Thursday, 24 August 2006

Montreal (Quebec)

I had a night of fractured sleep in the hostel. Luckily the dorm. room had cooled down quite a bit from it's daytime swelter and by the morning was fairly cool. Most people came in relatively quietly so I wasn't disturbed as much as I'd feared in my position under the wooden stairs. Even so, the air mattresses acted like muted, polite whoopee-cushions whenever anyone moved around, but in a group of 14 people there were no heavy snorers.

I was up early-ish - before the breakfast that was included in the price ($30/night and $35/night on Fri, Sat, Sun) so I went for a short walk around the quiet old city until breakfast at 7 am. Internet at the hostel is free but painfully slow, and therefore usually in use, so I might not get to catch up with blog this time.

I went out to the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal ($8) only to find that it didn't open until 11 am (Damn!) so I went in search of a Weekly Guardian and killed some time. It's a real pleasure to be able to sit and read something interesting - it's not all gloom and doom (just mostly) According to one article, the number of people overweight now outnumber the hungry in the world; a difficult statistic to swallow, but I guess it must be true. (If it's in the Guardian!)

The contemporary art was as I expected, one or two nuggets of skill and creativity in a field of chaff. How many randomly paint splattered canvases to you have to see to realise it's a load of Jackson Pollacks. Some of the descriptions of the 'works of art' were in themselves works of art - how much nonsense is written about the meaning and significance of somethings so pointlessly abstract as to not warrant a second glance or a glance of more than a second. Clearly the emperor's new clothes.

I had planned to do something in the afternoon, but it was cloudy and gloomy and I got side-tracked catching up on blog at the hostel while it was quiet, and trying to find a route from Montreal to Boston. I did find a very rough route plan of the Boston-Montreal-Boston endurance cycle race (which runs in August, but hopefully not when I'm cycling it! - I don't want to get mixed up in a race...) I went out to find an Internet Cafe that could print out the route for me. On the way back I treated myself to a cheap and filling meal in Chinatown (Singapore noodles)