Day 95: Montreal: Back to Supersize Coffee

October 24, 2015

Thankfully, I am not the only one who would often prefer quantity over quality when buying a coffee. For example, in Linz, Austria this year, the Klassens went for breakfast at McDonald's and commented on the benefit of receiving a North American sized coffee.

Despite this bias for big coffees, even I was surprised this morning at the arrival of a coffee large enough to drown a small child in. Here is the coffee, and the child:

Evee and Dodie also enjoy "non pudding" style hot chocolate.

Once the coffee was safely disposed of. we crossed the street from the cafe and returned to that little farmers' market, from which had come the baguette that turned out to really be from a local bakery. The farmer re-established his credentials when we discovered that he was raising chickens and turkeys, and could deliver a fresh one next Saturday. This is too late for us, for by then we will be 4600 km away, in Seattle. But it should be great for the family here.

Very small local market. Tomorrow we will make the trek to a giant one.

We also noticed that the market featured both a sheep and a shepherd. Both are welded from old farm implements!

For some reason, we told the farmer that we were recently returned from France, and we mentioned that the people there could tell we were from Quebec. He found that a bit incredible, since to his ear only our English accents were audible. That makes sense, since any Quebec accent would just sound normal to him. Interesting.

Our big tourist activity for today is to be the festival of lights at the botanic gardens. We have to wait for dark for that, so any report will come later.

Meanwhile, I have disassembled the bikes (remember the bikes?) ready to be packed into suitcases. There is no room to do this in the house, and outside - it's chilly! So the bikes and the cases wait patiently for us to build up the gumption to go get on with it. How the mighty (cyclists) have fallen!

Garden of Lights

In the shadow of the Olympic Stadium, Montreal has a major botanic garden. This includes a Chinese Garden and a Japanese Garden. Each Fall these gardens receive an installation of elaborate Chinese lanterns and other lighting effects. The Chinese lanterns include some of the traditional small round ones that most people are familiar with, but the main thing is the large ones. Each year these depict different themes. This year there were large hantpainted silk animal forms and scenes. Especially when installed out in a pond that is part of the Chinese garden, these produce a magical effect once darkness falls.

We headed out to the gardens just at dark, despite a bitter wind. We found there a very large crowd, slightly reminiscent of the Milan 2015 situation. Fortunately the long line moved forward quickly, and anyway Josh managed to buy our tickets from his smartphone as we waited, so we then went right in. The crowd moved slowly, clockwise through the gardens, but we found people were very polite and in a good mood. No shoving or cutting in!

Here is a small selection of what we saw:

The stadium from the 1976 olympics. Montreal finished paying off the 1.5 billion dollar deficit from these Olympics in 2006.

The lanterns - more like light sculptures - are made from silk and wire, and hand painted.

With the reflections on the water. the installation in the lake was the most impressive.

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