Contact Montreal

You know what else Montreal has besides poutine, mountains, Bixi Bikes, extremely clean (if rather inextensive) subways, and apparently meters and meters (see this conversion?) of snow? Contact stripping, sex stores, and brothe..., err, massage parlors.

And lots of them. Apparently one of highest per capita of strip clubs in the world. This is an unconfirmed statistic I read somewhere else on the web in an attempt to make this blog have actual facts, so since it's now written in TWO places, I guess that makes it true. You'd be surprised that Googling "montreal strip club statistics" does not yield much non-naked material.

The last stop for out-of-work superheros...

Contact stripping, for those of you not in the know, is designed where you can actually touch the strippers (I somehow thought touching a stripper would be similar to falling in the East River, but that's just me...). While I have yet to visit any type of strip club, I've always thought this whole concept of contact stripping was kind of hilarious. Plus the marketing is pretty amazing, usually consisting of a couple super shady guys at the bottom of a long stair well, chain smoking and yelling totally ridiculous invitations to passers-by (in both French AND English! Equal opportunity.)

And, of course, massage parlors. There's a 24 hour massage parlor next to a pizza place (or, somewhere near a pizza place we found) on St. Denis and Ontatio. Ok, look, that's not even really clever, right? 24 hour massage parlor? Because the last thing the 24 massage parlor would be busted for is prostitution? Though I shouldn't joke, they advertise on Craigslist a lot and I bet the girls all started out as bright eyed foreign "visitors" as well til they couldn't learn French fast enough...

Yea, seems about right

I think people who have lived here for awhile don't notice all this...

I just wanted an excuse to use this photo...