By Eileen Ogintz
Tribune Media Services

(Tribune Media Services) — The blackboard menu is in French and all around the little cafe, people are chattering in French, nibbling on croissants and sipping café au lait. But we’re a lot closer to home than Paris.

Welcome to Montreal, just a scant hour-long flight or a 370-mile drive from New York, or an hour’s drive from the border of Vermont. Most everyone, it seems, speaks English, as well as French, so there’s no need for my 16-year-old daughter, Melanie, to practice her French, she says happily.

Another plus: Though there are no bargains here for Americans anymore now that the Canadian “loonie” is about the same value as a U.S. dollar (the strongest the Canadian dollar has been in more than 30 years), at least we can soak up the foreign ambiance without spending as much as we would in Europe where the dollar is so weak against the Euro.

Mel and I have come to Montreal for a mother-daughter weekend getaway and a look at McGill University, one of four in this oh-so-cosmopolitan city, which visitors can’t help but love. Even our taxi drivers wax eloquent about their city — the restaurants! (There are more than 6,000 offering everything from French to Ethiopian to Montreal’s famous bagels.) The museums! (There are more than 30. Visit www.museemontreal.org for the Montreal Museums Pass.) The theater, dance companies and festivals that go on all year! (There are more than 90, including the popular la Fete des Neiges de Montreal in January.) The shopping! (Simons, www.simons.ca, on Montreal’s famous Ste-Catherine Street, we discover, is a good bet for young fashionistas on a budget. Such a clean city! So many parks; there are 1,009 of them and scores of green spaces.

Let’s not forget the 21-mile Underground Pedestrian Network that connects everything from metro stations to restaurants to skating rinks, office buildings, hospitals, libraries and nearly 1,000 retail shops.

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By Pauline Frommer
Special to MSNBC.com
Updated: 12:14 p.m. MT Oct 17, 2006

Toronto is a chameleon of a city, the darling of the entertainment industry for its ability to look like, well, almost any large urban center in North America. It played Brooklyn in the movie “Moonstruck”, Chicago in “My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding” and “Chicago”, and Boston in “Good Will Hunting”, among other films. Does that make it a faceless, personality-free place? On the contrary, the “Little Apple” as many fondly call it, is fiercely cosmopolitan, with a bustling energy that recalls New York City (hence the nickname) and an internationalism that is unmatched in Canada. It boasts the largest Chinese population in North America, and has also welcomed thousands of Vietnamese people, Jamaicans, Indians, Somalians, Italians and others as well. The itinerary below will give you a taste of that multiculturalism as well as a glimpse of the city’s history and strong commitment to the arts.

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