© Eva Blue
A firework 🎆
Every New Year’s Eve, the skies over Montréal are lit by a world-class fireworks display, marking the year that’s passed and the one yet to come. Our time capsule wouldn’t be complete without at least one!
© Eva Blue - Tourisme Montréal
A skate, a snowball and a sled ⛸
It takes more than a little winter weather and snow to keep Montréalers indoors. Instead, every park’s frozen pond becomes a skating rink, every hill a sledding slope and every open field a snowball fight battleground. We’ll need one of each.
© Alison Slattery - Two Food Photographers
Poutine, pastries and bagels, oh my! 🥯
Nothing goes down better than a warm, cheesy poutine, or bagels fresh out of the woodstove followed by a perfect pastry from one of Montréal’s mouth-watering patisseries. We meant to put examples of all three in our time capsule, but they may have gotten eaten in the process. Can you blame us?
© Eva Blue
#ÇAVABIENALLER 🌈
As the city closed its doors and put a pause on public life, the windows of the city were festooned with painted rainbows and the simple message, Ça va bien aller! (“It’s going to be fine!”). Alongside a few of these homemade signs, we’ll also include examples of the face masks local designers made fashionable.
© Eva Blue - Tourisme Montréal
Pretty as a postcard 🏞
2020 was a year spent outdoors, taking in the one-of-a-kind vistas of the city and appreciating Montréal’s glorious views from the top of Mount Royal and across the St. Lawrence River. While they can never do it full justice, we’ll put in a stack of postcards of just a few of Montréal’s natural wonders.
A whale of a year! 🐋
For a couple of weeks in late spring, Montréal gathered on the banks of the St. Lawrence River to catch a glimpse of a humpback whale that made the city its erstwhile home. The reminder of the balance between man and nature made for one of 2020’s most moving and awe-inspiring chapters.
© Canada's Drag Race
A bejewelled high heel and a sky-high wig 💅
2020 also marked the first season of Canada’s Drag Race, our version of the incredibly popular Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Montréal is home to two of the season’s fiercest competitors, and we’ve asked Rita Baga for one of her iconic wigs and Kiara for a stiletto. Werq!
© Jean-François Savaria
A stage on wheels 🎤
Due to Covid-19 restrictions, we couldn’t all gather inside to enjoy live music, so instead the Cabaret ambulant took the stage outside … on wheels! Transforming the city streets into a cabaret in motion, some of Montréal’s musical talent played their hearts out proving that it takes more than a pandemic to put a stop to live music. Let’s add one of the Cabaret ambulant’s microphones to the capsule.
© Eva Blue - Tourisme Montréal
Dancing in the streets 💃
The city streets came alive this summer with countless live performances and entertainers ranging from dancers and acrobats to contortionists and marching bands. To commemorate a few of our favourites, our time capsule includes a hula hoop, a trumpet and a giant eyeball mask as worn by Les Belles Bêtes.
© Eva Blue - Tourisme Montréal
Installation city 🐩
To keep locals entertained, the Quartier des Spectacles became a hotspot of installation pieces and public art, ranging from a sound collage by local musician Patrick Watson, dog sculptures in every colour of the rainbow and the Sha Tan Chinatown Terrace by Chinatown’s emblematic gates. We’ll toss in a lantern, one of the dog statues and an .mp3 player with Watson’s soundscapes for listeners of the future to enjoy.
© Eva Blue - Tourisme Montréal
The colours of autumn 🍂
Montréal is a beauty all year round, but she never looks quite so magical as in Autumn when the leaves turn red, orange and gold. To mark another spectacularly photographic year, a small bag of dried leaves surely deserves its place in the box.
© Eva Blue
Books by starlight 📚
This year, Old Montréal glows with holiday lighting installations not only celebrating the season, but also everyone’s resilience over the course of the past 12 months. Light up your Instagram with the towering stars on Place d’Armes, and wait for the likes to roll in. And cap off a starry night with a walk over to Place des Festivals for the 2020 edition of Luminotherapie, a redux of the iconic LOOP, this year paying tribute to some bright stars of Québec literature like Innu poet Joséphine Bacon, Haitian-Canadian novelist Dany Laferrière and playwright Wajdi Mouawad. We’re putting their latest books in the capsule, but we’re going to need everyone’s help to make one of those stars fit. Altogether now … push!
Mark Hamilton
Mark Hamilton is the community director for QueerMTL, an internationally-touring musician with his projects Woodpigeon and Frontperson and a graduate studies student of history researching LGBTQ+ activism in the city. He’s lived in Montréal since 2015, during which time he’s most often spotted atop a BIXI bike usally running a few minutes late.
