These are just a couple of random pictures from our neighbourhood. Apparently someone got fed up with the graffiti on the "clean up after your dog" sign.
There's an adorable little in-home daycare called Little Reasons that we would totally take our kids to if we had kids.
We drive to Virginia! Well, Katie drives and I navigate. Navigating is an important job, too. Yes, it is! Is, too! Is, too! Is, too infinity plus one!
Mmm. Let's go down to the brestaurant to get a bite to eat.
These hasidic Jews, man, it just looks so hot! It's like 25 degrees outside. Yikes.
Love the socks, though.
It's a Manhattan! And one of those "Waterfalls in the City" art installations they have.
I wished the kid was in it. *sigh* Yes, I'm a bad person.
This is Sarah. Katie knew her ages ago, and she lives in Virginia near Matt and Abby. Yes, I let just anyone touch my head.
Speak of the devil. Abby touched Ross' head. We should have gotten a picture of Katie touching Matt's head. Ah, that was a fun orgy.
Hi, Abby.
Aw, luh, so cute. They're getting married.
Whatever, Matt. Yeah, hook 'em horns, or something.
I was trying to demonstrate the Green Lantern Ring bottle opener, but Abby's always got to get her shitty little face in there.
Jesus, you'd think we had a crush on the girl, all the fucking pictures we had of her.
Ah, back in New York, Katie saw this, a calligraphy stand that happened to have her name on a Hello Kitty background. Hilarious.
A new city approaches! Prepare for battle! We went to Montreal because I had to leave the States long enough to renew my work visa, so we went to Montreal for Labour Day weekend.
We're going across the Pont Champlain (Champlain Bridge).
That's Mont Royal behind the city. Actually the city wraps around the mountain, kind of like Cape Town, that's just the downtown area there.
Oh, right. So a week before we left for Montreal, I called this hotel called Hotel St-Denis or something and made reservations.
So we get to the Hotel St-Denis, only to find that the hotel had changed owners _last week_, the previous imbeciles had booked a room for us for _next weekend_, and they were currently _full_. Cunt-kickers.
So we spent an anxious hour calling every hotel we could find in both the Lonely Planet and some shitty tourist magazine we got at the idiot hotel.
"Oh, sorry, we're all full tonight." About twenty times. Bear in mind this is at 5pm on Saturday afternoon on Labour Day weekend. I seriously started to freak out. We went to one hotel that had a "vacant" sign out front, but seriously, it looked like the kind of place you rent if you want to spend a leisurely weekend torturing someone to death.
Thank fuck for the Hotel du Fort. Gorgeous hotel, a bit more expensive than what we were thinking initially, but worth every penny for a clean, well-kept room with a stunning view of downtown. This is looking out our window.
Looking south. So good.
Nice bathroom.
Little funny kitchen nook! Seriously, if you go to Montreal, look up the Hotel du Fort. It was great.
Rue Ste-Catherine. One of the major arteries of the city.
The St. James United Church, partially-obscured by trees.
The Montreal Film Festival was going on, and there was a free film screening at the Place-des-Artes.
Oh, sorry, World Film Festival.
They had a huge screen set up.
There it is. People were staking out tables, and there were a bunch of benches down on the street. They were showing Madame Bovary and Tsotsi. But since the first would be in French, and the second in Afrikaans with French subtitles, we decided to take a pass.
The water fountains turned the shovel-things. I love installation art.
Oh, look! A Katie!
Oh, these guys were doing really good graffiti. I hate the graffiti here in New York. It's mostly just fucking tagging. These guys, though, they're artists, and they're good.
Sweet.
It looks so much better than just desolate grey brick walls.
Cool.
This is an older one.
They had a DJ and everything.
What a weird little building. It had a burger shop downstairs and a videogame store upstairs.
Montreal at night. I really need to figure out how to work our camera.
You can't really see it (see comment regarding learning correct operation of camera), but it says "PC Bang" above the glowing BattleNet24 sign. That's a Korean term for internet cafe, and there was some hangul (Korean writing) on the sign, too.
