April 2007 Archives

apples vs. oranges

apparently he thinks i am his ticket to fame.

even though like 0.3 people read this.

so we were only in montreal for two days really. the second day we just climbed mt. royal. and walked around basically. and came home sunday.

maybe the weekend after that i flew to virginia to see my family for easter.

last weekend was a four day weekend, which was kind.

the weather was absurdly warm today [high: eighty-seven].

i got my class ring. i feel a little awkward about it. like, am i buying into the mit brand? but it is shiny. and who doesn't want a ring with a big fat beaver on it?

the weather was also really nice this weekend. on saturday rian & i walked to central square and i bought nail polish. and then we ate at pu pu hot pot and got ice cream at toscanini's and were halfway home to bexley when i realized my nail polish was still in a bag on a table at pu pu hot pot. so we had to go all the way back, but i got it. and i painted my nails hot pink.

last night i had ANOTHER anxiety dream about being late for a flight. except i did make the flight in this dream.

i cleaned my room today. it looks significantly nicer, i think. it's funny, because lauren always comes home and is like :OOOOOO SO CLEAN !!!!11 and i tell rian, "i cleaned my room !!!" and he comes over and is like, "... looks the same." or "you call this cleaning?"

and i was sweeping while our cleaning lady was doing the bathroom and she came through with her dustpan-on-a-stick and helped pick up the pile i swept into the middle of the room. and we had a kind little chat. i didn't know she was colombian until today.

and tomorrow i will take the plastic golden egg i found the morning before i left for easter to the student center and redeem it for a $20 gift certificate to the galleria.

and then maybe i will buy some flip-flops. and a lilly tunic or something for summer.

sex sex sex for erek speed.

drama drama drama for clacky.

kindness for egg.

unkindness for dugan.

i'm playing some star wars game in the lounge with tyler and klacky.

we watched COMMITTED and it was a very very very bad movie.

egg thought she saw a really big bug but she prolly didn't.

this is a blog.

okay bye !!!

we got off the metro at mont royal and started wandering up the street, people-watching, looking for somewhere to eat, and STARVING. or at least, i was starving.

after wandering for a few blocks, and someone vetoing each place that was pointed out, we agreed to go back to one of the first places we saw to eat.

our waiter there ended up being pretty bitchy. we came up with a few hypotheses:

1 he was uncomfortable speaking english
2 he hated americans
3 he was having a bad day
4 he was just BITCHY

he was really slow about everything and didn't bring us the POUTINE we ordered [which was prolly a good thing because 1 we were full with the rest of the food we ordered and 2 poutine is disgusting] or the dessert that came with the specials until we asked.

but we made use of the long wait for everything by taking pictures of each other.

after eating, paying, & peacing, we wandered around mont royal a little more, looking for 1) somewhere to get more canadian money and 2) a liquor store.

money was easy: we soon found an atm.

asking people where to find the nearest liquor store was a little sketchier. got a few tourists by accident. also didn't want to ask anyone who looked my parents' age or up. but eventually we found our way there. i bought some gin, was carded ["do you have hi-dee?"], and gave them my real id and it was okay! how exciting. heart canada.

bought some toothpaste & shampoo in a cute little grocery store next door, then back to the hostel. we had some quiet time, freshened up, then started planning our evening.

this involved hanging our map on the wall of our gypsy caravan, going through a list of bars that looked fun [our criteria were: not too french & hopefully other young people], google-mapping them and marking them on our real map to figure out our route. we also started drinking a lilly bit of our gin. [we also might have watched the x-files?]

ka chu & klack left me and rian alone for too long and i started taking dark blurry pictures of him. see figure 1.

once it was late enough, we set out on the town, heading up boulevard st. laurent. we stopped for poutine, because ka chu's stomach is neverending. after poutine, despite all our little marks on the map, we only ended up going to one bar: bifteck. wikitravel says:

Some of the cheapest beer in town, served with some of the saltiest popcorn in all of Creation, consumed by bohemians and students from near and far (and the occasional honest-to-God rock star). Great place to start or end a St-Laurent pub crawl: to the south, you'll find trendy, relatively expensive places; to the north, some of the best dive bars anywhere. Or you can just stay and get tanked.

the popcorn was certainly delicious [& salty], and we downed two pitchers of beer along with it, making friends with some random bar people at the same time [a youngish couple who said they had just graduated from mcgill, i think].

