Montreal!

cuisine szechuan is probably the reason montreal is the 2nd happiest place in the world

I love how all the people on this forum evidently live in Mile End and around Jean-Talon. Those are the sort of anglophones who would say the food is good.

instead of the smart anglophones who know to live where the food is bad

i mean dude... obv u r not happy where u r... but many ppl clearly are. so maybe u should either move to a neighbourhood that suits u better, move to a city that suits u better, or realize that it is perhaps not the city that is the problem here!

alternate suggestion: stop eating at cheapass pan-asian fast food restaurants

that applies to pretty much every city

hrm, i live in st henri and used to live in ndg. ndg had some fantastic restaurants and even st henri has some good food. i don't eat out very often, though, and i've never lived anywhere else so don't take my word for it. took a gander at slocki's blog after a link to a blog post about mangoes and iirc dude is a local restaurant critic so maybe he can shut you up.

oh, haha xps

I don't think anyone has said that bad food doesn't exist here. Looking at you, St-Hubert. But the good food is pretty great, and a lot less expensive than other cities in Canada.

bad food exists everywhere, with the possible exceptions of france and italy

fields of salmon i reserve judgment on whether you are a cool guy or not bcuz i don't exactly get what the fuck you're talking about but your posts itt are condescending in a really weird and hard-to-parse way. by all means enlighten us to your next level food criticism, but idg why you are accusing us of living in neighborhoods n stuff

there is also a lot of decent food in verdun! and parc ex! and way out east! sure it's not new york or LA but we also don't have anywhere near that population. anyway, i don't eat out a lot and prefer to make my own lunch *if only b/c like sandwiches and salads are crazy overpriced for what they are, even if 'gourmet' and i can make exactly what i want to eat), but when i do go out i feel like i have an abundance of good things to choose from.

i have yet to go to kazu! o_O

s1ocki i still need ot get yr professional opinion re: where to see what pasta's supposed to taste like within our fair city. although i kind of feel bad asknig you for advice because its liek i should be paying you.

don't feel bad

just pay me

(jk)

(or am I)

A close friend of mine is leaving for TO at the end of the week, most likely for good, and I'm looking to arrange a day/evening of MTL-exclusive activity. Suggestions?

what sort of activity? what do u like to do?

Well I already figured a walk around the mountain is sort of a no-brainer. The evening is mostly taken up w/ the roller derby final. In between, I guess a choice meal (not too pricey) and...something else...would suffice. Something else outdoorsy would be good, preferably something accessible by public transit. (I've lived here a fairly long time but basically never leave the house, is the issue.)

you could go to ile-ste-helene and pretend it was still osheaga :D

botanical gardens?

if u waited till after roller derby to eat u could take advantage of the sublime lemeac after-10 special

i do NOT miss apartment hunting, fuck a craigslist.

Spielberg to destroy Montreal, perhaps sparing Schwartz's and St.-Viateur.

i feel like i need to sneak onto the set of this and hijack the production somehow

as if apocalypse wasn't already hard enough to spell

i think i will spend next summer farming

taking a trip to the Hockey Mecca that is MTL in a week. i've been browsing relevant montreal threads, and wondering if anyone has any more ideas. i've got a hockey game one night, the pretty reckless @ Metropolis, will do the normal tourist things like sightseeing and whatnot....dieu du ciel and bagels are on my radar; i don't do meat to Schwartz'/poutine is out. all recommendations considered. and merci

what else do u like to do / eat

uh, i'm open to regions - SE Asian, Japanese, vegetarian fare, Italian....pretty much open to anything that's veg. based. been looking at the menu of a place called Kitchenette that looks kinda innerestin' -

what is it like finding an apartment in Montreal. try to incorporate the word 'soothing' into your response.

a soothing experience

you can't cherry-pick 'em like you used to, but i think it is still faaaaarrrr easier than apt-hunting in toronto/new york/etc.

^^^

yeah. solo places are more expensive then they used to be and it requires a bit of hunting but you'll find something affordable and livable and neighbourhoody if you put a bit of time in.

just found the greatest place to live imaginable for next year after like 1h of craigslist searching & 1 phone call, very soothing. although it's in st-henri not plateau/mile-end

i think the best place for cheap rent + beautiful architecture combo is like rosemont, little italy

Montreal real estate may be, of its many advantages over Toronto, the biggest. Like, it doesn't even compare.

st henri is p. good. i was out there for the first year or two of undergrad. up at the northern edge of mile end these days. parc/bernard-ish

sidenote: why do we never do montreal FAPs?

we're at least as cool as Chicago ILX0rs

st henri is cool but kinda isolating in the winter imho

oh, definitely. i have learned to embrace the isolation, although i'm also studying math so it helps not being surrounded by divertissements

get a calculator and enjoy the divertissements!

ha, i thought 'i have learned to embrace the isolation' was re: why no faps. i am not there yet but pro-fap.

ty for your advice. i have to move in a bit of a hurry so i'm hoping some short-term share or convenient one phonecall craigslist thing will crop up. i'm less spooked than i was.

i think we just have dance parties instead of faps here
and when ilxors come to town, sometimes we eat iconic montreal foods together

are you moving here for work or school or etc? shares and sublets are not so hard to find in the summer months (May-Aug), especially as many university students move away

i got my first apartment via a university housing message board 10 years ago - shared with one person in st-henri, stayed there 3 years, my rent was crazy cheap. then got my second apartment, in mile end, where i still live, because a friend was moving away, so i took over her lease. my rent is still pretty cheap. sometimes i think about moving to something bigger. lately though i just want to get rid of half my stuff.

maybe i will need half your stuff? am moving for school in sept, was planning to just bring like a garlic press and a tin opener & some clothes, so i'll have to get it together when i'm over there.

university housing message board sounds promising; i'm semi-alarmed at most return to school things on the horizon but the idea of living w/strangers is pretty high up there. st-henri's nice, or?

anyways, i'm here one more day and found some nice eats, fyi, S1ocki. Aux Vivres is a pretty brilliant vegetarian resto. Smoked coconut in place of pig for a BLT?! what a genius concept and execution. also had wonderful banh mi and Chinese. and i freaking love the beers by dieu du ciel.
gonna hit cheap thrills today in my walking about. cool city, but there is some definite wierdness here in Quebec. crazy people that hate English speakers are way outnumbered, but i've felt their impact (literally got a hard shoulder check just walking down the street yesterday)....

weird

Is this maybe a not-from-quebec-ppl notice it more sort of thing?

As a (mostly bilingual) Anglo with family from Montreal, I haven't noticed anti-Anglo hostility in Montreal in eight years living here. Part of me thinks that the narrative about QC is so linguistically-focused in the rest of Canada/the media that people are more likely to interpret any sort of brusqueness as related to that. I dunno. But then again, the longer I live here, the more I become a crazy person who hates English speakers - specifically here-for-four-years college students from Toronto or New York or whatever who by the end of their stay still can't order fast food in French and obnoxiously make a scene about how *ridiculous* it is that there are people in Quebec who don't speak English. And I suspect a lot of those tensions have to do with class divisions between non-Quebecois university students and the rest of the population of the city/province.

But even then, for me, it's not really hatred for English speakers so much as frustration at people's lack of curiosity? I know too many people who parachuted in here to partake in the 'cultural scene' and never bother to explore the other half of the cultural scene, which is just as rich as the Anglo stuff that gets national attention.

Alot of the anti-Anglophone sentiment dissipated after (since revoked) laws banning English from signage/advertising and threats of Quebec secession wreaked havoc on the economy and made mainstream Quebecers realize the whole anti-English thing was a bad idea.

it's been almost 10 years since i moved to Montreal and i'm still not fully bilingual (to my own shame but my efforts have been inconsistent), and i really do embrace the cultural/language difference now. it took a while, like, i did feel alienated for a bit in the beginning, but i think that was more cultural than language, plus i was in grad school, which is just an alienated experience as a whole imo. I came from BC, knew very little about Quebec, had been to Montreal twice but only for a day each time when i was younger, but I also really wanted to get away from BC and Montreal was the only place that really appealed in a major way.

i almost always order in french except if i'm at a known anglo establishment (Schwartz's, etc)
haha i also have become that same crazy person, alex! even though i'm a big huge anglo!
eeesh, when i get back home next week, i'm going to make a point of finding a language partner again