Of course, the reason I head to this stretch is Camellia Sinensis. So no, I don't mean the Mont-Royal to Sherbrooke station drag. This is the span from Sherbrooke to about Ste-Catherine. Yes, it's short. But it gets really dense in there. You can pack a lot of city into two blocks and then have pointless expanse for miles--elsewhere. Chinatown is proof, although I think it's just a Chinatown thing. Whether Chinatowns/International Districts/whatever are big or small, there's more of it per square foot than there is of the Main (well, in a different way). Maybe it's a cultural thing.
Anyways, back to UQAM area. Don't you just hate the construction around Quartier des Spectacles? The 80 bus has been derouted and it took me forever to find it this one time I was going to a cupcake place on Park. (It was closed. Apparently, it's really good, but I can never catch it at the right times. Cocoa Locale, I will get to you someday. Maybe.)
Anyways. If you go the long underground way out of the Berri Metro, you come out on the stretch I was talking about. There's some attractions around there. Cinémathèque Québecoise, for one thing; and the Cinéma Robothèque. And some normal movie theatre, right across from C. M. The profusion of movie theatres may be why some of the Festival du Films du Monde is there.
When you turn onto St-Denis from St-Catherine, there's a little green space in front of a building--part of the UQAM campus. There's a cool thing going on there right now. The design school is doing something it calls 40 ans, 40 chaises; I assume it's celebrating it's fortieth anniversary. And yes, with chairs. They have perfectly normal metal framework chairs, just without seats (I guess there are forty. I didn't count). But they've woven seats into the chairs, so that they're actually quite comfy. It's done with some kind of red seat-belt material. But it doesn't end there. The chairs are woven in to the place--into the storm drain here, the chairs connected by one woven-round strap. The trees are tied full of them. Some is woven into the upper balcony, some into the ironwork fence. And mixed in, tied in, woven in, are pretty neat, bright red chairs. You should really go check it out.
Right across, there's that neat church building that's attached to a newer bâtiment. Entering through the pretty old front-of-a-church brings you to it.
The next stretch is the nice part. It's a lot of old, colourful, beautiful houses, except filled with stores. That's past and present meshed if I've ever seen it. They remind me of the houses outside of Square St-Louis (the most awesome place ever. If you've never looked at the houses around it, do). The awnings, the terraces, the people, the narrow street, the cars. Somehow it's very, very Montreal. The kind of place you bump into someone and they'll say 'Scusez and you'll say Sorry at the same time and you'll both understand each other. It has the coffee shops and the sketchy shops and the shisha places. This is the Plateau. Je suis bien au Quartier Latin. It's pretty damn difficult to get better than this.
Le Commensal--a famous buffet-style vegetarian restaurant--is here. There are a lot of cool restaurants; this place is mostly restaurant, in fact. Part of what makes it so pretty is the color, and the levels. That's what always strikes me. These shops don't make a row, they make a commotion.
There's a little Tibetan hole-in-the-wall clothes shop north of Emery. It's really small, but it's really nice; I just got a gorgeous headband there for 8$. The prices are all reasonable, and the clothes are all gorgeous, if not all wearable. There's interesting Tibetan traditional stuff, but also bags, wallets, pretty things.
That's really all I have to say. I hope the first Montreal post is all right.
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