Montreal Grand Prix Week
Wow - it's upon us already. The weekend where tourists flood Crescent Street bars and locals get as far away from downtown as possible. Okay, that makes the whole thing sound bad, doesn't it? Not so, but it's certainly not a week for the faint-of-heart.
Once a year, the F1 and its entourage come to Montreal for the Grand Prix du Canada. This entourage consists (allegedly) of hundreds of thousand of people along for the party. Many of these tourists are from Europe, where most of the F1 supporters are, so we experience a little culture shock too, but the good kind 
The main party area is the above mentioned Crescent (and Bishop) street. Any bar or restaurant will be catering to the crowd. At some point, probably Thursday, Crescent will be closed for a car show. Some F1 cars and lots of other fancy sports cars will be on display. Usually there is also a mock "pit row" and crews doing tire changing races etc.
If you're a visitor or a local, there is a LOT of people watching to do. Generally, if you can deal with crowds, you can have a very good time in downtown Montreal. The official festivities start only on Friday, but unofficially, the place is already starting to rock. Most of the fun starts at around lunch time and goes until the wee-hours of the morning. Downtown bars get a second wind as the race fans arrive back in town at the end of the day on Fri-Sat-Sun, so expect a surge of activity around 11pm or so.
The Gilles Villeneuve race track expects about 100 000 people per day at the site. Montreal tourism experts estimate 75 million dollars will be spent. That's quite a week!!
You can get specific Grand Prix info here: http://www.grandprix.ca
Otherwise, have a great time during race week!
Theo OUT
