The Rest of the Montréal Stay

On Wednesday we relaxed and recovered from our collective heat-stroke, foot pain and head-rattlage. Kev and I popped out to do some more DVD hunting at another Future Shop and Best Buy, and had more luck this time. I might miss something, but our DVD collection additions list looks something like this:

• ER Season 5 (I think)
  
• Dazed & Confused - Criterion Edition
  
• Zoolander (that's mine)
  
• Superstar (mine too)
  
• The War Of The Roses (yep)
  
• Due South (Kev's)
  
• Terminator 3 (guess)
  
• Final Fantasy: Advent Children (...)
  
• March Of The Penguins (we only saw the first half on the plane, and it's such a gripping narrative...)
  

We were looking for Frasier 8, if I'm not mistaken, but no luck, or at least not for a reasonable price. I'm not completely sold on the premise that Canadian DVD retailers sell for cheaper than online Australian stores etc, so I'll look for my Sex & The City collection when I get home. Which, incidentally, is in three days.

After our intense shopping experiences we popped into the mall and had Burger King for lunch, where we were served by the surliest, most incompetent girl imaginable. Yuck. But hey, I was still buoyed by my near-head-injury giddiness so I let it go.

Home, and I remember us watching South Park, or was that Tuesday night? We watched the episode where Cartman finally gets his million dollars and buys an amusement park for his sole use because he was sick of waiting in lines! Ah, empathy.

Ah, I remember. We went out to "Mix Movies In The Park" and saw 'Fun With Dick & Jane' which was surpringly better than I expected. Kev was apparently frustrated by all the 'hedging' before the whole robbery stuff, but I had no idea what the movie was about so that wasn't a problem for me. Ah, innocence... We were joined by Kev's old Uni friends Bev and Nick, and I also finally met the renowned Callaghan, who did not disappoint. (Anyone who knows me who is intrigued by this comment, or wants the goss on any of Kev's friends need only email me. Oooh, how leading...) Afterwards we went to Cheaters restaurant, whose name does not refer to adultery but in fact to cheating on your diet. We had disappointing waffles and some low-key banter, before calling it a night.

A note about Cheaters - they serve the "Australian Waffle" which is topped with kiwi (ok...), pineapple (...sure) and strawberries (what?). Fair dinkum. I guess the cook was served pavlova once while Down Under and assumed the patriotic side refered to the fruit...

On Thursday we explored some of Old Montréal (including the Basilica of Notre Dame, where Celine Dion got married! Wooo! I would describe the things we saw but this person did it already, so...) until it started raining. We took cover in a Tim Hortons where Kev bought lunch. The place was packed, understandably, and a lady offered us a seat at her table. Well, when I say offered, I should really say "she conceded, after long and pointed stares from us, that it was a tad selfish of her to take up a four seater table by herself." Then, foolishly, I said something to Kev, and the lady (American) became all excited when she recognised my accent, and proceeded to talk about her travels in the N.T. and blah blah blah. Then her (American) husband joined us at the table, picks up the conversation, and thanks me - as a representative of all of Australia - for joining the war effort in Iraq! Not awkward at all... But that wasn't all. Oh no. We are then joined by a random lady who has noticed my "friendly" accent, and introduced herself as "random" from Hobart. She speaks to the Americans for a bit, then the conversation runs dry and she sort of stands there uncomfortably. She finally excuses herself, the Americans also leave, and we spot that the rain has ceased so we split too.

All I wanted as a souvenir from Canada was a singlet top saying "Canada" or "Montréal" but they all seemed to be designed to stop at the belly-button on women with very small breasts... So on me they were a few centimetres short of a crop-top.

We spent the rest of the day shopping, but to find out where and for what you will have to be a close friend and email me privately.

In the evening we went over to Tracy's house, as that was where Chris had spent the day. They had tried to disguise the marijuana fog with a quick spray of air freshner. Subtle. We held our noses and walked through to the living room, and watched a couple of episodes of Scrubs. Mmmm, Scrubs. Maybe that should be my next DVD collection purchase. We then headed into 'Downtown Montréal' to do a spot of shopping in the underground malls (but failed to find anything interesting)and then had dinner at Nickels (which used to be owned by Celine Dion - ooh, if only I was a fan!) and had a fairly ordinary chicken-y fettucine-y plate. The gimmick apparently is that if you buy a beer, you get the second beer for a nickel. There used to be a whole bunch of nickel-oriented offers but I guess they can't afford it now that Celine pulled her finger out.

We decided to watch 'Dazed & Confused' at Tracy's, so we got the gang together again (Tracy, Chris, Lou, Vince, his girlfriend, and later Justin) to eat popcorn and relive the 70's. I loved the movie, so much better than other movies that "show" the way things were rather than truly fleshing out the world. If famous faces like Ben Affleck and Parker Posey hadn't been in it, I wouldn't have known it wasn't made in the 70's for real... Oh, and Best. Soundtrack. Ever.

Friday was going home day. Steph made her way to Chris's house while Kev and I watched some 'Due South' which I quite enjoyed. Then we drove back to Cumberland with a stop at Harvey's for a Kev Burger and a Jess Burger. If you're seen/heard the ad you'll understand. If you're Australian, know this - the Jess Burger wasn't actually made out of Jess meat, ok?

Friday night was spent packing all our things together (Cheryl kindly gave me one of her old suitcases, featuring a stunning pastel floral decor) ready for a super-early start on Saturday. This of course was when the liquid explosive saga hit, and we made sure to have all liquids and gels packed into our checked luggage.

After about 3 hours of sleep, we got up at 3:15am to hop in our 'taxi', a private courier van of some sort. The trip to the airport wasn't too painful, I think we passed about 12 Tim Hortons' and a lot of disturbingly large factories, like Coke. We went through check-in, where we scored priority luggage tags because of Richard's VIP air-travel status, and went through the slowest security check EVER. Steph, Cheryl and Richard went ahead of us as they were on an earlier flight, and Kev and I had to wait for eons as a guard checked and re-checked my backpack for the bottle which he "could swear" he could see on the x-ray monitor. He also chose to confiscate my moisturiser - how exactly is that either liquid or gel, hmm? They could at least have mentioned a 'no cream' ruling. Bastards. And I thought that would be the worst that would happen...