Montreal Day One Report

We capped off the night at Grey Cup Festival headquarters, watching “Elevation”, a U2 rock band, perform before a packed house

Day One of our cool Montreal adventure is in the books!

After getting settled at our hotel and kicking back a bit, we headed to the Metro for the ride to Verdun Auditorium, now the new home for the Juniors de Montreal of the QMJHL. Being a 70 year old arena, we expected a claustrophobic, tumble down venue way past its prime, so weren’t we pleased to find nice splashes of paint (team maroon), dual seat lacquered wooden benches, and a cozy intimate venue. Best of all, it was a pretty good house on hand in this 4000 seat arena, kind of a surprise considering that Q teams have come and gone in this town over these past decades. Looks like this latest incarnation of junior hockey here will make it.

On this night, Patrick Roy and his Quebec Remaprts were in town, and tomorrow night being his big night at the Bell Centre, the Juniors had a short ceremony to acknowledge Roy, who received a lengthy standing ovation. Then they trucked out a guy named Andre Ouellet, who was the national anthem singer at the old Forum during the Canadiens’ 1993 Stanley Cup run. When Ouellet did his booming rendition of “Oh Canada” in two languages tonight, he absolutely nailed it. This guy could give Slewidge a run for his money.

Other than the PA guy being too loud and drowning out casual conversation in the stands, the events crew here does a more than good job – awesome music tracks which get people into the game, these amazingly hot “ice girls” dressed in tight fitting black jump suits sweep the ice, and they must have thrown 500 t-shirts into the crowd. All a pretty festive atmosphere, helped along of course by a crushing 8-2 win for the hometown boys. Two Juniors scored hat tricks.

After the game we headed over to the Grey Cup Festival Village, set up at Place du Canada. There are a lot of exhibits, merchandise stands, video screens and stuff which we will check out more tomorrow, but tonight we headed into the Molson Ex pavilion, ordered up a couple Molsons (of course) and watched this really good U2 styled band named “Elevation” do their best version of U2’s best tracks. The crowd was loving it, we were picking out all the different football jerseys in the crowd (Bills 7th round draft pick Ah You jersey was spotted!), and we met up with a bunch of guys from Calgary who were very impressed with the USRT… we have an open invite to hang out with these fellas when we make the return visit to Alberta. By the way, they paid a scalper $600 a piece for 100 level tickets to the Habs game tomorrow night. Prices here for this event are insane!

All through the night Matt Pearl was texting us with updates from Buffalo… the good (UB wins in double overtime!), the bad (Sabs down 1-0 after one, down 1-0 after two) and the ugly (Phil 3, Buf 0 Final).

So that’s it for Day One. Lots on tap for tomorrow – the Calgary Stampeders are inviting the community to a free pancake breakfast at the Village tomorrow. For lunch we make our pilgrimage to our favorite Jewish deli in Montreal, Schwartz’ Deli for their delicious smoked meat. Then its off to Le Centre Bell – the big retirement ceremony gets underway at 6PM.

Till tomorrow!