I took a hike

I seem to excel at both forgetting to take my camera with me and forgetting to reload the battery when I do remember to take it with me. Today I went to Jean-Talon Market, which is a pretty big outside marketplace, but as I pulled out my camera and switched it on, it just went BEEP BEEP BEEP and switched itself off. So I just sighed and put the camera away.

Instead of pics of today's adventure, you get older pictures. A few days ago Carole had some business in Fairview, which is a rather large shopping area about three kilometres away from where I stay, so I decided to go with her and then walk back. Brunswick Boulevard goes all the way up there, so I could just backtrack on foot and get back here in about 30 minutes.



Somewhere along this road is the house I'm staying at. Anyway, so get up to Fairview and much to my surprise, there's hardly any traffic there at all:



Yep, no cars at all:



So I start to walk back and I'm kinda stuck at a crossing trying to figure out how to get across. No street lights, don't see any crosswalk stripes or anything, so I figure this probably counts as a crosswalk:



And apparently it does. Check out how narrow the sidewalks are btw:



A kid, some 12 years old maybe, walked past me around here and there was hardly enough room for the both of us. And the sidewalks elsewhere don't seem to be any wider either.



I suppose this is the magic button you're supposed to push or touch or something to get a green light when you want to cross a road, but after 2 minutes of flailing my hands around like an idiot I gave up. No beep, no lights flashing, no nothing, I bet I was the laughingstock of all the passing drivers. Then finally one of the two dozen lights at the crossing turned green, so I figured, hey, that's gotta be for me! Honestly though, I don't know, I probably jaywalked. Luckily enough they mostly have the regular 'push-me-and-the-lights-will-change' buttons here.

Another thing I found rather puzzling:



Fire hydrants everywhere! I swear to god, they have them like every 50 metres, it's like clockwork. I suppose folks walking here get so dehydrated in the heat that they need a place to drink every 30 seconds. Also worth noticing in the picture: trees! You'd think that's a forest over there, but I'm pretty sure it's actually just a piece of cloth with trees painted on it that they just pulled over a building or cars or something.

Speaking of buildings, I wandered off from Fairview and arrived to the residential area, and... well, you must understand that I use the term 'residential area' very loosely here. I mean I'm pretty sure I hit a time-warp and arrived in the middle ages because THIS IS WHERE KINGS AND QUEENS ARE SUPPOSED TO LIVE:



In the words of everyone on the interwebs: WAT? I mean seriously, both sides of the road were lined up with houses like this, and, I kid you not, this went on for ages.



"Here lives a person with too much money."

I don't know if it's just me, but I found this very funny:



Monsieur Propane, how awesome is that? See the little dude there in the logo? Cute. I wonder if they sell it to kids. I'd have played with Monsieur Propane.



I like this building a lot even though it's the headquarters of an evil contractor determined to wipe out the last remaining green areas in the island. Or was there a bank? Not sure. I like the building anyway. There are actually quite a lot of big business buildings with glass walls here. Maybe I like them only because you don't get them in Finland, but they do look nice in the sunshine, even better when the sun's going down.



Now, after all the castles and mansions, I arrived to a more human(e) part of town. The houses here are really nice, but not overkill. There are quite a bit of old trees everywhere and it doesn't look so fake and artificial like in the previous areas. Jon calls this place The Wasteland, but I kind of like it here. What's that, Chick? Oh I mean I love it here!



This is a bus stop. I plan to unravel its secrets later.