Bienvenue de Montreal
synn and I went to Montreal for a week!
Neither of us had ever visited. We ate all of the things.* We also walked around all day almost every day to explore neighborhoods, sites, and museums, despite the nippy winter-into-spring weather: at or just below freezing most days, blustery, flurries. It wasn't too bad for me because Boston has been having a late, cold spring, but poor synn flew up from balmy North Carolina. The first front blew in on the evening we arrived, knocking over the bajillion road construction signs and sandwich boards as we leaned into the snowy gusts and cried, "Pourquoi????"
We spent Friday at a Supernatural con: synn is a fan of the show and I have liked one of the con guests, Sebastian Roché-who played a recurring character named Balthazar for, IIRC what synn said, one season out of 13, but SPN fans never forget-for, yikes, 20 years now, and never had the chance to meet him. We went to his Q&A, we took a silly Official Photo where synn suffered me to ask him to pretend to be evil vampire Mikael from The Vampire Diaries/The Originals and we pretended to be scared, and thanks to synn's sneaky generosity, I was also treated to a seat at his meet and greet, where seven attendees and Sebastian chatted around a table for 45 minutes. It was super nice. I also enjoyed the Q&A with Lisa Berry (Billy) and Kim Rhodes (Jody). Much more sedate and heartfelt than Sebastian's, who spent most of his time jumping on chairs and singing a dumb (but I guess charming) song with and about the house band. He did speak a lot of French, though, while making fun of Quebecois vs. France-French accents and lingo, which made my teenage heart go pitter-patter. And he made no secret of his attraction to Misha Collins, including, while answering an audience question about which cast member he would choose to be his slave for the day, the title of my new favorite Dr. Seuss book: "Mish on a Leash."
On the weekend we met up with
xenophonique and were introduced to
lunarflares, both delightful. We snacked our way through a maple syrup festival*-it's the tail end of maple-tapping season there-before retiring to xen's beautiful apartment for afternoon tea and conversation. A wonderful oasis during our city visit.
We checked out the cemetery and chalet-slash-lookout point atop Mont Royal, accidentally/on purpose got lost in the Underground City, and remarked on how the architecture varied so widely from street to street. We managed three museums:
*Okay but seriously so many delicious eats. Patisserie! Apple strudel from Hof Kelsten and almond croissant from Maison Christian Faure! Chewy Montreal bagel from St. Viateur's "Maison du Bagel," rosemary flavored! Brisket pastrami sandwich with pickle from Schwartz's deli! We treated ourselves to one fancy dinner, a six-course tasting menu at Ile Flottante, beautiful plate after beautiful plate of mainly vegetable dishes with playful colors, textures, shapes, flavors, forms (leek foam, ash). Maple taffy, sweet maple mustard, tart maple vinaigrette, maple-cured bison on a sesame cracker, maple steamed buns, maple pulled-pork taco, maple-drizzled fried ham and cheese ball, two kinds of sweet-sour-savory maple meatballs. Sickly sweet thimbleful of ice cider. Poutine at La Banquise, because we had to: one classic and one Tex-Mex with ground beef, tomatoes, guacamole and hot peppers. Both were fine. I wouldn't go out of my way to have it, but it wasn't bad, just heavy. And a nice dinner in Little Italy of family-style eggplant ragu and mushroom and pancetta cavatelli. The most adorable steamed buns from Bao Bao Dim Sum. Other culinary miscellany, plus soup from Chinatown near our hotel, because synn came down with a chest cold our last couple of days. Valiant synn who still ventured out each morning, determined to check off items on our itinerary before needing late-afternoon siestas.
Now back to regular life: work and chores, reading, radical weather shifts, and hopefully soon, back to vidding.
Originally posted at https://bironic.dreamwidth.org/368998.html, where there are
comments.
Neither of us had ever visited. We ate all of the things.* We also walked around all day almost every day to explore neighborhoods, sites, and museums, despite the nippy winter-into-spring weather: at or just below freezing most days, blustery, flurries. It wasn't too bad for me because Boston has been having a late, cold spring, but poor synn flew up from balmy North Carolina. The first front blew in on the evening we arrived, knocking over the bajillion road construction signs and sandwich boards as we leaned into the snowy gusts and cried, "Pourquoi????"
