph paper.

Back on the metro to Berri-UQAM and the long long walk to the coach station to buy my ticket for Florenceville tomorrow. $114 – arrgghh – and that’s with the senior citizens discount too. Heaven alone knows what it might have been at full price. But with 10.5 hours on the bus (changing at Riviere du Loup) it’s not really all that bad, I suppose. But 22:30 I leave, 09:00 on Wednesday I arrive – I am not looking forward to this, but since they ripped up all of the trains there isn’t much of an alternative.

So I had a really good chat to Rachel on the phone, giving her enough advance warning so that she can flee the country, and then a wander through all of the galleries – or, at least, as many as I could find. It’s cooler in there than outside.

That cheap technology shop near the railway station had nothing of interest although I did start to notice in one or two places that Government energy stickers are slowly starting to appear in the shops. A sign of the times, hey?

new ford transit montreal quebec canadaAnd look at this! This is not a new Ford Transit but a replacement for the Ford F-series panel vans. And if you are wondering why many of the very useful white-van-man features of the previous Ford Transit have mysteriously (and surprisingly) disappeared from the new version on sale in Europe, then look no further.

They don’t have white-van-man in North America. His equivalent over here drives a 4×4 pick-up and that’s where you will find the interesting bits and pieces. White vans here are just used for furniture removals and parcel deliveries and a little bit of urban maintenance and so are a completely different breed.

So if any North American has had a hand in designing the new Transit, that will explain why, as far as facilities go, the new Transit is essentially a backward step. I’m convinced that Transits of the model such as Caliburn
 actually had a white-van-man on the design committee and it’s sad that Ford Europe doesn’t have the muscle to have pushed forward their observations to whoever was on this global design panel.

Abandoning another good rant for now I head off down the rue St Catherine where there’s a big new shopping mall type of place on the right as you go down the hill. All clean and bright, with a Subway sandwich place down in the basement. Ahh! Lunch!

fountain food court shopping mall rue st catherine montreal quebec canadaAnd for the first time ever, since I’ve been visiting a Subway, when I asked the Serving Wench for my 12-inch with just crudites (yes, if it’s crudities you want, then I’m your man) she did not ask me if I wanted cheese with it. I made a comment about it, to which the aforementioned replied "well, I’ve been working here for quite a few years now so I’m used to it"

They had a fountain here too so I took a photo of it seeing as how pretty it looked, and as soon as I had started to leave, it erupted, so I came back for another photo.

giant chess board rue st catherine montreal quebec canadaBack outside and down the street they had the giant chessboards out again and so I watched 3 or 4 games in the company of a woman, and we were exchanging comments about the games. One game was ultra-defensive and everyone lost interest after a while, including the two players who abandoned the match.

Another one was however quite exciting. It was a younger girl against an older man and was played in what you might call something of an aggressive spirit, swinging like a pendulum from one way to the next as they traded piece for piece. She made a couple of moves that had mystified me, but then suddenly she caught his king in a trap against her pawns. By this time he just had his king and a knight and she a bishop (or fou as they are called in French, so I discovered) and a king, and they both had four pawns each.

What helped my concentration was that there was an ice-cream parlour right next door, and I can thoroughly recommend the coconut milk sorbet.

Further down the road in St Catherine Est I came across a bookshop selling second-hand books and CDs and so that’s me spent up yet again for another year.

chapel of notre dame de lourdes rue st catherine montreal quebec canadaThe Chapel of Notre dame de Lourdes was erected to the glory of Mary so we are told (but just WHAT is the Glory of Mary?) thanks to the generposity of the local people.

However that generosity does not extend to giving out help to those who ask for it. There’s a big sign outside saying that it is forbidden to solicit alms either outside or inside the Chapel.

Just what kind of Christians are these?

three wheeled batmobile rue st catherine montreal quebec canadaMy reverie was interrupted by the rather bizarre noise of something different coming down the street. Luckily I had my camera to hand to photograph it.

I couldn’t get close enough to this to see what it was, which was a shame, but it looked very much like a three-wheeled batmobile to me. It bore something of a close resemblance to The White Swan that we saw on the Saguenay Ferry in 2011.

3725 rue st denis montreal quebec canadaI had my falafel for tea as well. I walked right up the bank to the rue Sherbrooke and then rue St Denis to where I had had my tea one night in 2014.

Just up the road from here is this magnificent building, the address of which is 3725 rue St Denis, and one day I’ll find out much more about it. It has to be something quite important or have an interesting history.

