Canada
and Vermont Vacation, July 2005
Northbound
NH/VT | Montebello, QC | Montreal
| Southbound VT
Wednesday, July 20:
City Walks and “Just for Laughs” Festival (Montreal)
Montreal is a city
of festivals. Walking to dinner, we fell into the "Just for Laughs"
festival where I posed with a monster, he tried to abduct me, and I fled.
I'm drinking a maple-lemonade from a street vendor.
Still walking around,
we bought chocolates from a wonderful shop with green tea flavors and other
exotic flavors. We also spotted the store that Bob mentioned to us by saying,
"Howard and I saw a store that, if Robert and Jef and I wanted to dress
up as our characters for Halloween, would be perfect for us." Here it
is--it's the one with the One Ring, Frodo, and Gandalf on the top of it.
Dinner at Au Pied
de Cochon (Montreal)
Dinner was amazing
at this little contemporary bistro-type place in the plateau. We ate:
Thursday, July 21:
DinoFossil: Montreal (Old Port)
A never-before-seen
in North America exhibit of Chinese dinosaur skeletons. The text was China-centric,
as you might expect, with oddly translated tenses and words: “carnasaurs,”
“giant dragons of the ocean,” etc. There was also an obsession
with dragons, with constant reassurances that dinosaurs are not dragons. You
can't see it in the picture, sadly, but there were also typos: Humans appeared
600 million years ago. Really?
Walking around Old
Town, we saw this great Japanese creperie (which was closed because it was
too early in the morning) with very high-quality fake food in the window.
You can get whole brownies in your crepes, according to the models.
We rested in a park before walking the rest of the way to the Victoria Square
subway station.
We watched boats pass
through the locks ("A lock is basically an elevator for boats,"
the sign told us), and we tried to make the Silophone work--these abandoned
grain silos are supposed to have great echoing properties, but the speaker/microphone
that Robert tried out on shore wasn't fully functional.
Lunch at Jean-Talon
Market and Dessert
Along with many, many
different day cares (apparently Thursday is trip day), we took the subway
to the Jean-Talon Market for lunch. We almost swooned at the wonderful fresh,
local fruit, nearly all of which had samples. Boston has no vaguely comparable
market, none at all. We lunched on a basket of Quebec native strawberries,
a slice of pate, a slab of raw milk goat cheese, a loaf of sundried tomato
fougasse, and a lemonade.
After lunch we walked
through Little Italy, stopping at spice stores along the way, and then we
walked all the way (too far, in the heat especially) to Les Petits Plasirs
d’Andrea: we bought small unusual food gift items (rose jelly, chocolate
mustard, custard tea) and we ate wonderful small-batch-made sorbets: a mango-Szechuan
peppercorn sorbet, and a strawberry-basil-vodka sorbet. Both were intense,
gem-colored, and beautiful.
Smoked meat dinner
Montreal smoke meat
is different than New York pastrami, brisket, or corned beef--we went to Schwartz's,
which had a huge line, but for two to sit at the counter, we were called in
only five minutes. Cash only, crowded, and lots of cherry sodas: the sandwiches
were great (we had one each) and the pickles quite good. We wandered around
and found a Breton Ice Cream and Crepe place for dessert, with a little sidewalk
seating area. Ah, raspberry and nutella crepes. . . .