I may have an opportunity to work in Montreal. Can anyone help me with things like the cost of living, cost of renting an apartment, etc.? There is always lots of info on the net, but I like to hear about personal experiences, perceptions, etc.

If you are working anywhere in the city centre, it is adviseable to try to find somewhere not far from the métro. I live up near Jean-Talon, where there are two métro lines and several buses, including three all-night buses. Despite some gentrification of late, it is still cheaper than the Plateau or right downtown, but very accessible for transport - great foodie place too, with the market and thereabouts.

But all of this depends on your wants and needs.

I would definitely take advantage of subsidized French classes.

You could also seek out more temporary accomodation and do your search from here. A clean, basic, and economical place to stay in the SUMMER is the residences at Université du Québec, McGill and Université de Montréal. (If Concordia has a residence, it would be way out at Loyola, in western NDG).

I am really hoping all this comes together. It would be nice to live in a larger centre. Actually, when I was younger, my family lived in Lachine.

It is quite an old suburb - I'm no expert on housing around there as I am a militant urbanite, but in addition to the papers I cited, you could also look up "The Suburban" - Joel Goldenberg, an occasional babbler - is a journalist for that weekly and might be able to help you more. Part of Dorval is write on the St-Lawrence River where it becomes "Lac Saint-Louis" - quite scenic. An interesting point in that area is that a lot of Inuit, who commute from Northern Québec for business, health and educational reasons, have settled there.

As lagatta says, Dorval is accessible via the commuter train, and it's also a bus hub, so many buses meet up there. The Société de Transport de Montréal website has a lot of good info. You can see that many neighborhoods give you access to Dorval.

Good friends of mine lived in Dorval, right near Lachine. It didn't seem to have much of a community feel, and they didn't like it very much. Quite boring, ugly, strip-malls, basically a suburban wasteland. Lachine has a bit more stuff, and down by Lachine park is livable (for a suburb), but parts of it are quite economically depressed, especially since the Lachine Hospital closed a couple of years ago.

My recommendation to people in Montreal is *always* to avoid the suburbs. Montreal is too nice to end up living in Dorval. I myself ended up living on the border of the Plateau and La Petite Patrie, and I had to commute every day to St Anne de Bellevue for Cegep. It was long, but worth it.

In light of that, check out the STM map. I'm pretty sure some more interesting places, like St Henri, have bus access to Dorval. Living around there would be much more interesting.

But if you look at it the other way, one good thing about Dorval and Lachine is that they're relatively close to downtown.

lagatta posted to the Voir, so i won't repost it, but it has a reputation for having the best apartment listings in the city.

I am also a pilot, and through research have found that the Laurentian Flying Club has a field out in Cedre, just to the west of Dorval (I am not too sure how "just" just is). I would like to live in between those two locations if it is convenient. It certainly sounds like commuting in Montreal is convenient. In someways it would be nice not to have a car but I am sure reality would not make that possible. I really want to avoid flying out of a large urban airport if possible.

Much for my wife and I to consider.

Valois is a bit sleepy, but less crappy than most of the Waste Island. Pointe-Claire village is a bit too faux-touristy for my taste, a bit like old Montreal but more white bread (if that's possible).

(That's for "West Island", kingblake, the enormous on-island suburbia of Montreal, which once upon a time, in the 60s when I grew up in it, was culturally and socially as close to Montreal as it was to Cincinatti...or so it seemed in the Beaconsfield waspnest.

As kingblake and I have said, we are hardcore urbanites, but old Montreal-West has an English village feel that certainly has its charm. Sure, Pointe-Claire Village can be "touristy" in the summer, but it is pretty, and has nice cafés and amenities.