Montreal

Once again, I have to apologize for not really keeping you up to date and not uploading the pictures I've taken during the last few weeks. I'm kind of lazy publishing here but I'll try to do better for the remaining few months. Although I don't think that there will be a whole lot worth publishing within the next few weeks since I'll probably stay in the lab from early morning to late at night.

Anyway, some weeks ago I went with Christian and Lenko to Montreal. A former roommate of Lenko lives in Ste-Julie so we had a place to stay over night. Before arriving in Montreal we went to Laval to go to an Apple Store since Christian wanted to buy an iBook. After that we left the car at a subway station and went by train into the city. We walked around in downtown and the older part of the city. Montreal is really a nice city, it's amazing to listen to people talking to each other. One asks a question in French and the other one answers in English and adds some more information in French, the language only depending on the mood of the people, I guess. Most of the people though like to speak French more than English and we even had problems in some stores but usually there is at least one bilingual person working at each location.

At night we met with Sebastian, a friend of mine from Magdeburg, and some of his friends and went to the beer festival. You had to buy some coupons and then you could try from hundreds of different kinds of beer. It was really fun and the place was packed with people. Unfortunately we didn't have much time so we left the festival and went to Jonathan's (Lenko's friend) house and fell asleep really quick.

The next day Christian had to back to the Apple Store because he discovered a bad pixel and wanted to get a replacement for his laptop. So Lenko and Christian went to Laval while Jonathan and I went to the Olympic Stadium of the '76 Games. It was really awesome and looked futuristic especially if you remember that they build this more than 30 years ago. At the stadium they also had the flags of all participating nations and German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was one of them.

After that we met with Christian and Lenko and climbed up the Mount Royal to take a look at the skyline of Montreal. Mount Royal is the highest point in Montreal and houses are by law prohibited to be build higher than this hill. Anyway, the view was really good and was worth the struggle of climbing all the way up. Since it was pretty late already we had some food at a restaurant called Reubens which is supposed to be famous for their roast beef sandwiches and finally we had to head back to Kingston.

Just a week after that we decided to go to Montreal again. This time we just wanted to do a day trip. Besides the three of us there was also another German called Jörg and Marika a girl from Finland. We basically just walked around in the city again. This time it was packed with people since it was Formula 1 Weekend and a lot of events were on the streets. We saw hundreds of Ferraris, Porsches and all kinds of other expensive cars. After climbing Mount Royal once again and having dinner at some restaurant there was a concert and a big party on the street. Finally we drove back to Kingston and arrived here around 3 am.

montreal