La Nuit Blanche in Montreal

Last night, Montreal played host to the third edition of "The White Night" (La Nuit Blanche) - part of the yearly "Montreal En Lumière" festival program during which a variety of nighttime cultural activities take place in the city, often at reduced prices.

Just to give you an idea of the festivities, I'll tell you how my own "white" night unfolded.

It started at nine, right after I spent half an hour looking for parking (to be fair, buses were running free all night, but given the temperature of -15C outside, I opted for the car option). We went to "The Upstairs Jazz Bar & Grill" where Chet Doxas and his quarter were performing. Great music and great atmosphere (not that I'm an expert, of course), but it was only our first stop.

With no time to waste, we moved on to the Museum of Fine Arts (mmfa.qc.ca) to meet some other SiteBits contributors and see the exposition on Catherine the 2nd (the Empress of Russia) together.

From there we made a failed attempt at visiting the Canadian Center for Architecture - the line outside was clearly unmanageable. Thus, I didn't have the opportunity to participate in the guide dog activity organized by Fundación MIRA and have nothing to report in this regard.

Undeterred, we went on to the free tea degustation at Té Camellia Sinensis, finding great atmosphere, good music, good tea and a game of chess in full swing.

Afterwards, we continued to the Cinémathéque Québécoise (cinematheque.qc.ca) where we saw some short horror & science fiction flicks which were all good and sufficiently gory, despite being overloaded with the clichés of the genre.

Short break for a quick breakfast and we're making our final dash - to a rave at "Station C". Once again, good music and good atmopshere, although not as crazy as we hoped it would be.

For us, the night ended at seven, even though I was still in shape to continue with other activities. But enough is enough, especially when we're talking about culture in the middle of the winter.

To summarize my experience for future cultural insomniacs, the "White Night" will definitely be worth your time and energy. Whether it's going to be worth your money is another question. Frankly, if I could make one suggestion to the organizers, I would recommend lowering the prices and making the coat checks free since the main idea is to encourage people to move from place to place. If it wasn't for my DJ boyfriend's press pass, I'd be 70 dollars lighter by the end of the night. Although it's hard to make extrapolations based on the short history of the event, it seems that in the first two "editions" there were more free activites, which made sense if the city is trying to expose people of all socioeconomic levels to culture.

Posted by Irazema in Montreal » Activities on 26/Feb/2006