What to say about our trip?  I'm going to split this in two I think, one for the actual rundown and one for some ruminating.

What we did: ate Pizza Hut and Casa Grecque, drank Starbucks and a nice local coffee place too.  Saw a show at the Planetarium, went to the Biodome, went book shopping (used bookstore + Chapters).  Caught a cold.

Actually the cold is kind of amusing now that it's mostly over - each of us getting the exact same symptoms in the same order, within hours of each other.  We've got a nice echo going - "I can't hear you; my ears are stopped!" "What did you say? I can't hear very well with this cold!"

Taking the night bus (giggle all you want, HP fans!) was a bad idea.  We thought it might be nice to have a whole day in front of us on our arrival, but we didn't sleep nearly as much as we thought we would and we were wasted.  Plus we got there at 7 a.m. and couldn't get in the hotel until 1 p.m. (check-in time was technically 3:00 so they were nice to us) so we spent half the day wandering around in a fog, and we never did quite catch up on our sleep until we got home.  But the hotel (once we found it - in the middle of a name change) was pretty nice although we suspect ours was once a smoking room.  It didn't smell like smoke but it smelled kind of musty sweet, like someone had tried to overpower a bad smell.  Ever since I was a kid I've loved flopping into a hotel bed and watching all the channels I can't get at home.  That part was just as good!  And I ate like a kid too, oatmeal creme pies, Nerds, chips, soda...I didn't feel so hot of course but it was nice to take a break from all the calorie counting I usually do.

The restaurant food was really good (except for the times we ate somewhere crappy out of desperation).  We had some frustrations at first trying to find a pizzeria that would deliver to our hotel (apparently there is a delivery black hole in downtown).  Then trying to find a Pizza Hut that had an actual dining room.  The first one we tried was one of those kitchen-only places with a few tables in the window.  But other than that...oh my god, was it ever good pizza!  Every pizza in our town tastes like wet cardboard or else costs half a week's pay.  And had a yummy filet mignon at Casa Grecque with their equally yummy house salad.  And I didn't realize how much I missed having access to a decent coffee shop.  I was so addicted to those specialty drinks in college!  Here the best we can get is Dunkin smoothies or an Iced Capp from Tim's.  Not bad, but no Starbucks.

We didn't do a lot of shopping really, but I did take advantage of our trip to pick up some pocket paperbacks in English since the English reading material I brought with me is getting pretty familiar.  It felt so nice, so familiar, being in a nice big bookstore like Chapters, or the crammed-to-the-gills used bookstore we found.  I hadn't realized how much I missed my English.

And we were there right in the middle of the big metro ("subway") shutdown.  They found some cracks in one of the stations and a big department store just above it, I think not coincidentally in the same area that they were doing some road work to put in a median and a bicycle lane.  So they shut down a large portion of one of the main lines of the metro for the entire weekend, to be safe.  Fortunately there's a second line that runs pretty much parallel just a few blocks away, so it wasn't really a major hangup, except that now twice the traffic was squeezed onto this line and everywhere we went it was seriously crowded.  Incidentally, and this is so silly of me, I love the subway!  You see it so much on TV and in movies, and it's like something that all the cool kids do and suddenly you're doing it too!  And you watch your expression in the door and try to look (and act) like an old pro but the whole time you're just sitting there thinking "Glee!  It's SO FAST! Wheeeee!"  And it was hot and humid the whole time, worse underground - but that's Montreal in summer.

We both enjoyed the biodome, even though we went last time too.  It's essentially an indoor medium to small animal zoo that recreates different climate zones.  The habitats are decently simulated and they have lots of space, so it seems like a pretty nice place for the animals.  This time around we happened to be observing the underwater habitat at feeding time - that was a blast!  I loved watching the little ducks and seabirds dive, weaving between the fish, rocketing through the water, little feet paddling away.  And of course everyone's favorite, the arctic habitat - all penguins and puffins.  I narrated for one little puffin as I watched him struggle to get as high as he could up the fake cliff, and for a little dispute between the penguins ("MY rock! Back off!").  And as often happens when I get close to animals, I attracted a friend!  One of the penguins kept swimming back and forth in front of me where I was standing at the glass (I know it was the same one because they had colored armbands).  I tried to be modest and say it was my bright colored shirt, but honestly I was pretty stoked that he seemed to like me!

After we made the tour we went to see the narrated video presentation of "When Animals Speak of Love," about attraction, mate selection, and offspring-rearing.  It was nice and humorous, made me laugh several times ("Raise your hands -if you were a female moose, would you pick A, B, or C for a mate?  Okay, those of you that picked C...that's an ostrich.  It has feathers, see...").  I didn't learn much that was new but I was still happy I got to see it.

And the next day we went to the planetarium.  It was a pretty basic show, talking about supernovas, pulsars, black holes, constellations and light pollution.  I learned that the light halo for Montreal is as powerful as that of New York City, although Montreal is only 1/4 the population, and that Montreal's halo is visible from Burlington, VT, 100 miles away.  My favorite part though was when they were showing us the sky from the southern hemisphere and then slowly rotated it to show the northern hemisphere.  I confess I grabbed the armrests to steady myself!

We decided that there was no way we could stand another overnight trip, and since bus tickets have no set time/date, we paid for an extra night at the hotel and left out in the afternoon instead.  It was quite pleasant until we got about midway - the next bus for our route was packed solid.  We couldn't even sit together.  We were lucky enough to sit across the aisle from each other but it was still a lot of panic and stress - "Is this our bus?  Is there room?"  DH was furious and I was near tears at some point.  I know it doesn't sound like such a big deal but for us it was.  Add to that that neither of our seatmates were pleasant company (I think mine was where we got the cold, he was hacking rather spectacularly from time to time; I gave myself a backache trying to lean away from him).

But I still had a pleasant trip.  I'm not sure for DH, as I think I mentioned somewhere else.  Even for me it wasn't so much what we did or where we went as it was just seeing the city and all the thoughts and feelings I had from being there.  More on that next time.