Desiderata

The irony: my gmail theme tells me that it's clear and sunny in Boston while here in Montréal water steadily pours from the skies. We spent the morning traipsing around Mile End and visiting relics of Laurel's time here - her first apartment, her studio, the cafés where she spent endless hours. Mile End is also home to Montréal's famed bagel shops, where delicious rings of moist, chewy dough emerge freshly baked from the wood oven 24 hours a day. We'd planned on heading to Au Pied de Cochon for dinner to get a taste of their duck in a can, which has seemed to gain a cult status, but we didn't manage to nab reservations for tonight. We'll do that tomorrow instead - my last meal in this self-purported foodie heaven.

Laurel's out enjoying a brief run through the rain, an activity in which I can no longer partake due to the psoriatic arthritis that plagues the second toe on my left foot, so I'm sitting here listening to Beirut while perusing Chowhound for other quintessential Montréal eating experiences and garnering inspiration for my own website. The last entry's big photo slideshow fail has only further convinced me that I need to move to my own domain - the idea's been sloshing through my noggin for a number of years, but I think I finally sketched out a satisfactory design and site navigation last night. Of course, I should probably do my thesis proposal and finish the lab website and do all that other stuff on my summer list first, but I'll fit it in somewhere. Hopefully.

Meanwhile, here is some documentation of today's adventures (so far):

Bagel Stop #1: St. Viateur's Bagels

Hot out of the oven!

A quintessential Francophone experience: poppy-seed bagel with Orangina.

Fairmount Bagels, the other (supposedly more "original") bagel maker.

Everything bagel: garlic, onions, sea salt, poppy and sesame seeds. Delicious.

We walked into a funky artsy store and I thought these were hilarious. The flyswatter below is a map of Milan.

Tonight: smoked meat sandwiches at Schwartz's, followed by viewing a fireworks display put together by folks from the motherland.

Labels: Montréal, travel

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: