On my bike ride home yesterday, I encountered three stereotypes of Montrealers that best exemplify the type of people we don’t want non-Montrealers to know or hear about. The first was a motorbiker with an obnoxiously loud bike and a joint hanging out of his mouth. The second was a guy on a pedal bike who blew a red light and almost got hit–with his three year riding in the child’s seat in the back. Third, just before I got home, the Montrealer we try the most to hide: the guy with a red Mazda3 listening to really loud, bad dance music from the nineties. Yes, we have bikers, bad drivers and people with bad taste in music, but here are three cool things about Montreal to held you forget about those people:

Crossing the tracks is a cool little article from Maisonneuve which talks about the railway that skirts the northern boundary of Mile End:

The tracks serve as a neat boundary for the neighbourhood, dividing it from Little Italy, the Petite Patrie and the nameless industrial area to the north. To cross them, you have a choice of three underpasses: one on Park Avenue, one on St. Urbain and one on St. Laurent.

Of course, that’s if you decide to cross them legally. Most people don’t bother with that, choosing instead to duck through one of the many holes that have been cut into the chain-link fence along the tracks.

The tracks (I almost feel it deserves a capital ‘T’) are not part of Montreal. They are another world.

If there’s anything I love better than watching the battle between people tearing down the fence next to the railway and the railways people inventing new ways to try and keep people out, it’s walking down alleys. Montreal has a neat system of alleyways between every block as this image on the left illustrates poorly. Whenever I can, I take alleyways because, oddly, there are more people back there sitting on their decks or raking the gravel in their backyard that at some point they thought was a better idea than grass. Recently, Spacing Montreal featured Montreal’s Best Alleyways, full of photos of alleyways even I haven’t seen.

And lasty, the pride of Montreal: voyeurism. Am I kidding? Wouldn’t non-Montrealers love to know.