If only it were so.
Well, I guess the good thing about being so behind on my posts is that the binoculars of time make it easier to trim the fat and just focus on the highlights.
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Saturday, June 6th in Montréal: exploring the Old Town and the Old Port.
We spent this day exploring streets, buildings and monuments too numerous to track. I'll show you my favorite in a little while.
But first, I'll head straight to the highlight of my day: I got to be THAT GIRL. The one who the really cute street-performer guy with the dreadlocks picked out of the big crowd to assist him with his nutty knife-throwing, fire-juggling, and laying-on-spikes tricks.
I did not, however, get to help with his "Great Balls of Fire" trick.
Really, that's what he called it.
Of course, this had to be the one day when I wore shorts, something that I recently told Melanie W. that I would NEVER WEAR IN PUBLIC except perhaps for hiking/camping. Because they are flattering on ALMOST NO ONE BUT TODDLERS. And on runners. Some runners. Well, I brought them along in case of hiking, but decided I'd wear them in public on just this one day because it was the only day during our entire trip that was expected to be warm. So, be warned, people: I'm wearing shorts, and the legs are late-May/early-June/I-haven't-yet-bothered-with-tan-in-a-bottle PASTY. Never again. Because I never know when I'll be picked to be THAT GIRL again. Yeah, in like 30 years.
This big guy was also chosen as an assistant. So, Shirtless Kilt Guy was going to lay on this spike-covered board (obscured in this photo by the "DANGER" sign temporarily resting on top of it for the practice round), and then one of us was going to stand on him while the other one helped stabilize and balance the stander. The crowd got to vote about which of us should do which job.
Of course they picked the big guy to do the standing.
Shirtless kilt guy begins his descent onto the spike-covered board...
You probably can't see it here, but I'm grimacing.
At this point, Bryce is so stupefied that he forgets to take a picture while the big guy is actually standing on him.
Shirtless Kilt Guy survived the trick. But not without getting some gnarly craters on his back.
When he wasn't defying death, he was usually making us laugh. I apologize for the sideways nature of the following video (I occasionally forget that I can't rotate videos like I can rotate photos), but it's awfully funny. And it gives you a taste of the fun way he mixed French and English. I hereby dedicate the first half of this video to Aunt Nancy and my dad, and the second half to Melanie W. and Dustin C.
For his final trick, I just had to pass him stuff.
Shortly thereafter, we ended up in the Chateau Ramezay, a quirky museum in the Old City. There are dozens of museums we would have liked to have explored in Montréal and Québec City, but as it turned out, this was the only one we entered because there was so much to do and see that we weren't able to devote a morning or afternoon to another museum during the rest of the trip. This wouldn't have been my first choice of all the museum options, but we needed a restroom break, and knew we didn't have enough time that afternoon to go to one of the museums that were higher on our priority list. Fortunately, our serendipitous stop rewarded us richly, with a quirky mix of historical artifacts and contemporary objects, and a fun installation on the history of the bicycle. The bicycle exhibit alone would have been worth the price of admission. I took dozens of pictures there, but here are just a few.
The cutest baby booties I have ever seen:
I'm sure you must be wondering what this is:
Yeah, you read that correctly. It's a dog-powered spit-turner. Poor little doggies...
And this is a water fountain and wash basin:
Basically, this was a bathroom sink prior to plumbing. The basin did not empty itself automatically, nor did the fountain refill itself automatically.
For an early dinner, we ended up at a little Italian restaurant, where we were the sole patrons until halfway through our meal, and where we managed to score our most "non-awful photograph of BOTH of us" for that day:
Following dinner, we went back to the Basilique Notre Dame, which we had admired from the outside earlier, because a wedding had kept us from being permitted to enter. You may find that I spent an awful lot of time admiring churches on this trip, but the Basilique Notre Dame was definitely the most beautiful one we saw... possibly the most beautiful I have ever seen, possibly even eclipsing the beauty of the Paris Notre Dame Cathedral in my view.
We arrived just in time to snap up some remaining tickets for a light-and-sound show they present in the Basilique on some evenings. It illustrates the history of the city and the Basilique, and it's terribly cheesy, but at the end, you are rewarded with this jaw-dropping eye candy:
After the show, we were allowed to walk around and take pictures for a few minutes. My photos don't do it justice. There are many better shots on the website, but they don't even come close to conveying the beauty of it.
One unique aspect of the Basilique is that many of its paintings and stained-glass windows depict events in Montréal's history.
There was so much more packed into this day than what you see here, but the Basilique is the part that I remember most vividly and fondly. I am a big sucker for beautiful churches and religious iconography, which may seem ironic, given my views on religion.
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Coming soon (or whenever I get around to it): DRAG QUEENS!!! Day 3 of our trip will make day 2 look like a geriatrics' tourbus daytrip.
