Quebec City and its fun crowd left behind It’s time to move to the main city in Quebec, the world known Montreal. Not a long ride gets me into town relatively early and it’s hot, what is needed is a shower but the check in is not for a couple of hours so I just end up catching up with mail, blog and all other sorts.

Done that and checked in it’s time to start exploring, it’s a beautiful day and I’m only going to be here two nights so it’s off to the races.

I decide really early on that I like Montreal. It’s french yes but has a sort of understatedness about it, not like Quebec, where you could be forgiven for thinking you were in actual France.

The riverfront is positively fascinating and I end up indulging in another bit of unhealthy eating, chips this time, while I walk along through the crowds of week end strollers.

I spend the night in the hostel bar, making friend with a couple of beers and turning in remarkably early. Campsites being as, sometime more, expensive than hostels is going to make so that I might end up staying less in them and more in the laters. I’m not complaining, it has some advantages, including no problems with bears.

Monday morning and the weather is not great. The plan is to climb Mount Royal for the view and to ride around the Gilles Villeneuve F1 Circuit. The plan collides with the weather first, forcing a wonderful detour to the Museum of Fine Art, and then with the fact that you cannot take motorbike on the circuit, more on this later. What about That for well laid plans?

Anyway I spend a few hours filling my rather melancholic soul with art and, I have to say, it helped.

Some people do not see the point of art, more don’t see the the point of contemporary art. In my older age I love art more and more, in my older age I find some contemporary art compelling, other haunting, most of it necessary.

Of all the piece I saw today, this by Sorel Cohen is the one that shook me more. I love the juxtaposition of photography and text and in this particular instance the text and the images form an almost perfect mirror for where I find myself for small intervals of nearly every day. As the text is sometime not easy to read I have written it in the caption of each of the works in the series.

To those who say the don’t know what to do with contemporary art I say, what could you do without?

A great morning of art and the weather got a bit better so I manage to climb Mount Royal after all.

So I had read on the website I could not take the motorbike onto the Île Notre Dame, the one of the two main island in Montreal where the casino and the race circuit are located. I ride to the other one, Île Saint-Hélène and park near the biosphere, the massive tubular structure below, and walk to the other island.

Fortunately they rent bicycles and I rent one with which I take two laps of the circuit filming and taking pictures as I go along.

Not for the Cannes film festival but fun nonetheless.