Montreal

Today we caught the Metro towards the centre of Montreal, and then followed the underground tunnels through part of the city. It really is an underground city - shopping malls 2 and 3 floors high, all underground. There's buildings above it all, but it seems they're gradually building more underneath it all. It wasn't so necessary today in the 20C sunny weather we had, but it does mean you don't have to dodge traffic all the time.

When we did surface we wondered where all the people were - it was like a ghost town. We finally managed to find some when we got to Basilica Notre Dame. After checking it out, we wandered through Old Montreal and then sort of stumbled across the waterfront. This was where all the people were! It seemed like everyone had come out to enjoy the sun and warmer weather, be it on foot, on rollerblades, bikes of various shapes and sizes, or just sunbaking on the grass.

Then we saw a guy go flying by on a Segway! He had a shirt on that suggested there was a rental place for them somewhere, so we immediately went on search to find it....

And find it we did :)

Here's the result:


They are amazingly simple to ride. To go forward or backwards you basically have to think about moving, and voila! Em and I are totally hooked, and if they didn't cost $8000 Australian, we'd be totally sold on them.

After we gave the Segways back (and came to terms with having to move our legs to move again) we walked back to the nearest Metro station and headed over to Ile St Helene (St Helen's Island) to check out the Biosphere. It is impressively huge. I don't know if the photos will do it justice - it's 62 metres high, so probably 10 or 12 floors tall.

Here's all the photos from the day:
http://picasaweb.google.com/aaron77/Montreal

Tonight for dinner we just had to try Montreal's specialty, Poutine. It's french fries and cheese curds covered in hot gravy. As a friend of a friend described it "it's 0% healthy and 100% fat". It was quite filling, and neither Em nor myself managed to finish it off.

This is what it looked like:
http://picasaweb.google.com/aaron77/Poutine

It's quite strange here being so far north. It's after 9pm and there's still a little bit of light left in the sky. Not much, mind you, but more than there'd ever be at this time of night in Brisbane. It's making it hard to get to bed at a decent hour when the sun doesn't actually set till about 8pm.

Tomorrow we're going to drive up Mont Royal and have one final look at the city before we head on to Ottawa. It's only a little over 2 hours drive, so it will be our shortest leg of the trip so far.