Montreal Round 2

Each rotation we get a minimum of 48 hours entirely off from the program.  It has to fall on a weekend.  Sometimes groups can extend it to 72 hours but we weren't able to this rotation, like we did in Thunder Bay over Thanksgiving.

Because no one wants to sit in a cold house doing absolutely nothing for a weekend we made plans to go to Montreal and raise some hell.  On Friday night we caught a ride to Trois-Rivieres with a few work partners, I was lucky enough to get a middle seat.. I always get the middle seat. It's the short legs rule.

We bought bus tickets at the depot and caught a bus which got us to Montreal for just after 9.  The city was nice and lively and we had to walk with our huge backpacks (or in Dalandrea's case, wheel a carry on bag with snow clogged wheels behind her..) through the busy sidewalks to get to our hotel. We booked two rooms with bunk beds, which was probably our subconscious minds at work keeping us from getting homesick from the Katimahouse and our squeaky metal bunks.  Our hotel was three seconds from Chinatown, 3 minutes from downtown St. Catherine's, and supplied a free continental breakfast which was ideal for our tight budget situation/bum lifestyle.

Sort of submarine style, eh?

Within the first few hours of being at the hotel we found out we were three rooms down from some of Dalandrea's hometown friends and down the hall from a group of New Yorker's who insisted on becoming our friends.  This forced friendship would eventually lead to many attempts at ditching them once we were finally able to remove them from their hotel rooms to enjoy the daylight hours.

The first night we all went out to a club called foufounes electrique, but the locals call it foufs, so we did too, because if that's all it takes to be cool we'll do it. It was super close to our hotel and a really good time, the music was excellent and the dance floor was full.  I met up with two really good friends and Sophie saw hers as well; the best part was that Montreal clubs stay open until 3am.

Saturday morning, after a a cat's nap of a sleep, Sam and I went off to Chinatown to get breakfast and go shopping for chopsticks.  We stopped a Vietnamese restaurant and got veggie rice rolls, soup and sprout salad.  It was fun, and so yummy and we'd both never tried food like it before.

My beautiful breakfast date :)

Delicious

We spent the day as a group shopping on St. Catherine's which is long and full of great stores and lots of people.  On our way to find some of the group Sam and I stumbled upon what appeared to be a large, screaming, car-horn-honking group of people staging a protest/riot against a man named Ben Ali.  I'm not going to post things about Ben Ali, but here are photos!

They happen to be on an extreme angle because I happen to be quite bad at taking photos above my head in extra windy conditions.

This post is not finished but I have to stop right now, more lata!

Okay more now!

Back at our hotel eating pizza for supper we experienced a healthy sized panic attack when we found out the times for Igloofest (an event we'd been planning to attend since back in Thunder Bay) were earlier than we thought.  We considered not going.  We strongly considered not going.  But then we realized that we had all bought one piece ski suits for the event and the world needed to see our fabulous costumes.  We made our way down to the old port by 8:30 and were pleased to discover it was just getting going.

As for a distinguished description of this "Igloofest", I'm at a loss. One of my friends who didn't go asked "It's just a big outdoor rave with people standing around in winter gear getting cold, right?".  

Which is a fairly adequate description if you don't really get along well with snow..

I'm going to have to give this some thought, because I'm pretty sure words to describe this night haven't been invented yet.

It was a huge outdoor rave, with the best music of life - no sh*tty mainstream mixes, heaps of people from everywhere - we met people from the States, Russia and Brazil, and a back and forth ripple effect of energy the entire night.  There were massive screens everywhere, it started to snow the second we got there and it didn't stop all night.  You'd be filthy rich if you could harvest the energy of that night in full swing.

Photo credit to Sam Middleton, who constantly supplies our group with a photo timeline of our adventures together.

This was early days..

Dj stand, big screens, and happy people

Hanging out on Martin's shoulders during our dancing hours, having the time of my life

This photo is from the back of the crowd, maybe 150 m from the stage (that huge bright light at the end). There was a balcony all around the port and you could see how thick the crowd was from up there.  When the crowd got too big we bailed to the balconies and guessed that about 4000 people were attending.  Whenever I looked back towards the streets all I could see were more groups of people making their way to the port.

Group shot with a beer bottle

Dancing in our one pieces was a ridiculously hot experience in more than one way.

And also, that's a snowflake, not Sophie's brain tumour.

This is the website version of that night.

I haven't got many more words for that night, and I'm forgetting more and more of it each day so I'm glad I wrote it all down sooner rather than later!  It was just unreal.  We still can't believe we thought of not going.. No one in our group had a bad time.

We're loosely planning to have a Katimavik reunion at igloofest in future years. Our weekend in Montreal made all others we've had together seem boring and slow, but as we're all back to being broke and exhausted now we fully realize one can't do weekends like that every weekend.

bye!

Petra J