The other day we accidentally hiked up Mount Royal. We wanted to go see a drum festival, but somehow we missed the park and started walking up the mountain instead! Turns out it’s a very nice public area with big trails, stairs, and a big park and visitor’s center with food and such at the top, so it’s not like we were about to get attacked by bears or anything. We did almost get attacked by squirrels, though, when they surrounded us on our picnic blanket and eyed our sandwiches. I later learned that the park has a bad overpopulation of squirrels because visitors feed them. WE did not feed the squirrels, we just got them to stand on their hind legs, as my friend Dan here demonstrates:
Chapter 2 – Out and About
Maybe I’m just not used to the big city, but it seems to me that there’s always something interesting happening in Montreal. There was a launch party for a video game at a local bar, one we all recognize now because it has a GIANT spider with an eyeball on the end of each foot hanging over the entrance. (I didn’t go because I didn’t have much interest, and I really didn’t want to walk under the spider.) I could give you a big list of all the different kinds of things you can do around here, but if you were really that interested you’d just Google it. There’s always a museum exhibit, a concert, a festival, a something happening in this city. Yes, there’s a possibility it may be presented in French, but that’s why we bake cookies for the Francophone kids, isn’t it?
And speaking of presented in French, this past weekend was extended an extra day for Labor Day, so all the schools had classes off and many of the business (far more than in the US) were closed. At the same time, September 7th was the final day of the Montreal World Film Festival. The Film Festival had been going on since we arrived and every night it offered a free out-doors movie about a five minute walk from the dorm. The overarching goal of the festival is to ‘to encourage cultural diversity and understanding among nations’ through the medium of film. But, apparently showing movies wasn’t helping people understand each others cultural difference enough, so to end the festival they threw a giant outdoor Electro-Techno-Fireworks-and-Parade Thing
.I’ve honestly never heard music quite like this before. My friends and I are still trying to find out who this band is because we were so blown away by their sound. There’s no good way to describe it, but to give you an idea, there were four guys on the stage with different kinds of guitars, one guy behind a sound board, and one guy singing (and singing well). And the music they created can only be described as some sort of Techno-Rock hybrid; similar to techno, but with the sounds (including the percussion) produced almost entirely by the guitars, and with lyrics. On top of that, they had a mesmerizing assortment of abstract images pulsing in sync to the music, and a camera crew recording and editing together live the whole performance into a music video that was being projected on to the outdoor movie screen. And not to mention the stunt person from Cirque du Soleil who was running vertically up and down the side of a building on guide wires since, you know, a massive techno-rock concert where everyone has a noise-maker after a parade just rolled through isn’t quite fascinating enough. (Sorry for the double dose of light sarcasm in the same paragraph.) At the finale of the concert, they set off fireworks (in time to the music, of course) on the roof of a building right above the crowd. I’ve never been this close to a big fireworks display; I could literally see the cardboard casing flying through the air.
And then we all settled down and watched a documentary called ‘Imagine John Lennon’, which was basically the story of his life as told by him and those close to him with the help of some very clever editing. It might have been a little long-winded for someone not deeply interested in the Beatles, specifically the John component, but I’ve been a fan of his since I was 12 years old, so I found it very interesting and entertaining. (Spoiler Alert: This movie has a sad ending.)
Future Montreal-bound Champlainers will be happy to know that this is all happening again next year, same place, same time.
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