Saturday, September 10, 2011

Montreal - day 2

Our first full day in Canada started with us running into the "Le Marathon des Arts" festival. We witnessed the opening parade and lion dancers:




For lunch, we found a great vegetarian place called Commensal, where food is sold by weight. It was a lot like Souper!Salad! - except nicer, hipper, and with good food.



Afterward, we made our way to a couple of dual purpose bike shops that I had read about. Le Grande Cycle is a small shop that had an unridden Gary Fischer Klunker for a really reasonable price ($495) that I really wanted. They also have a small cafe inside. The other shop is called BikeCurious. It's also a small neighborhood shop that - surprise, surprise - is gay and lesbian friendly. They have a small barber shop inside and offer "lesbian haircuts for anyone."


After the requisite bike shop stops, we made our way to Chinatown, passing along the way a Ferrari Daytona (a pretty rare car that I have never seen in the wild):


a sidewalk tribute to Leonard Cohen:


And finally, the Chinatown arch:



Then we made our way down to Vieux-Montréal and Vieux-Port (Old Montréal and Old Port). The old part of the city is pretty touristy, so we didn't stay long:







On our way back to the hotel, we passed a number of weddings being photographed:


We also saw a bunch of BIXI bikes for rent in town. I believe Austin will have similar bike rental stations soon:


Jill finished off the night working on her novel:



No comments: