Day 10

We left the ship at 9am and grabbed a cab to the hotel ($9Cad).  After a bit we saw a few people from the ship arrive at the same hotel but they had opted for the cruise line transfer to the hotel.  The cruise line charged $69 per person where the taxi cost $9 for two of us.  What crooks.  We dropped the luggage at the hotel and set out.  We wanted to take a city tour first to get an overview of the city. The concierge at the hotel told us that the day tours left by the archeological museum.  After a 10 minute walk there we figured he was wrong.  After another 15 minute walk to the nearest tourist information office, a girl there told us there were no bus city tours any more because the tourist season was over.  Fortunately, we heard a different guide explaining city tours to another couple.  We got the straight info from him. The city tours left from the tourist information office 1.5 miles away.  We took a taxi and got there 10:45 for the 11am tour.  The 3.5 hour tour was great.  We saw many parts of the city we would not have seen, including the Olympic village, the “mountain” (Mount Royal) that gave Montreal its name, and some areas that used to be working class and poor, but are now gentrified and have interesting post-industrial architecture. After the tour we stopped for lunch and were able to check two local specialties off the list at the same time – smoked meats and Montreal bagels, which are different from New York bagels because they dip them in honey water before baking. We stopped briefly at out hotel (St. James) in Vieux Montreal, and then went out again to continue exploring. We walked till we dropped… about 8 miles. At some point we decided to explore the subterranean city, which is actually marked on the city map. They have 30 some miles of underground passages so they can keep warm in the winter. They are not very clearly marked so we had some difficulty finding our way around the underground, but eventually we did, and we discovered that we had an entrance/exit about half a block from our hotel. Very lucky because it was getting cold.