Montreal - Day 1

Well last night did not go too well although I guess it could have been worse. Joel woke up at 10:45pm and it took us 2 hours to settle him. So much for an early night for us! Unfortunately, although he may have settled on his own after crying for a while, I was so paranoid about waking up other people at the hotel, we didn't let him cry for long and picked him up to try to settle him (which doesn't usually work very well with Joel, it typically makes things worse). Then 2 hours later he woke up one more time but I was able to just pat his back for a few minutes and he settled and slept for the rest of the night.

So we all started out the day pretty tired. But we were off bright and early anyways. Breakfast is included at the hotel. It wasn't anything fancy, but it kept us full until lunch!

We began the day by taking the metro to Jean Talon market. This was a really great market and it was bustling this Saturday morning. Fruits, veggies, meats, sweets, etc. Anything you can imagine actually. We were disappointed that we had stuffed ourselves so full at breakfast because there were the most delicious looking crepes ever (among many other yummy things). We did buy some nectarines which we ate later in the afternoon.

After browsing the market, we took the metro to St. Denis street. This part of Montreal actually reminds me a lot of Toronto. It's pretty much just a shopping area. We spent most of the day shopping around. All day long though, all we bought was one one pair of yoga pants for me. $12. I guess that's a good thing that we didn't spend much money. Trev checked out a bunch of record stores but didn't buy anything.

Lunch time came around and we happened to be in the area of a restaurant famous for Montreal smoked meat sandwiches...Schwartz's. When we got there, there was a line up out the door to get in. We waited about 10 minutes and then we got a table. In hindsight we should have just got it to go. Because it's so busy, they cram as many people in as they can. So our table also had 3 other people at it and the other tables were right next to ours, really close. We were crammed in there and there was no place to put Joel. So he sat on our laps and one of us ate at a time while the other person tried to keep Joel from pulling food off of the table, grabbing knifes, etc. I went to change his diaper and there was nowhere to do that in the bathroom.

So we left Schwartz and took Joel to a little park nearby to feed him his lunch. This is when I remembered that I left the Joel's baby spoon at the hotel breakfast place this morning. Oops! So one jar of baby food...no spoon. Tricky! Trev went wandering in search with a spoon and came back with a plastic soup spoon from a takeout place nearby. The spoon was about twice the size of Joel's mouth! It was one messy lunch!

After that we did some more shopping. We had planned to go to the science centre, but we were enjoying wandering so we decided to skip the science centre. We had seen a large park marked on our map. Trev and I love parks. It's something that we found in almost every great European city we've been to. A fantastic park with tons of people suntanning, playing games, bbqing, etc. This park was great. We wandered around for a while. We saw lots of bocce players, people BBQing with awesome portable BBQs, kids playing, dogs playing, some baby ducklings etc. We found an awesome playground. There were probably about 4 play structures (good for different ages), a castle to play in, swings, sand. It was great. Joel went on the baby swings and then we played in the grass. We walked some more and found a great shady area. Turns out we had set up near another family with a little boy. It wasn't long before Joel and this other little guy found each other. They had fun playing together and we spent some time talking to his parents. They gave us some tips and tricks for our visit. We also found a Dickie Dee guy and bought a yummy ice cream sandwich.

At this point we were pretty tired. We decided to start walking back to our hotel and find a restaurant to eat at. We had seen a good looking mexican restaurant yesterday so we headed there. It was nice because it wasn't too busy. We had room to set up Joel in a high chair. Much more relaxed than lunch. Food was alright, nothing special. The highlight was the huge, cheap, virgin strawberry daquari I had. Yum! Joel was tired and crazy and spent the dinner making the craziest faces! I was in hysterics! Again, there was nowhere to change a diaper. I have no clue what people around here do to change diapers.

We got back to the hotel at about 6:20pm. I am seriously wiped. Everything is a bit trickier with Joel with us. Especially since at least the area of town we were in does not seem to be stroller friendly AT ALL. Every place has steps. We carried the stroller up and down steps many times today. The subway has no elevators so that involves lots of stairs and escalators with the stroller as well. It makes it hard for browsing beacause it's a lot of work to just pop into a store. Often times only one of Trev or I would go into a store, and the other person would just wait with Joel outside.

All in all today, Joel slept less than usual after a less than stellar night last night. So he is currently exhausted. Hyper and cranky at the same time. It's an early bedtime for him tonight (and for us as well). Hopefully he's tired enough to just sleep tonight. Could work the other way around though since it could mean he'll be twice as cranky when he wakes up. I guess we'll see soon enough!

Other random interesting things we saw today:
- An asian restaurant called Wok n Roll
- A man peeing on a tree
- A guy rollerblading and playing the banjo (not kidding)

- A man walking with a baby on his back while reading a book (we saw him twice and it looks like he decided to go for a walk and read a book at the same time...he was reading a novel)
- People practicing tightrope walking in the park