The metro from Sherbrooke brings me all the way round to the metro DuCollege, and then back on the bus. And I ended up being guide to a couple of French tourists from Picardy on the same bus who were trying to find their hotel.

I had a shower, for by this time I was steaming and then to bed for my last night for a while in Montreal.

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Saturday 30th August 2014 ! WELL, I’LL BE …!

Yes, in some surprising development, I’ve had some customer service in Montreal that could rival the best that you have ever had in Brussels. It was totally astonishing.

To set the scene, I have a Canadian mobile phone with a Canadian number, supplied by Bell Telephones as they have the best coverage in the wilderness. And, as an aside, after this experience, I’ll be calling them “Hell Telephones” for ever onwards because the customer service is the closest thing to Hell that you would ever wish to find.

To cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … my credit card expired and so I had a new one, but I forgot to upgrade the card with Bell Telephones and so my service was disconnected.

No complaints with that – it’s my own fault although one would have thought that with 50 years of expiry dates of credit cards, companies would have caught up with this kind of thing – so off to find a Bell Telephone shop.

First place that I found was one of these stands in a shopping centre. The staff there were totally uninterested but they did give me a number to call customer service. THis was when I discovered that the battery in the ‘phone was flat.

Next stall that I found, the guy there was extremely helpful and if things had carried on like this, I wouldn’t be seething out of my back teeth. Anyway, he actually put me in touch with a human at Customer Service (we did have a 20-minute queue) who told me to buy a new SIM card, put it in my phone, and call up the connection service (she gave me the number) an I’ll be back on the air.

Simple?

Not if you are anything like me it isn’t.

With the battery in my Bell phone being flat I put the SIM card in my European open-access phone and tried to call the number but several attempts gave me the “not registered on network” error message and nothing that I can do would fix it. Consequently I found another Bell telephone place – the shop in rue St Catherine to be precise.

Some girl in there who clezrly knew even less than I did checked my European phone with her data scanner. “It’s not a Bell telephone” she said, as if she were telling me something. She took me to the door, pointed across the road to the shopping mall and told me where the Rogers and the Fido stalls were. “You need to go and ask them”.
“How will they help me activate a Bell Telephone SIM card?”
“I don’t know” she replied.

Yes, you can’t make up a story like that.

But I will tell you something for nothing – and that is that we would never have reached this particular point had Samsung, the mobile phone maker, had its act together. I have three Samsung phones all told, and they all have different batteries and they all have different charging inputs. What is this all about? A standard-sized battery and a standard charging input would have saved all of this nonsense. Swapping a battery from one phone to another is the work of seconds. This thing about different chargers and different batteries (and we are talking millimetres difference in size, not anything substantial) is total rubbish.

As for the rest of the day, I’ve been on the prowl again. I found Montreal’s biggest second-hand car sales places, to find that it closes at weekends and what’s that all about too?

canadian pacific railway station montreal windsor canadaI did find the old headquarters of the Canadian Pacific Railway, at the abandoned Windsor Station. Canadian Pacific was another in the long line of companies that moved away from Montreal following the francophonie policies of the Quebec Provincial Government. “Cutting your nose off to spite your face” is what springs to my mind – it accounts for much of the decline in fortunes of the Province but the attitude is that the Quebeckers would rather be a very big fish in a very small pool rather than an influential subsiduary player on a multi-national stage.

The station (said he, leaving the politics aside) is a beautiful building and was only narrowly saved from demolition when Canadian Pacific pulled out. It’s now a listed building.

old packhard montreal canadaThis is an interesting car that I encountered on my perambulations. It’s a 1939 Packhard doing a wedding at the Christ Church Cathedral in Saint Catherine Street.

The colour of the car is white-over-rust, which you can clearly see even from this distance. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a “professional” car looking as bad as this one, with the rust bubbling up on the bottom of the doors and on the rear wings underneath the paint.

The paint job isn’t bad at all even if the masking off was poor, but there’s more to a restoration project than just three coats of paint.

latin quarter rue st denis montreal canadaI also came across the Latin quarter of Montreal in the rue St Denis. What took me completely by surprise was that all of the signs here were in French. I wasn’t expecting that in the Latin quarter. “Puer amat mensam” say I.

But it isn’t half chic and trendy here. I couldn’t do with any more than five minutes of this kind of place.

At the Tourist Information desk I found not only the information that I wanted about the Richelieu Valley but also a booklet on the route to James Bay – another one of my projects. But there was nothing about the Lower North Shore. Not a surprise, seeing as how the communities down there are English, not French-speaking.

The “Forgotten Coast” indeed.

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