Another world

Ah, another trip to Montreal. This one will probably be more memorable than most. First, our hotel sucked. Donkey. Please, nobody stay at the Maritime Plaza in Montreal! It's old, it's falling apart, and the "breakfast" is pathetic.

At least it was close to the arena, where we had tickets for a Canadienes game! I usually see one game every season. Since this one was drawing to a close, I was quite dissappointed that I still hadn't seen one. That was until we got some free tickets from our contractor! The Senators were visiting and the rivalry was obviously intense! People were dressed up and yelling at each other in the streets. The game was excellent, with the Canadienes winning. But I have to say the arena bathroom is poorly designed. At first, I thought, 'wow, a gigantic bathroom, cool', but having larger bathrooms also meant having fewer bathrooms. Having a bank of forty urinals on a wall works great, only if the traffic is managed correctly. Turns out, the organic flow of the crowd streamed men into the bathroom, stopping at the urinals/stalls, and poured back out... while missing the sinks. The design of the bathroom was such that people passed the sinks *before* the urinals. Entrance, sinks, stalls, urinals, exit, in that order. As a result, nobody washed their hands. *I* fought my way the the sinks though, but it was tempting not to...

We ended up getting our work done ahead of schedule. It was quite the toss up between staying and having fun or going home, but we elected to go home early. We were glad to though, after what we saw go down in the streets of Montreal. Not a back alley at 1am, but Ste Catherine, at dinner time. A handful of hooligans beat this one guy into a twitching bleeding mess. I don't know how it started, but as we approached the group, the victim was kicked into the street, where he obviously was already defeated, but subsequently received a few more kicks on the ground. To top it off, the last attacker stomped on his face. Not kicked, but stomped, with all his weight. How one can bring himself to stomp on a human face is beyond me. They ran off, leaving the lone victim bleeding in the street. We felt so useless. It all happened so fast, and up till near the end, my naive mind still thought it was rough-housing. We were glad to go home early.

On the last day, we had some time to visit St. Joseph's Oratory, an old church atop a nearby hill. It was pretty impressive, and had the most elaborate museum of nativity scenes ever. There was also a pet shop nearby where I almost got a baby turtle. But Air Canada said nay to exotic pets like reptiles. Meanies.