Thursday....more Montreal!!

Ok, so today is the day that we had nothing to do but walk around. We got up pretty early, 7am, but we're supposed to be on vacation and sleep in!!! Anyways, so we took the bus to the metro station, and got off in the business sector of town. I only had a map of the metro, so when we walked upstairs and outside...we pretty much got lost!! Anyways, we didn't have time to eat at the hotel, and I get pretty grumpy when I'm hungry, so we stopped at this cute little cafe and got a fruit covered croissant and some hot chocolate.


Once we were done with that we started walking around again, and found a big huge building with the words "Tourist Information"....so we went in there and made sure we were going the right way, which we were. We trudged on until we got there, with only a few stops of Aaron looking at "all the pretty police cars"...haha! Silly boy! Oh, we were headed to a cheese festival by the way...It was HUGE!!!! Anyways, we got to this building and went inside, and there were tons of little shops, and this huge food court area that had like 30 restaurants in it.

These were the signs that were hanging everywhere. Everything was in french, but we figured it out anyways. Probably because the only insult I know in french is to call someone a cheese head, so I knew what it said!!! Actually, I only know the cheese part, but we figured that it stands for "Icky Cheese".... Aaron tried this cheese that he said tasted like pooh. He waved it in front of my nose and I almost threw up!!! It was NASTY!!! There were some pretty good ones though. After the cheese festival we wandered around and looked at things, then got some lunch. Food in Montreal is so expensive!! They have 2 kinds of tax on their food, but we didn't know that....Aaron went to A&W for lunch, and got a meal, and a rootbeer float for me. Normally that would cost like $7 ish dollars, right? It was over $11!! Actually, they have their dollar signs on the end, so it would have looked like 11$. Strange brew. We headed back to the metro, and Aaron said he knew where we were going, so we walked around, and around, and around...the same building!!! We were walking a circle! We didn't know it, but there was a metro station underneath the giant building we were in, so we hopped on that one and headed to the Olympic Park and the Biodome.

The olympic park is pretty self explainatory...Montreal hosted the Olympics in 1976, and this is where it was held. It has some really cool architecture, and we saw the olympic pool and where they did all the diving competitions and stuff.
The roof of part of the stadium was suspended by these huge cables that were attached to a taller part of the roof...it's hard to explain, and it was too big for us to get a good picture. Anyways, there was this glass elevator thing that took us up to the top of the Stadium, and it had a really great view of the St. Lawrence river, and the city. I'm not going to post any of those, but go to the flikr website and you can see all the ones we took. We also went to the Biodome (that was my pick, Aaron got the cheese, and I'm a nerd, so I picked a zoo/museam/habitat thing to go see) and it was pretty fun. There were 4 different ecosystems with creatures from all of them, so we saw penguins, and aligators, and monkeys, and birds, and all sorts of other things. It was pretty fun! Here are a few of our favorites!



There were little tiny monkeys that were maybe a foot tall, and they were grooming each other.



Alligators or Crocodiles...I can't remember which. There were some giant turtles that lived with them.

Cute little penguins

This bird was chasing the lady around, because she had a green scarf hanging out of her bag, and I think the bird thought it was food. It chased her for like 5 minutes, all around the dome!

When we were done adventuring we were both pretty tired, so we headed back to the hotel. It took about an hour to get there, with all the metro stops and bus stops. Anyways, we got to the hotel and were both pretty pooped (we figured we walked at least 5 miles plus all the standing that we did on the bus and metro) so we ordered pizza. I should say that that we TRIED to order pizza. All the places that we called said they didn't deliver to the hotel, even though the people at the desk said they did. So I went down to the desk, and they called the pizza place and yelled at them, and then our pizza got delivered! The guy at the desk said it's because I called and spoke english with no accent, they don't like Americans I guess. So we devoured the pizza in like 5 minutes and then did more homework and went to bed. Phew!!!