Back in July, Apple opened a flagship store in Montreal of which yours truly has already had an opportunity to be a customer.
The store is ninth on the list of Apple's flagship stores world-wide (the others are in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, London, Tokyo, Osaka and New York) and the first of the kind in Canada...
Read the rest of: "Apple Opens Montreal Flagship Store"»
Montreal will soon get its own city-wide bike-rental system clearly modeled after Paris' Vélib. It will work almost exactly the same way as Vélib: you pick up your bike from any of the stations, pay at the station or simply swipe a card, use your bike and return it to any station you deem convenient.
The only (minor) problem is, the system is still to be named. So, the city is asking everyone's opinion. Here are the options: BIXI, Bycik, MontVélo, VélO2 and VillaVélo...
Read the rest of: "Montreal Bike Rental System Looking For Name"»
The Montreal Jazz Festival - 2008 has just ended
and the city is already fevereshly preparing for the 2009 edition. You might think this is an overstatement - after all, there's almost a year left! But in fact, in this short year, one of the most important concert spaces, the plaza between the Place des Arts and the Rue de Bleury will have to be completely redone. The models and renderings for the new Place des Festivals were
made public a few days ago and the city's mayor took the opportunity to
assure everybody the project remains "on schedule, on budget"...
Read the rest of: "Montreal to Get New Plaza in 2009"»
Many tourists (not to mention the residents) find the lack of direct
transport links between
Downtown and
Old Montreal inconvenient. Sure,
the métro is there, but because of the U-shaped configuration of its
lines, a traveler who wants to go from centrally located Peel Street to
no less central
Old Montreal would have to travel a few stops west (or east) on the green line, switch to the orange
line, then essentially come back to the geographic center of the city
albeit 10-15 blocks south. Annoying.
Fortunately, the city is aware of that - in fact, many recent proposals
for building a tramway line cited this very inconvenience as the major
reason for building it. Well, the tramway, if it's ever built, is still years
away, but something much more feasible is already coming, the Gazette
reported:
Old Montreal and
Downtown Montreal are to be
linked by a new bus route...
Read the rest of: "Downtown, Old Port To Be Linked By New Bus Route"»
With few exceptions, I never order anything that I can cook well myself. Thai is one cuisine that I would love to wow guests with. Its distinguishing feature is the use of coconut milk, lemon grass, peanuts and chilli peppers in harmonious constellations for consumption. But sadly, I've never actually done anything about studying it, maybe because I am a regular at Restaurant Thaïlande. Let's face it, we're a lazy species, and if others can do it better, why not go to them?
Read the rest of: "High on Thai at Restaurant Thaïlande"»
There are many restaurants in this town proving their worth by hiring the right chef, PR agency or interior designer, attracting the "in" crowd or serving the most "creative" (sometimes absurdly creative)
nouvelle cuisine dishes.
And then there are restaurants that don't need to prove anything: as long as they stay true to their mission and character, they will be deservedly popular.
L'Express at 3927 rue St-Denis belongs to the second category. In the 20-odd years that the place has existed, it slowly transformed its status from that of a "cool new thing" to that of a Montreal institution...
Read the rest of: "L'Express Way"»
I am not exactly a frequent visitor at tea salons
- a fact pretty much ensured by the very presence
of the Y chromosome in my DNA.
Yet, since about a year ago, I regularly find
myself at a place that ranks suspiciously well on
the tea connoisseurs' list of Montreal cafés and
restaurants.
And what do I order there? Tea. And cookies...
Read the rest of: "Tea and Cookies at Nocochi"»
A visiting Parisian recently made me laugh. Stretched on the grass next to the esplanade in the
Old Port,
she suddenly noticed
Habitat 67's retro-futuristic assemblage across the Lachine Canal.
"
Et ça" - she said, peering confusedly at the distant building - "
Ce sont des logements sociaux?" ("And that... that's a housing project?"). I laughed because although nothing could be further from the truth (the internationally acclaimed building houses well-to-do Montrealers - one could even say, the city's elite) many people somehow make a similar mistake. They are put off by the building's stern look, uninviting color and absurd shape, and so they wrongly assume something of the sort can only be used to house the underclass. I am here to clear up the confusion and defend the merits of Habitat 67...
Read the rest of: "The Habitat"»
Canada
