Desiderata: Montréal, Day 1

Lazing. It's slightly strange to think of it as an actual activity - especially in our crazy fast-paced multitasking-oriented lives. But it's a full-blown lifestyle here in Montréal, which makes it perhaps the ideal destination for my weekend vacation. Now, I have to specify here that "lazing" doesn't mean "being lazy." A lazy person would probably just sit at home all day and voir la télé. Au contraire, lazing in Montréal manifests itself in the city's obsession with outdoor restaurant terraces (or, ahem, terrasses, with that full throaty French "r" sound), coveted extensions so ubiquitous that one almost forgets that the region spends at least half the year bitterly buried under snow. And in the infinite amount of time between finishing your entrée and getting the bill - in my limited experience, you actually have to ask for the bill, even after the servers have collected your empty plates, because they assume you'd be contented to sit on the terrasse and chat or people-watch all day. And in the multitudes of people who park themselves on their blankets upon any (and all) green spaces, whether it be an expansive parc or a small patch of lawn in a commercial area, bikes laid horizontally in their periphery, blissfully chatting whilst munching on deli treats and sipping wine from a bottle cooling on a bag of ice.

So here I am living it up in Montréal: Laurel and I are currently sitting on the terrasse of her apartment, ending our day exactly where it began (a breakfast of honey/almond/oat/puffed rice cereal in vanilla soy milk), our faces mildly illuminated by the screens of our matching MacBooks, listening to Sondre Lerche on the mix that Laurel made for me a few years ago (How many? It eludes us now - we realized today that next year, we'll have been friends for an entire decade, an entire decade removed from the colored pencil maps of Mrs. Thompson's seventh grade social studies class) appropriately entitled "fourteen Sensational Supernova Songs for Summer". I've come to accompany her last hurrah in Montréal, since she leaves Wednesday from the city in which she's spent the past six weeks. She's got the impending mover's sentimentality while I've got the wide-eyed tourist's efficiency, and together we're determined to conquer as much of this city as we can in the three days that we're here.

Without further ado, I present to you my first day in this gorgeous city, in picture form. Actually, blogger is dumb and I can't post my nifty flash photo album directly into this blog. So you're just going to have to check it out here.

Some previews: