Bienvenue à Montréal!

We had a pretty early start yesterday as we woke up at 5 o'clock at Donna's house. She gave us a ride to the train station and we said our goodbyes. I'm planning to write a text here where we tell more about them and our Hospitality Club experiences so far, but on this point we only have time to say that we had excellent time with the Brown's and we really felt like being a part of their family.

We arrived to Toronto's Union Station at 7 o'clock and started to walk with our backpacks to the Greyhound Bus Terminal. We were way in advance and had time to have a cup of coffee and call to Finland from a payphone. Canada seems to be a developing country in cell phone issues compared to Finland (for example, calling from Ontario to Quebec is a long-distance call and therefore costs more!) but calling with a phone card here is extremely cheap. We bought an international phone card from Chinatown for 4 dollars and it gave us airtime for 45 minutes!

We considered several options how to travel to Montreal. Trains are nice here but more expensive than in Europe, there is also a couple of good websites for ridesharing and it's pretty cheap. (In ridesharing a person who is going to some place with his own car offers seats from his car to save in costs.) We just couldn't find a ride for the day we wanted and as Greyhound had pretty good prices for students, we chose to take the bus.

Greyhound is a big bus company that serves customers in both USA and Canada. It has a wild reputation but our trip was very comfortable and even I could sleep for a couple of hours. (That was of course no problem for Michelle.) We needed to change bus in Ottawa, which was a bit of a hassle because it seemed we would miss our connection, but it was still nice to see the Canadian capital.

After Ottawa it was interesting to watch how the language started to change to French everywhere - among the passengers and in road signs. But it marked a huge difference when we actually entered the state of Québec. Like many of you might know language is a huge political issue here and it divides opinions among Canadians. Like Finland, Canada is a bilingual country and for example in Ontario it is obligatory to have French texts in road signs, documents and milk cartons. But Québec has a pretty rough line in protecting the French language, and although Montréal is very bilingual you don't see much English here in road signs and advertisements.

We arrived at the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Montréal where we met our German friend Toni. As we had a couple of hours before we met our Hospitality Club host, we decided to have a nice, long dinner somewhere. We found a nice Italian restaurant in an area that seemed to be city's rainbow district. Besides been ranked as the number one city in gay culture in the whole North America (even before San Francisco!), Montréal is also one of the culinary meccas in the continent. It seems that it also means good quality in low-budget restaurants, as we had a perfect pasta dinner for just a couple of dollars. The only bad thing was that they served beer from a plastic mug.

Finally we met our host Stéphane at a metro station after he got off work. It seems that our second Hospitality Club experience is also an excellent one, as Stéphane seems to be a very kind and helpful guy. He's a Montréal native with an Arab heritage, and in just two hours we discussed everything about our previous trips and his coming trip to his parents' homeland Syria.

After sleeping well, we're now eating breakfast in his apartment and starting to get ready for a day in Montréal with our friend Toni.