Montreal From A to Z: An Alphabetical Guide

By Laura Roberts

Tired of the same old guidebooks telling you what to do and where to go? This alphabetical city guide looks at Montreal - and tourism - from a whole new angle, letting readers browse the city at their own pace. Learn about local favorites, tourist attractions, and cultural oddities through the eyes of a long-time resident, and enjoy unique trivia you just won't get from the other guys!

Whether you're a first-time visitor or a life-long resident, MONTREAL FROM A TO Z will surprise and delight you with plenty of facts, figures and personal experiences from author Laura Roberts. Explore the French concept of "joie de vivre" as you tour the Paris of North America, starting at Atwater Market and ending with French phrases that begin with the letter Z.

Inside you'll find plenty of pages packed with commentary on Montreal landmarks, eateries, bars, museums, bookstores, neighborhoods, cultural oddities and much more.

A must-have for the discerning traveler or seasoned flâneur.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Buttontapper Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310621987

Laura Roberts

Laura Roberts can leg-press an average-sized sumo wrestler, has nearly been drowned off the coast of Hawaii, and tells lies for a living. She is the founding editor of Black Heart Magazine, the San Diego Chapter Leader for the Nonfiction Authors Association, and publishes whatever strikes her fancy at Buttontapper Press. She currently lives in an Apocalypse-proof bunker in sunny SoCal with her artist husband and their literary kitties, and can be found on Twitter @originaloflaura. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, Laura has penned the alphabetical travel guides Montreal from A to Z and San Diego from A to Z, offbeat writing guides A Cheater’s Guide to NaNoWriMo and Confessions of a 3-Day Novelist, and the satirical adventure tale, Ninjas of the 512. She is also the editor of the collection Haiku for Lovers, and the forthcoming anthology Everything I Need to Know About Love I Learned from Pop Songs (February 2016).

Book preview

Montreal from A to Z

An Alphabetical Guide

By Laura Roberts

Copyright Laura Roberts 2013

Published by Buttontapper Press at Smashwords

Cover design by John Moore Williams

Table of Contents

Introduction

A: Atwater Market

B: Bibliothèque Nationale

C: Café Culture, Concordia and Co-ops

D: Downtown

E: Expo 67 Flash

F: Farine Five Roses

G: Gourmet vs. Gourmand

H: Andrea Hausmann Photography

I: Îles

J: Joie de vivre

K: Kafeïn

L: Librairie

M: Mount Royal

N: NDG

O: Oratoire St-Joseph

P: Pâtisserie

Q: Quebec

R: La Ronde

S: Sarah B. Absinthe Bar

T: Terrasse

U: Underground City

V: Vieux Montreal

W: Westmount

X: X-Rated Theater

Y: YUL

Z: Quebecois Phrases That Start With Z (Plus Cursing in French!)

BONUS: Haiku From A to Z

Still More Bonus Features

About the Author

Introduction

Montreal from A to Z began as a series of blog posts written in April 2013. I had decided to participate in the annual A to Z Blogging Challenge for my second year in a row, and I wanted to write about a city I knew and loved. The choice seemed simple enough: I would write about Montreal!

It just so happened that I was finishing up work on my serial novel, Naked Montreal, around that time, and I wanted to help introduce readers to the city of Montreal in a way that was a bit more G-rated. As you can probably infer from the title, Naked Montreal paints a picture of the city as a vast wonderland of sex and sensuality. Of course, that's only half the picture – so why not fill in a bit more of the canvas?

Coincidentally, Naked Montreal had originally begun its own life as a take on the standard tourist guidebook, and was meant to be a tour of the underground city, or all of the places that the official websites and books wouldn't show visitors – from strip clubs and sex shops to BDSM dungeons and after-hours clubs. The project was inspired by my weekly sex column, written for a local paper, where I interviewed Montrealers working in the sex trades and visited uniquely Quebecois places like the sexy breakfast joints that combine topless waitresses with over-easy eggs and bacon.

Of course, writing a typical guidebook is hard work, and by the time you're done compiling all the research and information you need to write the book, half of the places may already be out of business! So I eventually scrapped that idea, not wanting to devote the rest of my life to perpetually correcting outdated info.

Instead, I set out to capture the essence of those sexy spots (and some of the characters I met there) through fictional vignettes. I've included many of them in Naked Montreal, as well as my collection of short stories, The Montreal Guide to Sex. But something still nagged at me. What about all of the awesome places in Montreal that weren’t in those books? What about that guidebook idea? Couldn't a guidebook be both cheeky and just one person’s highly subjective suggestions about what’s worth seeing in a city they adore?

I suppose the term for it is travelogue. But that sounds a bit like something you might cough up after a particularly exciting night on the town.

So, although it remains an imperfect rendering of the city, Montreal from A to Z is a collection of my own thoughts and feelings about many of the places I’ve visited during my days as a curious Montrealer. You won't find the typical sections on restaurants and bars, nor a list of must-see landmarks and attractions. (If you want some of those, I’m sure you’re familiar with Fodor’s, Frommer’s, Lonely Planet and the like.) Instead, you'll get insights on what an outsider looking in has discovered about the city she calls home, and maybe