Montreal > all

During the last few days I've been spending a lot of time with a Canadian friend of mine who's now here in Finland. He's from Edmonton and he had this to say:

"Juha, would you please stop going on and on about Montreal already? Please?"

I promptly answered: "No."

I think he hates me now.

Home sweet home

Great. 80-90% of the grass in Joensuu is dead. Yellow and brown and dead. It looks like Pripyat here. Must have been the heat.

Well this sucks, just royally

I feel horrible for saying this but honestly, I don't want to leave.

Taina, mom, dad, sis, bro, friends... move to Montréal? Please? Pretty please? With sugar on top?

If anything, spending two months in Montréal has made me realize how there really just isn't anything happening in Joensuu. Going back there feels like switching back to eating regular oatmeal for breakfast after wolfing down Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs every morning for two months. I sure liked my Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. Wouldn't mind eating them again in the future.

I will try to make a some sort of recap of things I learned and/or enjoyed in Montréal once I get back to Finland and maybe recover from jetlag a bit.

Again, thank you so much, Chick, Carole, Jon, Mandy, Don, Pat, Lynda, Katrin, Dan, Andrew, Murray, Heather, Bradley, Ralph, Chris, Jen, Emma, Ann(e?), Dennis, Nora, Mel, Rona, The Weird Old Hippie Dude, and all the other colourful characters I met during my adventures and forgot to mention here (sorry!), you made me enjoy my stay here so much more! You rock.

La Ronde

I'm so happy I decided to go to La Ronde after all. Big thanks to Dan for encouraging me to go.

The Goliath is sick. It's sick I tell you. I swear the drops were just straight down vertical.

Fireworks were amazing up close. Couldn't stop laughing at the total overkill of exploding awesomeness.

Also visited Angrignon park and the city library.

Dunno what's gonna happen tomorrow. About two trillion overlapping/conflicting plans. Well two anyway.

Two and a half days left

Quick update.

Wednesday: spent 5h in the Museum of Fine Arts. Miles Davis exhibition rocked. Saw works by Picasso and Cezanne and all those guys. The rest of the day in Old Montreal + Old Port.

Thursday: Went to Oka for some biking (and swimming!) with Don and Pat. Pretty amazing beach they got there, too bad there was very little water. At the 1.6 metre sign I had water to my knees. Later in the evening went to the Morgan Arboretum with Chick. Saw Saturn and its rings through a telescope, spent an hour staring the sky for some Perseids, saw maybe 15 and a fireball too. 200+ people in there, folks cheering and clapping after each shooting star, was nice.

Friday: Spent the day in parks mainly, visited the Biosphere in Jean Drapeau too. Highlight of the day: munching on my grilled cheese sandwich at Orange Julep while Depeche Mode's Enjoy the Silence was playing on the radio. Being right next to the Decarie Expressway, I had to take the title ironically.

Tomorrow: one last park, then maybe an amusement park and fireworks.

Also, picture of the day:



Blurry but awesome.

Oh man, what a day... again

A day full of wonder and blunder.

I woke up at 10 (yeah I know, I know... sue me), did my usual morning routine of reading/replying to (university) email, going through the news followed by some googling. I've learned that google maps is a really neat service. Never had much use for it in Joensuu (:D), but here it's just pure gold. I always check my targets for the day on google maps to help me navigate later on.

Anyhow, done with my preparation I ran to the bus stop, only to realize I had checked the wrong bus schedule and missed my bus by some 5mins or so. First mistake of the day. So I decided to walk back home to wait for the next one there, but on the way back I met Chick talking to his neighbour Dave, who was just about to go take care of some business so he decided to give me a lift to Fairview. Thanks, Dave!

So I eventually I get to Cote-Vertu and go grab a late breakfast or lunch (late brunch I guess!) at the Decarie Hot-dogs (or whatever it was, the sign was almost completely faded). The joint, which both Chick and Jon apparently used to frequent back in the day, was well worth the visit. I ate what must have been the greasiest pile of fries ever. Me and my arteries loved every second of it.

I walk back to Cote-Vertu, take the metro to Bonaventure. I have this silly way of sometimes not getting off at the nearest metro station to where I want to go; I kinda wanna visit as many stations as possible, simply because they're all different and some of them are really nice looking inside with all kinds of colourful artwork and stuff.

It took a bit of wandering around but after a while I found St Patrick's Basilica and hopped right in. From outside the church didn't look like much but inside it was just gorgeous. Beautiful arched ceiling, marble pillars, stained glass windows, you name it they had it. I had spent maybe 15 minutes tops there when a guy walked up to me and whispered 'excuse me, we're kinda closed' so out I go again.

Outside I was met with an old bum, who was adamant on helping me out with whatever it was that I needed help with, which was rather difficult as I didn't really need help with anything. He was very persistent though, kept talking and talking and talking about Montreal and how much he loves the city and all that business, most likely hoping to get a buck or two from me. Probably much to his dissapointment I turned out to be a perpetually broke student with little change to spare, but he didn't let it show. He was a really nice dude, or at least pretended to be one, and if the case really was the latter, he succesfully fooled me.

