The lease season tends to run July to July because the warm months are a better time to move and because Canada Day is July 1. Can't sit still The French-speaking population celebrates St. Jean Baptiste Day in late June with abandon. Last June the Gazette, the English-language newspaper, was filled with accounts of rowdiness and the arrests of several people on this holiday. The habit of changing residence often started in the 18th-century colony founded by pious French men and women. It wasn't unusual for families to have 10-12 children, and they had to keep moving into larger quarters to house them all.
Families are considerably smaller now, but the habit stuck.
Today, moving around in this peripatetic city is a dream. I stayed at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, and there was nowhere that I couldn't get without walking the many underground passages or taking the subway. The underground passages, the largest underground network in the world, make it possible to walk from hotel to office centers, from department stores to subway stations completely protected from the cold or rain. I walked from my hotel to the stunning cross-shaped office building Ville Marie, designed by I.M. Pei. A proud city I could shop easily at Eaton's, the most well-known store in Canada, or at any of the other 100 boutiques, or I could go to Molson Center or have lunch at the Deli Cathedrale.