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After a long 7 hour bus journey we arrived in the city of Montreal. We stupidly didnt book a hostel for the first night and after phoning the only hostel we had the number for we thought we were pretty screwed. Luckily we had a friend that lived just down the road from the bus station, we managed to get in touch with her and she let us use her computer to find other hostels in the city. She also let us leave the board bag at hers so we didnt have to lug it to the hostel (Thankyou Sandrine!).
The hostel we ended up at (La Maison du Patriote) was awesome. Its basically a big house in the old part of town, with a dorm, showers and a few private rooms upstairs and a living room, kitchen, toilets and private rooms downstairs. Free internet, breakfast and laundry all for $16 a night! With the main reception at a sister hostel around the corner it had a real homey feel.
We basically spent the week wandering around the city and checking out the sights. Being as skint as we are we cooked most of our meals ourselves, making an awesome curry with an Aussie named Jordan on the last night. Most of the other people we met were Americans up for spring break, so we ended up going out most nights to various bars around the city to celebrate with them. This is about the time we realised that beer costs money, after we spent one days budget on several pitchers of beer.
Montreal is a bit of a European city in the middle of Canada, its almost like being in France apart from the different cars and currency. People will tell you that if you don't speak French you will find it difficult sometimes but we didn't have any problems, everyone seemed to speak really good English.
If you've got money to spend some of the museums are probably worth a look as well as the biodome which was built for the worlds fair, unfortunately we had to stick to free attractions. We took a walk up Mont Royal which is a massive hill with panoramic views of the city, this is definately worth the walk as you wont get to see the city like this from anywhere else.
After an awesome week of sightseeing and meeting loads of great people we decided it was time to start the mammoth journey across the country to Vancouver. We had to travel back to Toronto to catch the westbound bus, mainly because it works out cheaper to go back and transfer than to catch the bus from Montreal. We got a ticket that lets us stop off in most of the major towns for just over $200 which is a really good deal considering the size of the country!
We left Montreal on the 7:30am bus because we didn't know when the bus left from Toronto. It turned out that the bus leaves at 1am every morning so we had a 12 hour wait when we got to Toronto. Not fun! We couldn't leave the bus stations because of our boardbag so it was 12 hours of reading, sitting in the same two seats and not a lot else! That morning we started off on our 43 hour journey to Regina to see some of my (matt's) relatives.
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