We spent our last day in Montreal walking around various sites, the first of which was Canada’s biggest Catholic Cathedral, St Joseph’s on the edge of Parc Mont-Royal. St Joseph’s is in quite a different part of Montreal, to where we’d been, but we enjoyed our little foray.
St Joseph’s Oratory
St Joseph’s is a huge place on a hill and is where many Canadian Catholics make a pilgrimage, even crawling up the large number of steps to get there. We noticed that two sets of steps are made of stone, but the central set is wood. Easier on the knees for the pilgrims we wondered? Sue photographed the church with the stairs but the light was in the wrong place for a nice image. It will give you the idea though of this rather immense place.
The Oratory attracts pilgrims because of Saint Brother André who was born in Montreal in 1845. Orphaned by the time he was 12 he worked in various jobs before joining the Congregation of the Holy Cross in 1867 where he took the name of Brother André. A timeline of his life is displayed at several spots around the oratory, just so you don’t forget.
Around the time he was 30 he apparently became known for cures though he insisted, to no avail, that they were due to Saint Joseph. In 1904 he built a small chapel to Saint Joseph where the crowds came to visit him. Eventually, the huge basilica we saw was built, 1924-1955. Brother André died in 1937, was beatified in 1982, and canonised in 2010.
It’s a huge place, and not beautiful in the way of those great old European churches we wrote about last year, but it was interesting to see and it added to our knowledge of churches and the culture of saints!
Old Montreal
It would have been nice to then go into Parc Mont-Royal but the weather wasn’t particularly conducive to park wandering so we walked down the hill into the nearest suburb and fortified ourselves with coffee – at a cafe-bistro-traiteur – before getting the subway back into the centre. Traiteur, that was a new word for us. We looked it up later and discovered that it can be used for catering and for takeaway food. We are not sure how you can tell which of these it is when you see it on a building though we suppose that, on a cafe sign, takeaway is more likely?
Anyhow, after some basic fortification we got the subway back down to the Old Town where we checked out what is probably Montreal’s most famous church, Notre-Dame Basilica. Built in the nineteenth century, it is a rather gorgeous church … It is decoratively coherent, if that makes sense (versus some of the very old European churches whose charm often lies in their eclecticism over time). We loved the blue ceiling with gold stars, and the stained glass windows.
The old town and old port areas date back to the 1640s with the establishment by the French of a settlement they called Ville-Marie at the confluence of the Lawrence River and another river that no longer exists.
Having checked some restaurants on the Internet, we decided, you may laugh, to try a Polish restaurant called Stash Cafe. The waiter was pretty cute, particularly to Hannah, the ambience cosy, and the food not fancy but tasty and well priced. Hannah and Len enjoyed their tripe soup, and Sue her chicken livers with potato, onion and red cabbage. We all shared a pickled herring entree too.
We didn’t have a lot of time after lunch so we walked a little more around Old Town and Old Port areas before returning to the hotel and getting a taxi out to the airport. The plane left on time, though we were amused to hear, once again, calls for people to accept a later flight and an $800 travel voucher (from a neighbouring airline because they’d overbooked). We, though, were flying Porter airline. It excelled itself by not charging for checked baggage or for snacks on the flight. We highly recommend them (if you happen to be flying in their direction.)
Running the gauntlet of airline security screening
As we reported in yesterday’s post, Cheryl and Tony very kindly gave us three little jars of maple syrup. Rather than sit down and greedily spoon down the lot, we tasted each only briefly, planning to take the rest on the airline back to Toronto. With Hannah confidently advising that each passenger could take as many containers as they desired, providing each contained no more than 100ml of liquid, she swanned off through her own security checking line, leaving her father to take his precious cargo through security alone. As he waited for his stuff to arrive on the far side of the X-ray machine, he could quite clearly see these three bottles on the picture in front of the woman operator. She zeroed in on them like a hawk, fished the tray out from the machine, pointed to the bottles and said, in her best Franglais “wot is zis”? Len timidly explained that it was maple syrup, at which point a big grin erupted on her face and she said, “Oh ‘omemade!” and waved him and the syrup through. Emboldened thus, Len is now pondering whether it might just be possible to get this very special maple syrup all the way back to Australia.
Here is today’s slideshow …
No movies today – sorry!
Love your photo of the interior of the Notre Dame (well, not THE Notre Dame, but you know what I mean 😉 )
Also, you can’t blame me for “swanning off” and leaving y’all with the maple syrup when I’d been told in no uncertain terms that I had no claims to it and shouldn’t even hope to be given a measly one of the three jars! Hmph.
Now that’s an exaggeration Miss Hannah … It was more like you didn’t have FIRST claim to it … Though come to think of it, you night need to fight your father to get some! It is rather tasty.
Did Brother Andre only cure people who needed walking sticks?
“Chemin Queen Mary”? – please explain.
Beautiful stained glass in Notre Dame.
The maple syrup sounds interesting. Maybe you’ll have to decant it into smaller bottles and distributed them between the two of you on the return journey.
I wondered that too, mum, about the working sticks. I presume he did, but why aren’t there, say, piles of earpieces from the cured deaf people?
Chemin is French for Road isn’t it? These are houses along the road back into the little township.
We all had a taste test of the three syrups before we left Montreal. The jars each only contain about 85 ml, and Hannah says they get some homemade syrup from he housemate’s, I think, grandfather.
re ‘chemin’ I remembered afterwards that it meant road but at the time all I could think of was railway engine which I think is ‘chemin de fer’ and which did not seem very appropriate!
Yes, it does seem odd that Brother Andre seemed to cure not only people with walking sticks, but the same kind of walking sticks. And that was a good maple syrup story, though decanting it into smaller containers sounds like a sticky job, but if you need little itty bitty containers they sell them at Daiso (the Japanese 100 yen store which is the $1.50 store here)
Thanks Carolyn … You’re all cynics about poor Brother Andre! Though we did have rather similar thoughts.
Re decanting. Yes, very sticky. I don’t think we’ll be doing any as I wrote to Mum above. Hannah has had a taste. She’s just being cheeky!