Anyway, I eventually found myself at Place des Festivals, where I just sat for some 30-45mins watching skaters pull off some crazy tricks and kids play with the streams of water blasting out of the ground, stealthily taking pics every now and then in hopes of not being thought to be a pedophile. It was already past six o'clock when I got another one of my stupidly brilliant ideas - walk up to the lookout on Mont-Royal.

The temperature was only some 25-26 degreees but the humidity was killing me. It was killing me even more when I walked up St Catherine and Peel and finally up the mountain along the stairs. Not something I'd recommend you do in jeans and with a heavyish backpack with you. Well, I did and I was dripping sweat and my jeans were glued to my legs. Luckily at the top there is a chalet with bathrooms and water fountains for drinking etc so I could at least wash the sweat off my face and drink some more water as the bottle I took with me had already vanished ages ago.

It was like 19:30 when I went to the lookout and just sat there taking pics and waiting for the sun to go down in order to witness the gradual transformation of the scene from light to dark with the city slowly lighting up in the background. It took almost 90 minutes but it was totally worth it. Seeing the city down below you all lit up at night - just wow.

My next stop was getting some bagels from St Viateur or Fairmount and on my map I had noted a road on the north side of the mountain heading that way, but as I got there I found out there was no sidewalk. I figured I'd just drive all the drivers nuts if I went there, so I backtracked to the outlook, went for the bad idea number two, and decided to walk down the stairs back to Peel. Now, it must have been the first time I felt a bit nervous here in Montreal and it wasn't because I afraid of some crazed junkie pouncing on me from the bushes but because it was literally pitch-black. You could see a couple of feet in front of you, and even that just barely. Not exactly the ideal situation for climbing down some 500 steps zig-zagging down in a rather steep angle.

It took me longer than I thought so I just thought I'd ditch the bagel trip and walked down Peel to Rene Levesque instead. As some folks know, I just love cities at night and what better place in Montreal to admire the lit up skyscraper awesomeness in downtown than Rene Levesque. So I walked all the way up to Atwater and then down Atwater to Lionel-Groulx. There I quickly visited Tim Hortons for a coffee and some donuts (See, Carole? The reason I don't eat much in the Wasteland is because I keep nourishing myself with the fine, healthy culinary marvels Montreal is famous for). So I grabbed the stuff, went out and "Oh, look! There's the 211, I think I can make it!"

I just made it in but as I was one of the last people to enter the bus, all the seats were taken and I had to stand. The bus set off for the Wasteland, I grabbed ahold of one of the poles or whatever and I'm just standing there, happily sipping my coffee for about 10 minutes before... well, remember when I said the they keep the windows open in buses here? You do? Really? Wow, now I feel all warm and fuzzy inside! Anyway, again the windows were open and the bus was speeding along the highway, so of course after a while the draft decided it was time to get rid of Juha's amazing Flextronics cap.

At this point my superb reflexes kick in and I try to grab the cap with my free hand before I flies off altogether. Too bad my superb reflexes didn't notice the superb Tim Hortons coffee I was holding in this 'free' hand of mine. The coffee superbly soars into the air and I get it all over my hair, back of my neck, right shoulder and my backpack. Like I said, the bus was full, but not full enough so I was pretty much the only one standing while everyone else was sitting and fully able to enjoy the spectacle of me making an ass of myself.

So I start to smile, embarrassed, go all 'heh, I'm such an idiot', turn around and try to see where my cap flew. At first I can't seem to find it anywhere, further deepening my embarrassment. Then a nice lady behind me starts to point at something so I follow the trajectory and find my cap neatly parked on the shoulder of this youngish, twentysomething asian dude sitting on the seat next to me. "Ah, there it is, thanks," I say, grab the hat and... bang! A massive, brightly coloured 'ooohhhh crap...' explodes inside my head.

As I lifted the cap I realized that not only did I splash coffee on myself, but I also managed to pour it all over this guy's shoulder. His striped, blue shirt had a nice pattern of brown randomness all over it. By this time I truly wanted to go into ostrich-mode and stick my head in the sand to get away from all this embarrassment. The asian guy must have been a Zen Master or something, because he never bat an eye, just kept reading his book, acting(?) as if nothing had happened. I launch into a burst of apologies, so so sorries, totally my bads, all the while trying to find a kleenex or something to give him, but no, can't find one. The nice lady behind me tries to find one, but she doesn't have one either. The guy just sits there, reading. The poor guy must have been too shy to get mad at me or something. I'm fairly certain he whispered something during my little barrage of apologies. It could have been "It's OK", but I couldn't really hear him through the howl of the wind blasting in through the windows.

The only positive thing about the whole ordeal I could think of was that luckily the coffee wasn't hot any more.

Also, if you read all this you have no life.

Beat

Left at 1pm, came back at 9pm. That's 8 hours of biking. Dollard des Ormeaux, Sainte Anne de Bellevue, Baie d'Urfe, Beaconsfield. Walked around quite a bit too, especially in Sainte Anne de Bellevue.

Tomorrow to Quebec City.