Lots of pictures

OK, these pictures are from last saturday when Jon very kindly provided me with entertainment for the whole day.

I started the day by getting a lift to my bus stop from Carole. Next to the bus stop was a church. Saying that there are a lot of churches in Montreal would be a gigantic understatement. Supposedly, either Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde (google can't make up its mind) once said that 'you can't throw a rock in Montreal without breaking a church window' or something along those lines. It's honestly not that far from the truth.



This is what a typical Montreal bus looks like inside:



Not too different from Finnish buses, right? True. The only weird this is that if you take a closer look, you'll find weird wires/strings on the sides of the bus. When you want the bus to stop, you yank that string. I think there are buttons too, but those strings were so weird that I just had to mention them. Anyhoo, I took the bus to a place like this:



You can even see the bus right there at the stop! You can't see it because it's 'behind me', but there was a subway station here. However, I didn't take the metro but instead Jon came to pick me up. We walked a few blocks to a gas station from which Mandy took us a few blocks closer to the mountain. "You sure you don't want me to take you up there," she asked. "No no, we're fine thanks," we replied, oozing energy and confidence. After four hours of walking I remotely remember regretting this exchange.

So we walked through what I presumed to be a part of the downtown area. There were streets like this:



...and this:



Notice how I'm standing in the middle of the street like a dork when taking the pic. Also notice how I'm unable to hold the camera straight when taking the pic, giving you further evidence of my vastly superior intaligense. We paid a quick visit to a little shopping mall and, for whatever reason, they had a beautiful ceiling with a, pardon my French, big ass chandelier:



Other than that it was your average, modern shopping mall. As we got closer to the mountain, the streets started to look more like this:



You probably can't see it very well, but the street was already pretty steep. The street was lined with somewhat luxurious buildings and apartments and other things that a teacher will never be able to afford.



Here's where the street ends and the real torture begins. At this stage I was already showing signs of moderate regret for so enthusiastically turning down Mandy's offer 30 minutes ago. The mountain was a bit like Puijo, except with less stairs and more serpentine type roads/trails. The trails were absolutely chock-full of masochi^H^H^H^H^Hjoggers who genuinely enjoyed their morning excercise in the gentle warmth of the Montreal sun. For me, slowly crawling up the hill in scorching heat was more than enough thank you very much. For the record, Jon was doing even worse than me!

On the way up we saw literally hordes of these magnificent beasts:



Personally I was truly relieved they did not notice us and we made it out alive.



Around mid way up there was a monument of sorts, I think it was called the 'give peace a chance monument' or some such. It had the sentence written in countless languages. I was able to find Swedish, Polish and Japanese, among many others, but for some strange reason they had neglected Finnish. I found this very puzzling. One of the most remarkable, fascinating languages in the world left out like that, sheesh, what were they thinking?



This is Beaver Lake. Someone must have been drunk and/or high when naming this place because I only saw fish, birds, dragonflies and Koreans.



When I snapped this picture one particularly tame Korean galloped past me and said: "That's our sign!" I was astonished.



Another picture of Beaver Lake. Jon tells me by noon the area surrounding the lake is full of folks of different ethnicities BBQing away whatever it is that they barbeque in their particular corner of the world. In the lake they had all kinds of fish we only have in fish tanks, like catfish, goldfish etc. Scattered around the lake there was also some Art(tm):



Well, I thought it looked nice anyway. I guess I'm in the minority. Pretty soon we reached an outlook facing the heart of Montreal. Here's a view of what I believe to be the southwestern part of downtown:



...and here's downtown:



...and here's a picture of the view southeast:



I then witnessed an old(ish) half-naked man flexing his muscles behind a half-naked muscle-flexing young(ish) couple trying to take pictures of their half-naked muscle-clad bodies without having the old half-naked man in the background. They failed. However, all three of them convinced me to voice my support for Jon's excellent suggestion of getting the fudge out of there ASAP.



That was our escape route. This was our destination:



It was a street fair or sorts(?) where they closed off an entire street to help people pig out on all varieties of food known to man. See how few people there are, right?



WRONG! Open up this pic to its full size and you'll see a vast sea of people for blocks on end. The street was stacked up with stands that had all kinds of delicious things you could eat, and believe me, we ate. Walking along this road we stumbled upon Schwartz's where Jon treated me to a smoked meat "sandwich". Calling it a sandwich is rather misleading though as it was literally just a huge chunk of smoked meat stuffed between two barely noticeable slices of toast.

Oh, there was also a rather bulky dude with a horrendous reptile on his shoulder:



...which was pretty much the only animal on the street you couldn't eat. I suppose I could've tried, but I figured the dude was slightly stronger than me and there was a distinct possibility I might have lost the fight. After porking out at the fair we went to Jon's place and played board games for six hours, the details of which I know you must be just dying to hear, so here goes. We started with Magic the Gathering and Jon had a green deck built around large critters and Bioenergy and Dan had a blue-white-gre-OK fast forwarding till 10 pm so FIREWORKS!



You know we did eat Chinese at around si- Oh look more fireworks!



What's this? More fireworks? Can it be?



They have fireworks here every saturday for 30 minutes. It's like the world championships or something. I believe it was the Italians who were in charge of the show and quite a show it was. They had smiley faces, hearts, cats, weirdo-but-cool-random-direction-firing-blasts, you name it they had it. Couldn't hear the music, but... oh yes did I forget to mention it was all timed to music... it was pretty amazing nevertheless. See that bridge in the distance? That's where I wanna go one of these Saturdays, it's gotta be pretty awesome watching the show from there!



This is the pic that made some French folks behind me rather angry. The ripples in the clouds are where the moon was, but the pic doesn't look half as cool as it did then. Also, notice the building far away with the red lights? It looks a bit like the Empire State Building, right? That'd be because it's modelled after the Empire State Building! Or was it the other way around? No one seems to be sure. Didn't ask the angry French dudes though, I'm sure they would have appreciated my inquiry.