Montreal Update

Since I posted yesterday, I went for a walk. It started raining, and I kept walking. Just randomly walking around in the rain, getting wet. I don’t know how everyone here does it, but everyone else walking along was always looking dry. So anyway, I went a few kilometres in some random direction, and walked through a university of some description. I got directions to the main shopping area in the city, worked out I had to go due East for 1.4km. So I turned on the GPS and found my way there!

I’ve got heaps of photos of the walk, and of the shops. Lots of their big shopping centres are linked together so you don’t have to walk outside to get to other shops, which is pretty cool. You can even catch a sub from the level at the bottom of the shopping centre. I was thinking that Montreal is so nice, and how much I’d love to live here, but I wonder if I’d say that in a couple months time when it’s winter and down to -30C.

I bought a few things in the shops, and a lady I bought a couple things from gave me a list of pubs to visit. I then decided it was time to go back and rest up for a Saturday night out. Unfortunately I was a bit over confident with the direction I was going (to get back to the hotel), and after forty minutes I decided I was lost, so I turned on the GPS again and realised I had walked 40 minutes in the wrong direction, and was now 7km from the hotel – wooops! Love the personal sat. nav. – must be a geek thing.

We went on a pub crawl last night, having one or two drinks at every place, and we worked out the deal with the tipping (*I think*). The bar staff don’t get paid by the hour, and they earn ALL their money from tips! The only problem being that the “tax” gets taken out of the tips they make. Tax is about 8%, so it’s generally accepted you tip around 10% to 15% so that they make about 2% to 7% as their ‘income’. Supposably this avoids them having to charge us some other sort of tax. I don’t know!

By 3am everywhere closes, because I don’t think they’re allowed to sell alcohol after 3am. This was mildly dissappointing, although probably a good thing. Ben had beer confidence that he knew the way home, and I was encouraging him to try and find the way home by following his nose. I was looking forward to getting lost, just so I could have an excuse to crank out the GPS again! After we were about a kilometre in the wrong direction, I politely showed him which direction we had to go

Last night we spoke to a couple from Boston who recommended we go visit the “Bio Dome”, this big dome thing which has 3 or 4 different seasons of climate inside, with different plants/animals or something. I’m not really sure what it is, but it sounds like it’s something worth visiting so I’m going to go check that out right now. Afterwards I’ll probably go for a run in this park that from a map is about 10km^2.