We had a relaxed start to the day after all of yesterday’s terrible earliness. Like all good cities that have tourists, Montreal has a hop on hop off bus – though this is more of a “if you can find it” endeavour, the complete opposite of New York where there are people on every street corner trying to sell you a ticket.

Matter a bit of wandering around, managing to take every road that didn’t have a cafe on it, the first place we found was Maccas, so, Maccas brekky it is. Then, ten steps away, what do we see but four or five other cafes. Anyway, we chose not to enjoy this particular treat:

Today the weather is beautiful and sunny, with a top of 21 degrees.

Eventually we did find the hop-on-hop-off bus, and off we went for a ride around town. Learnt a few interesting things – like at one of the big parks, in winter they line the edge of it with huge hay bales. Otherwise, when there’s 6 feet of snow, it’s far too easy to slip down the slope at the edge of the park and slide right into the oncoming traffic … not a problem we have in Sydney as such. We saw lots of nice old buildings, the 1976 Olympic standing (from a distance), and other stuff where it’s much easier to just show rather than tell:

We did a loop of the whole bus route, left the bus slightly embarrassed that we had no cash to tip the drivers or commentator, then got back on a new bus to stop for a quick walk around the gay village. It was a village, it was at least a bit gay, we stopped off for lunch, made the cardinal sin of not trying to speak French first, and got the “Oh… English … OK…” eye roll from the staff. 🙂 Delicious Panini and salad though.

We hopped on, we hopped off, that has been about it. Feeling a bit sunburnt even though I did Slip Slop Slap.

It was election day today in Canada. It’s not mandatory, and polls are open from 8:30am to 8:30pm. Not a democracy sausage in sight though, they really don’t know what they’re missing! But what they did have was lots of peace and no drama, I guess there’ll be nobody trying to storm parliament in a few weeks either.

For dinner we went out to a nearby Ramen joint, Kinton Ramen, with some spicy chicken karaage which killed my tastebuds for a while, some tasty gyoza, and some delicious Ramen. Really nice!

After dinner, because we’re a young wild and crazy couple of people, we … went back to the room and watched the election results broadcast on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. I guess we won’t get a chance to watch the Australian results live, so this’ll have to do in the meantime 😀 A very different kind of show compared to what we’ve seeing in the last 8 or 9 days. It’s funny though when they say “…and that’s the results from Labrador and Newfoundland”. I was hoping next we were maybe going to hear from Corgi and Spaniel, but no.

It doesn’t feel like we did much today, but checking the watch tonight shows we’ve walked about 5km, so not too bad.

What other random details can I tell you? Traffic lights flash green before they go orange. Not many drivers use their horn, it’s very quiet compared to New York and Boston. However both cities have the same regard for red lights, seeing them as a vague suggestion rather than a command. But unlike Sydney all drivers are much more pedestrian-friendly. It’s a nice place, looking forward to exploring more of it tomorrow.