bonjour!

spent the weekend in montreal w/ my roommie. we left at 5 on saturday morning and got to our hostel around 9 am and then didn't sleep again until we last night after a bbq and fireworks night (where i got to play bartendar and perfected the margarita)

we dropped our bags off at the hostel and then asked the front desk person where we should walk and he pointed straight south and told us to head to Old Town and the port (towards the st. lawrence river).

old town was really quaint- cobblestone ground, small little shops and pretty churches (notre dame church for instance) and fountains. very european feel. b/c montreal is a small island everything was a lot closer together than we thought so we walked everywhere.

from old town we went to the port and saw a cookie truck opened early in the morning so of course our first purchases (and she took american $!). i got the dark chocolate cookie and they are fabuloussssss. not very big but totally worth it. which is why, later that night we went back and got more. :) we grabbed a quick lunch and gelato in old town and then headed back up to our area for a smaller drink and window shopping (tequila taco on sherbrooke and st laurent has that dive bar look but the food is pretty good).

old town was pretty dead during the day but we headed back down after checking out the jazz festival downtown and that's when we saw the crowds. they were doing fireworks for canada day and there were crazy numbers of people everywhere and all the stores and restaurants were still open (i'm still living in ludlow time...). after the fireworks we headed back up to st laurent street where all the younger people go to drink and club and had a couple drinks at an irish pub. these two guys, one french canadian and one french started talking to us and got us drinks and then took us to a tequila lounge that was crazy packed (bars in montreal close at 3. and also, no right turns in the city!). 


after the bars closed we went back to their place and sat around and talked and by the time PA and i figured we should get some sleep the guys said we had to watch the sunrise at the park overlooking downtown.

this is plateau mont royal park and it has two overlooks where you can see the whole spread of the city. so after leaving ludlow at 5 in the morning we stayed up 24 hours later to see the sunrise in montreal. gorgeoussss. apparently a lot of kids will go up to watch the sunrise after prom. we didn't even need our hostel b/c we ended up checking out afterward so we could make the trek back into the US before we really did just hit the sack in montreal and never make it back home.

got lots of recommendations to try bagels in montreal at this specific place (freemont bagels) but we weren't impressed b/c we were munchy from the alcohol and wanted fluffy big bagels but these were more like 2 day old bagels. so really, i'll have my big american bagel next time:)

we got back to ludlow really early (we felt a bit silly coming back so early but we actually spent 2 days in montreal, just condensed in one 24 hour period). but we finally took showers and then headed out to the gm's chef's house and had a bbq and shooting off fireworks. i love fireworks and it's pretty sweet that you can buy/set off big fireworks in vt. i mastered the blended margarita (2:1 ratio of tequila to mix). but since i can never handle more than one night of alcohol i was the driver (which was good since 5 people finished off 4 bottles of tequila!). 

looking foward to 4th of july on wednesday, the fireworks on the mountain are apparently supposed to be awesome.