This building reminded Katie of our German restaurant near our house, Zum Stammtisch.
I started doing the Three Amigos slapdance, but I can never remember how to do it right.
Little street cleaner!
Go, noisy little street cleaner! Go!
Mega Man sells bubble tea! Weird.
I don't know of whom this statue is.
Oh, wait. This is the Saint James United Church. That other one before was the St. James the Apostle Anglican Church. Sorry about that.
Hey, it's the graffiti guys again. I must have gotten the photos mixed up. Tee-hee!
Oh, I mainly took this picture so that Katie could see the poster. We went out to a few of the bars on Rue Crescent on our second night. (The first night was spent at the hotel decompressing after the long drive and idiotic no-hotel problem.)
Katie liked the architecture in Montreal.
Ah, the Metro. The Montreal subway system runs on rubber tires. So weird. I'm used to the subway screeching and howling, but these ones were eerily quiet.
This is the Marche Bonsecours, in Old Montreal. It was the parliament of the Canadian federal government for a few years, when Montreal was the capital city of Canada.
Old Montreal was gorgeous. It reminded me of downtown St. John's, only bigger. The streets were cobbled, and all the buildings were old and pretty.
This is Place Jacques-Cartier, it bustles. That's a statue of Admiral Nelson on the pillar.
Some horsies.
Katie got a hold of the camera and took some pictures of the people scooting by us as we sat on the grass.
A little double bus.
That was a cool one.
There were train tracks, and a very slow-moving, double-decker train pulled into a station just there, but it didn't come down near us.
This guy's umbrella looked like a big huge drink umbrella.
And we wandered around Old Montreal until the Basilique Notre-Dame hove into sight.
Great big frigging basilica.
Looking down the nave inside the church.
Good ceiling.
Woops! I deleted the slightly better picture of the pulpit. This one's a little dark.
The pipe organ at the back has nearly 7000 pipes in it. Jeepers.
Those skylights are fantastic.
This is the chapel in the rear of the main basilica. It was build as a more "intimate" place to worship, since the main basilica was so big and impressive.
The chapel was destroyed by an arsonist in 1978, and they rebuilt it, with this freaky bronze thing at the front.
There it is. The chapel is called the Chapelle du Sacre-Coeur.
The guy who designed the basilica is buried under the gift shop. Creeptastic.
The stained-glass windows were unique because they depicted the history of Montreal, rather than religious scenes.
Phew. Look at that altar.
The right.
The left.
This window shows Jeanne Mance, one of the founders of Montreal.
Little statue of a lamb bearing a cross. I guess this doesn't count as a graven image, because it's a metaphor for Jesus, right?
These guys were hanging out under the stairs to the pulpit.
There's that bloody giant organ again.
This is Jeanne Mance again. I tell you, those Montrealers love their Jeanne Mance.
Here's Jeanne Mance again. Just kidding. This one represents the conversion of the native Iroquois. Hm. I pronounced it as "ear-uh-kwah", and Katie said she always heard it pronounced "ear-uh-kwoy." Is that an American-Canadian difference? Or a RestOfNorthAmerica-Newfoundland difference? Or a Humanity-Adam difference? Anybody know?
Katie didn't know what to make of the confessionals, since they don't have them in Lutheran churches.
I loved this one. Haven't a clue what's going on in it, I just thought it looked slick.
Less light.
More light. I seriously have no idea how to use the camera. I'm like an animal sometimes.
I liked the candles. I have to say, though, that I see how Christianity is a creepy religion if you're not used to it. Praying to an image of abject suffering? Phew. That's heavy.
Across the street from the basilica is the Place-des-Armes. That little domed building in the middle is the main branch of the Bank of Montreal (with whom I used to bank), which was built in 1847. That blue thing at the top is the Bank of Montreal logo. [Useless fact: you can see that same logo on a building in some of the establishing shots in the Resident Evil movies, because they used Toronto for Raccoon City in the films.]
