Sunday, October 2, 2016

September 13th, Continued: More Walking!

We took the Metro back to the Vieux Port area, stopped for some coffee and gelato, then spent a little while wandering around the cool art galleries in the area. I somehow didn't take any pictures during this whole part of the day, but Montreal has some pretty fantastic art and we wound up buying a couple things. One piece was small enough to bring home with us on the plane, but the other one was pretty big so they'll be shipping it to us in a couple weeks. After a while we wanted a break from walking, so we took a bus to our next stop: dinner!

We went to Big In Japan for some tasty noodles. This was some kind of squash curry and I remember thinking "there's no way I can finish this" when they brought it to the table. I inhaled the whole thing. And ate Mark's mushrooms. I guess I was a little hungry.   :)

We made a quick stop back at the apartment after dinner. I grabbed this picture from the roof; it was getting dark, but we still had one more stop left for the day. Mark got us an Uber, and a short ride later...

We were walking through the Insectarium at the Botanical Gardens! I absolutely love this place; the Insectarium is one of the coolest museum-type things I've probably ever been to.

They still had the leaf cutter ants, too; we spent a few minutes watching them grab pieces of leaves and shuttle them across the vines running to the other plant near their nest. You can just kind of make out some of the ants on the leaves.

We were a little limited on time, but I made it through most of their display cases.

It's a bit hard to tell from this picture, but most of that tangled mess of sticks is actually stick bugs! They were huge, and there were so many of them.

I'm not sure what kind of bug this one was, but it made me smile. It looks like a banana.

 I looped around to a few more display cases before we left.




 I could probably spend a full day in here just looking at all of the bugs. The big attraction was waiting for us outside, though.

It was the Botanical Gardens' light display! We'd gone to this the first time we came to Montreal a couple years ago, and just before we left for this trip I realized we'd be able to see it again.

They do an awesome job with this. There are displays of lighted figures through a huge part of the Chinese Garden, and not just on the little pond. They're hidden in the trees and just off the path, too.

We made our way completely around the pond...

...before making our way over to the Japanese Garden. That section is a lot more subdued (and in some spots, slightly creepy), but it was still nice.

 We only had a few minutes left before the Botanical Gardens closed for the night, so we spent our last little bit of time in the Chinese Garden before taking the Metro back to the apartment for the night.

Despite all of the stuff we crammed into the day, it wasn't really that late. We hung out in the hot tub for a little while, finished our bottle of wine (and soaked our angry legs...my Fitbit showed over 35,000 steps for the day!), then spent the rest of the night listening to French pop music and eating a crazy good cinnamon roll we'd picked up at a random bakery early in the day. We'd managed to cram a lot into the day, and we still had one more full day left in the city!

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