We spent Friday at a Supernatural con: synn is a fan of the show and I have liked one of the con guests, Sebastian Roché-who played a recurring character named Balthazar for, IIRC what synn said, one season out of 13, but SPN fans never forget-for, yikes, 20 years now, and never had the chance to meet him. We went to his Q&A, we took a silly Official Photo where synn suffered me to ask him to pretend to be evil vampire Mikael from The Vampire Diaries/The Originals and we pretended to be scared, and thanks to synn's sneaky generosity, I was also treated to a seat at his meet and greet, where seven attendees and Sebastian chatted around a table for 45 minutes. It was super nice. I also enjoyed the Q&A with Lisa Berry (Billy) and Kim Rhodes (Jody). Much more sedate and heartfelt than Sebastian's, who spent most of his time jumping on chairs and singing a dumb (but I guess charming) song with and about the house band. He did speak a lot of French, though, while making fun of Quebecois vs. France-French accents and lingo, which made my teenage heart go pitter-patter. And he made no secret of his attraction to Misha Collins, including, while answering an audience question about which cast member he would choose to be his slave for the day, the title of my new favorite Dr. Seuss book: "Mish on a Leash."
On the weekend we met up with
xenophonique and were introduced to
lunarflares, both delightful. We snacked our way through a maple syrup festival*-it's the tail end of maple-tapping season there-before retiring to xen's beautiful apartment for afternoon tea and conversation. A wonderful oasis during our city visit.
We checked out the cemetery and chalet-slash-lookout point atop Mont Royal, accidentally/on purpose got lost in the Underground City, and remarked on how the architecture varied so widely from street to street. We managed three museums:
- The modern art museum, where we inadvertently hit peak Montreal by wandering through their current exhibit on Leonard Cohen. The curators had built literal temples to this guy, from a small wooden cathedral, dark, hushed, in which microphones hung from the ceiling while a recorded chorus hummed "Hallelujah" in surround sound, to a Stonehenge-like ring of video screens of aging men trying to synchronize a recitation of his lyrics, to a "depression room"-"intended as a solo experience"-where, presumably, the people waiting in line would be able to commune with Cohen's spirit one on one.
- The fine arts museum: enormous, impressive, comprehensive. My favorites were the Inuit art floor (and the integration of native and non-native painting and sculpture in other galleries), the contemporary furniture and industrial design collection, and a particular painting at the entrance to a gallery about Canada finding its identity during the initial era of Western "settlement," because this painting, both disturbing and hilarious, portrays the horrors of colonization and fur trapping from the point of view of the beavers. (Perhaps obviously: warning for animal harm.) It is by Kent Monkman, who is part Cree and part Irish and who, I have since learned, paints and sculpts all sorts of striking, subversive subjects, often focusing on mistreatment of native populations and playing with artistic traditions. A+, all beavers go to heaven.
- The natural history museum at McGill, a nice collection of shells, fossils, rocks/minerals, cultural artifacts and taxidermied regional wildlife in an interior hall that reminded me of a couple of English museums of medical curiosities that I visited with
deelaundry.
xenakis probably knows what it's called, beyond the website's description of "an idiosyncratic expression of eclectic Victorian Classicism." I learned a lot about shrunken-head production.
*Okay but seriously so many delicious eats. Patisserie! Apple strudel from Hof Kelsten and almond croissant from Maison Christian Faure! Chewy Montreal bagel from St. Viateur's "Maison du Bagel," rosemary flavored! Brisket pastrami sandwich with pickle from Schwartz's deli! We treated ourselves to one fancy dinner, a six-course tasting menu at Ile Flottante, beautiful plate after beautiful plate of mainly vegetable dishes with playful colors, textures, shapes, flavors, forms (leek foam, ash). Maple taffy, sweet maple mustard, tart maple vinaigrette, maple-cured bison on a sesame cracker, maple steamed buns, maple pulled-pork taco, maple-drizzled fried ham and cheese ball, two kinds of sweet-sour-savory maple meatballs. Sickly sweet thimbleful of ice cider. Poutine at La Banquise, because we had to: one classic and one Tex-Mex with ground beef, tomatoes, guacamole and hot peppers. Both were fine. I wouldn't go out of my way to have it, but it wasn't bad, just heavy. And a nice dinner in Little Italy of family-style eggplant ragu and mushroom and pancetta cavatelli. The most adorable steamed buns from Bao Bao Dim Sum. Other culinary miscellany, plus soup from Chinatown near our hotel, because synn came down with a chest cold our last couple of days. Valiant synn who still ventured out each morning, determined to check off items on our itinerary before needing late-afternoon siestas.
Now back to regular life: work and chores, reading, radical weather shifts, and hopefully soon, back to vidding.
Originally posted at https://bironic.dreamwidth.org/368998.html, where there are
comments.