by the second pitcher, i was pretty sleepy, so rian and i just went back to the gypsy caravan for sleep, while ka chu & clicky went off to have further adventures involving 99 cent pizza and too much hot sauce.

day one in montreal = complete.

clicky, kachu, rian, & i left for south station thursday night to hop a bus to montreal.

we napped most of the seven hours there, waking only to be hustled through customs. no, i'm not bringing any weapons into canada.

when we got to la station centrale d'autobus de montreal, we realised we had

1 no canadian currency
2 no map to the youth hostel where we had booked beds online [although i had printed one out & told klacky to pick it up from the printer, he had been too flustered by the disappearance of his boston red sox cap to remember to do so]

also, it was 6:45 am and we were very tired.

fortunately, the chu got a free map from information [although it wasn't detailed enough to have rue st vincent on it].
fortunately, a convenience store at the bus station took american money [at a one-to-one exchange rate], so i bought a more detailed map.
fortunately, some canadian guy was travelling to new york and wanted american money, so we were able to get $65 canadian.

and soon we were roaming around montreal in the very wee hours of the morning, exhausted. we found our hostel, but check-in wasn't until eight [and even then it was an extra $8/person because check-in really wasn't until two], so we had time to kill. we searched for breakfast.

first, we sat down in a tim hortons to get out of the cold, but then we realised we didn't want anything from there. a block away, we stopped at a little diner.

our waiter was very friendly. he asked us where we were from & strongly recommended 'the clubbing scene' in montreal. he also suggested climbing mont royal, which kachu got really excited about.

after eating breakfast, we were able to check into our hostel. except the hostess was like [in a cute french accent], 'oh, your cabin isn't heated yet & your air mattresses aren't inflated.' and all we wanted to do was collapse in bed and take our $8 dollar naps.

so we marched out back to our gypsy caravan and found our cozy little room with two twin beds & not much space. also, it was freezing. but at least the mattresses were inflated enough to sleep on. [i had imagined shriveled up mattresses with hardly any air in them, but they were just a little more giving than they ought to have been.] so we turned on the space heater, huddled under the covers, and took a nap.

we woke up four hours later with plans to go to the biodôme, because klacky saw some stupid movie and was really excited about it.

we figured out how to use the metro, although we didn't figure out that if you buy six tickets it is just as cheap as the four we bought, and arrived at the biodôme. [we even changed lines!]

after walking around the entire thing before finding the entrance, we made friends with fredrick, the biodôme ticket salesman. he asked click how noam was doing, after looking at his student ID, and told me that he used to have blue hair after looking at mine.

the biodôme was pretty cool, even though clack told us it was a self-sustaining ecosystem, and really it was just a fancy zoo [we saw penguins & fish being fed.] however, we got to see lots of animals from pretty close up, including capybaras, adorable tiny monkeys, piranhas, bats, caimans, birds, porcupines, & more. there were four 'ecosystems': humid rainforest, boring normal forest [invisible otters, beavers hiding in their dam, bobcat napping mostly out of sight], boring seashore [don't need to go to the zoo to see seagulls], and antarctic penguin city.

after our exploration of the four ecosystems, we went to the basement to use the toilettes & found a photo booth!!! we are in another country, so for some reason this seems like a fun thing to do. well, it only takes one or two dollar coins, so after standing around for a bit, i go up to the coat check counter and before i even know what's happening, the woman there has said something in french and made change for a five. i smile, take the money, and walk away.

the cool thing about montreal is that the first language is french, so it really is like being in another country. but the scary thing is that people will assume you speak french, and i had no idea what to do most of the time that happened. exciting.

so we put our money in and before we knew what was going on, FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH. and then we just kind of sat there. what just happened? on the booth it said there were a bunch of steps, like choosing a decorative background, etc. we thought maybe we did something wrong since the machine didn't seem to be doing anything. but apparently it takes THREE MINUTES for your pictures to be processed. and the choices of decorative background are: 1) curtain behind you or 2) no curtain behind you.

the pictures turned out all right, even if i have a double chin in one. katharine chu has them somewhere, so i can't post them for your viewing pleasure.

we went back upstairs and asked fredrick where we should go exploring. he pointed us in the direction of mont royal and off we went.

TO BE CONTINUED...