I had to back halfway across the Place-des-Armes to get the whole basilica in the frame.
Hey, look, an Iroquois with a bird on his head. I think I say ear-uh-kwa because that's the way it should sound in French.
Katie thought this dog was hilarious.
Mmmmm! Poutine! I was surprised at the Montreal poutine, though. I'm used to it being served with a thicker, hotter gravy that melts the cheese curds. Here they served it with a lighter sauce that left the curds mostly solid. It was still deliceux, though.
Katie loves poutine. Not bad for something she'd never heard of before I told her about it.
Lovely little Old Montreal street.
The other way.
This is the Hotel de Ville. When Katie asked me what that meant, I wisely nodded and said, "Huh, well I guess it could be a hotel..." Of course, in my infinite wisdom, I failed to remember that it means City Hall.
Remember when Jesus carried that lamb on his shoulders? Bonus: check out the Chinese newlyweds.
Ah, there's Admiral Nelson. He's a British sailor famous for dying at the battle of Trafalgar (Trafalgar Square is named after the battle, and there's a statue of Nelson there, too) and for saying such pithy things as "England expects that every man will do his duty" and "Thank God I have done my duty." Duty was a major theme.
Anyway, the English merchants in Montreal erected it in 1808 (33 years before the one in Trafalgar Square), but the city's Francophones hated it. Either way, it was removed in 1997 and replaced with this fibreglass copy.
A fountain next to city hall.
Whoa, blurry subway.
Ah, there we go. I didn't realize I was that drunk. The metro is a lot smaller than the New York subway. The trains are shorter, creepily quiet, and the doors open before the train comes to a halt.
More graffiti, this time up on Avenue de Mont-Royal.
Check the Iron Woman.
Katie took this picture solely to scare Abby with. I guess it worked, because Abby didn't reply or acknowledge that she had even gotten it.
There was this big drumming party going on at Parc Jeanne-Manse (I told you the Montrealers love Mme. Mance). I've got a couple of videos up on the videos section of the website if you want to go check them out. Apparently this sort of thing goes on every Sunday in Parc Jeanne-Manse.
Further up from the drummers were these _maniacs_, pelting each other with duct-tape-wrapped swords, halberds, daggers and lances. It was like the full-contact combat the kids at the Society for Creative Anachronism used to carry on with when I was at MUN. Only these guys were playing the touch-football version of the game, as opposed to the SCA folks, who could concuss one another on occasion.
This girl gave this guy a run for his money. It was so weird to hear them shouting at each other in French. There are a couple of videos on the video page that show the crowd fighting.
The Dark Knight here was a total hero.
When you get hit, you sit down. I was utterly fascinated by this. Katie had to pull me away.
So we gasped and sweated and struggled up the hill to the lookout station on Mont Royal. This was the view from the staircase we ascended.
And this is us, with Montreal behind.
Somebody took our picture for us. We had Iztakadoozies (psycho footlong popsicles), but Katie wouldn't let us hold them in the picture. Check the video on the video page to see them.
Montreal!
I loved Montreal.
YAY, MONTREAL!
MONTREAL, YEAH!
Yep, that's Montreal, all right.
Sing your melody. So weird seeing a KTV outside of Taiwan.
We went to Trois Brasseurs after our big adventure to Mont Royal. They have a bunch of microbrews.
3 Brasseurs was a nice little beer bar.
There are more microbrew tanks right in the middle of the restaurant.
Oh, pardon me. _Les_ Trois Brasseurs.
We stopped and got some yummy on the way back to the hotel. Katie got a falafel pita, and I got a chicken one.
Someone doesn't like the Bloc Quebecois. (They're like the nationalist French party - the crowd who wanted Quebec to separate from Canada.) Charles is looser.
The "FUCK QUEBEC" I thought was completely uncharitable. (Although at least they spelled 'loser' correctly this time.) I personally loved Quebec. I can't wait to go back. I hope next time we can go to Quebec City, but anyone who can should go visit Montreal; classy, classy city.
