How to do Montreal in a day

So we spent more like two days in Montreal, but the first day we just went to the botanic gardens, which was a massive disappointment. The sculpture gardens that I thought were there turned out to be in Ottawa, and it cost $20 entry fee! But we did manage to do almost everything that is listed as things to do in Montreal, in one day. You read that right... one day...

The only cool part of the botanic gardens

Alright, let's kick things off with a quick trip on the subway into town. We were actually staying across the river from the city, so we jumped on the train to get in. We originally planned to take our bikes in to make things faster, but when we got to the station we were told we weren't allowed to today. No explanation why (the subway website said it would be allowed). So we locked them outside the train station for the day. DON'T do this unless you have a massive chain to lock them up; we came back to find them gone and the train station did not care one bit.

Just a side note, you need to be prepared to do a loooott of walking to manage this in one day. And be a fast walker who doesn't need to stop and gawk at everything. So our first stop way Mont Royal, the best place in town to get a view of the city. We were both surprised with how easy and short this walk was. There were a tonne of people doing it, so it's not a nice nature experience, but it's worth doing. It only took us about 20 minutes to go up, but it is about a 15 minute walk from the train station.

We walked down the North(ish) part so that we ended up in Plateau Mont Royal to look at the apparently really pretty neighbourhood. Neither of us really enjoyed this area of town, there are a lot of colourful terrace houses, but there's also a lot of garbage sitting on the street. Combine that with the open sewer grates that give you a whiff of the putrid underworld every now and then, and you get a less than pleasant walk. We actually found Montreal to be one of the dirtiest Canadian cities we have been in. Maybe it has to do with the amount of tourists wandering around, but the side walks even seem to be covered in a layer of grim.

While we were in this area we grazed on some famous Montreal bagels, also not really our thing. They are meant to be super amazing because they are boiled in honey and then fire baked. They were tough and heavy and came in a disappointing limited number of flavours. I expected from all the hype we would be able to get a bagel sandwich, but the only option for topping is cream cheese... Give us Big Bang Bagels in Fernie any day! We also has some pretty good ice cream, although we gave the smoked meat sandwich a miss (ummm, ew).

With our bellies still a little unsatisfied from the lack of bagel sandwich, we got on the subway again and headed to old Montreal. This area was brimming with tourists because it is the architecturally old part of the city. It seems tourist and horse and carriage rides go hand in hand in this part of Canada, so the streets smelled like horse pee half the time and the other half like those lovely open sewer grates. Some people find cobbled streets lovely, I find them annoying. We ended up getting some Poutine from a fast food shop and an over priced churro.
While I'm on the topic of poutine, I'll just point out it's not very good. It's pretty much the same as people raving about a store bought meat pie in Australia. It is literally Gravox on chips with some chewy, bland chunks of "cheese" on top. I no longer trust anyone's judgement about food if they rave about poutine.

After wandering around the old city for a bit, and being confused about what everyone else was doing there (there's not really even many shops there?), we headed back to the subway and caught a train back to our AirBnB.
And that was pretty much everything there was to see in Montreal, so apart from going to a couple of night time comedy shows, we just hung out in our apartment.

Top Tips

1. Be aware of the high petty theft rate in Montreal: no one warned us before we went, but after our bikes were stolen we got lost of warnings... Helpful
2. The subway will get you everywhere you want to go, don't drive in the city unless you hate your car and have 2 hours extra in your schedule. 
3. Cheap poutine tastes exactly the same as expensive poutine, like gravy on chips...
4. Quebec does not need to put signs in English, so you will need to do guesswork at time (not sure why they don't, uh guys it's kind of hurting your tourist industry).
5. Maybe spend some time in other, smaller parts of Quebec, we enjoyed them a lot more than the bigger cities...