Late Spring in French Canada
Wooden sea anemones.
The 90s-inspired Place d'Armes, where my conference was.
Basilique Notre-Dame, right next to my hotel on Saint Sulpice.
From the top of Mont-Royal.
City panorama - you can see the St. Lawerence River in the distance.
Chalet du Mont-Royal on Kondiaronk Belvedere.
Parc du Mont-Royal. The park was designed by Olmstead, the same guy who did the design of Central Park.
Around the Latin Quarter.
On the Main during Main Fest, or Boulevard St. Laurent.
After this we went to a too-fancy restaurant, the Globe, where every single waitress is an Amazonian model & one of them used to be George Clooney's gf.
Radio Lounge on the Main - you'd think it was a sports bar going by the exterior but no.
WHADDUP
The Great Dane, Rapunzel, is moping from on high.
Mostly around Vieux Montréal, or the old city.
I like Café Apropos with the Magritte-looking, faceless guy.
The Saint Lawrence River & King Edward Port.
Habitat 67 by Moshe Safdie (created in 1967 for the World Fair - he was only 23!). A land-filled jetty meant to protect the harbor from currents & ice.
Maybe this is my ignorance speaking, but I cannot believe World Fairs are still going on! 2010's will be in Shanghai. I thought that was some turn-of-the-century thing passing from the 19th to the 20th century but apparently no.
The traveling Cirque du Soleil, which originated in Montréal. I tried to casually get a ticket & they were like, "it's sold out for the summer," then after holding their glower on me for a sec, they were like, "you can still get tickets, they're just scattered and you won't be able to find any together." So after exploring that option, I didn't want to spot $140 on a seat at the backmost corner of the second balcony.
Marché Bonsecours - used to be an agricultural market, now it's a market of bourgeois bull.
The Biosphére on Île-Sainte-Hélène. The old polymer panels burned out in a fire & all that's left is a skeleton of this geodesic dome.
The other island, Île Notre-Dame, was created with the stone rubble excavated from the construction of the Metro system.
The houses surrounding Square Saint-Louis.
Near Square Saint-Louis / Prince-Arthur Street in the Latin Quarter.
The Montréal Spaceship at Olympic Park. (Montréal Tower Observatory)
It reminded me of Milwaukee's Calatrava - but that's only because I'm not an architect. Every Calatrava design I've seen is straight out of Dubai, and all of them make me shudder a lil' (not from disgust, from fright!).
Bugs' eye view - the Botanical Gardens.
The Chinese Garden at Montréal's Botanical Gardens.
GOOD Magazine just posted a link to a recent report of the 25 most dangerous neighborhoods in the US. I got really engrossed in looking through the list and then searching for maps from the areas I've blithely walked about in or stayed in in the recent past. If you're curious, neighborhoods in cities like Chicago / Cincinnati / Baltimore / Philadelphia / Richmond / Memphis / etc are listed with crime statistics. Several neighborhoods threaten a 1 in 4 chance of being a victim within one year.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Someday, soon, I'll update on my real life. All I've been on top of here are work trips, which are always so separate. I have a lot in my wake and even more coming up, a great deal to look forward to. I'm leaving for Michigan tomorrow morning & heading up to the Upper Peninsula, so I'll have more than a week of long bike rides, saunas, cool afternoons sailing on & swimming in Lake Huron, chanterelle & raspberry-hunting, long shore hikes to homes reclaimed by nature, wide-open hours ripe for cooking and photo-editing projects, empty evenings for Six Feet Under & Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and so, so many great books that I can finally spend my time with! I really never consider bringing anyone with me because it's the only time I really have for myself the whole year, but I also haven't known as many people as I do now that would be perfect companions.
