Montreal is beautiful. Was there any snow there? Winters are notoriously brutal there. I was visiting last February and we got caught in the middle of a huge snow storm. The morning before the flurries started to fly, we were awoken by what sounded like air-raid sirens. Turns out, before big snow storms, city workers drive around in trucks early in the morning waking everyone up so that people move their parked cars so that the plows can get through those narrow streets.
Contrary to perceptions in English Canada, we also found Montrealers to be very friendly towards us monoglots, and its maybe the only truly bilingual city in the country.
Montreal is utterly unique in North America. It is a strange vestige of a bygone era and way of life as you duly note -- dignified and civilized. Montreal, under the rule of a dominant Anglophone minority, was the single major city in Canada until the 1970s when Toronto supplanted it. By then, insurgent Quebec nationalism scared off businesses as the government grew more strident in its protection and promotion of the French language and culture. There is something noble about that place as it holds out against assimilating fully into the English world. Without this heavy-handedness, Montreal would likely be as French as New Orleans, and its identity would be heavily diluted. Quebec stands alone in that regard. There, I think you have a degree of separateness from the rest of the world in a unique little bubble.
How did the rest of the trip go?