Montreal

After sleeping in and getting breakfast yesterday, we headed out to the Olympic Village and the botanical gardens.  Montreal hosted the summer Olympics in 1976.  Apparently the city basically went broke building the facilities.  First we went up to the top of the Montreal Tower, which is the tallest inclined structure in the world.  It is built at a 45 degree angle.  By comparison, the leaning tower of Pisa is only at a 5 degree angle.  From the top we had an awesome view of the city, harbor and surrounding areas. After coming down from the tower we walked all around the park.  As a whole, the entire area was surprisingly run down.  I think part of the issue is that since the Expos left in 2005 the stadium hasn't had a tenant.  It did look like they were doing a lot of work, we went into the arena where the swimming and diving events took place and there was all sorts of construction happening.

After exploring for a bit we walked across the street to the Botanical Gardens.  This was a series of linked greenhouses that housed all different plant specimens from all over the world.  While I must admit that I'm not a huge garden person, it was pretty cool to see some exotic flowers from the rain forests and from Asia.  The highlight of the Botanical Gardens was absolutely the butterfly room.  One of the greenhouses was the home to hundreds of butterflies.  They were all different shapes, sizes and colors and were flying all around.  They had fruit set out so could see them eating, different plants that they could blend in with and even an area where they were still in their cocoons.  It was pretty cool, we must have spent an hour just wandering around looking at all of the different butterflies.

We then headed back towards the hotel and grabbed lunch in this cute little cafe.  The area of the city we are staying, Old Town, has a ton of great little restaurants and cafes and is right along the harbor.  For anyone coming to Montreal, I would absolutely recommend staying here.  After lunch we decided to walk up to St. Catherine's Streets.  This is apparently the heart of downtown Montreal with tons of shopping.  In addition to the shopping, to our surprise there were a ton of strip clubs and sex shops.  Definitely not what we were expecting but still fun to explore the area.  We walked about 4.5 miles all around the city then headed back by our hotel, where we had dinner in this awesome little Italian restaurant.  Following dinner (and several glasses of wine) we came back to the hotel and crashed.  Our goal was to get an early start to Friday because the weather forecast was calling for 5-8 inches of snow during the day, with the worst of it coming in the early afternoon.

We woke up early today and went to a cute little crepe cafe for breakfast.  It had already started precipitating but it was a sleet/freezing rain mix that made it pretty miserable outside.  We took a quick walk over to the Notre Dame Cathedral, but on the way we stopped in several shops for no other reason than to get out of the cold.  The Cathedral was pretty amazing, it reminded me of some of the churches I've seen in Europe.  We then headed over to the Science museum.  We figured an indoor activity would be good on a day like today.  The science museum was really cool! It reminded me of the Franklin Institute back at home.  They had a shark exhibit that was really interesting.  I found out my brother lied to me when he told me sharks don't hang out around dolphins - that was one of the top 10 shark myths.  So that means I can go back to being scared that I will get eaten by a shark when I do my ocean triathlon swims!  We ended up staying in the museum for a long time and when we eventually looked outside there was several inches of snow on the ground and it was basically a white out.  When we left the museum it was after 4:00 and we starving so we decided to do an early dinner.  We went to this cute little pizza restaurant and had an awesome dinner.  Several Montreal observations - great restaurants and cafes, pretty wild nightlife and lots of smokers (we saw people on every street corner smoking - way more than I see in the US).  We headed back to the hotel after dinner and relaxed in the hot tub before packing.  My flight is at 6:30 am tomorrow morning so my wake up is at 3:45...ugh!  Montreal is a pretty cool city, I'd definitely come back, hopefully next time the weather will be a little better!