Montreal, Day 2
Oct. 13th, 2014 04:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missizzyThursday was my day by myself, to do with as I pleased, with mom planning to be gone until the evening. I started the day with no real plans except a need to buy hairwash.
I first ventured from the hotel looking for food where I could find it, and headed towards a drugstore which I had managed to locate by multiple google searches. Breakfast ended up being a bag of potato chips purchased at a local subway. The drugstore turned out to be a huge one, and I was able to get good sized shampoo and conditioner, toothpaste for mom(except she then put it on *my* toothbrush when I can't stand the taste; I had to get a new one today), and a tiny bottle of deodorant small enough I was even able to take it home on the plane.
After dropping them back at the hotel I decided because of the temperature outside to search for the "underground city" the guide claimed was easily accessible from multiple points around the hotel. After a couple of false starts I managed to get in. It consisted of multiple shopping malls linked together, which I spent some time walking through until I got bored, then returned to the surface just in time to see the Christ Cathedral and St. Phillip's Square. There were a lot of homeless people clustered around the former.
I continued walking above ground, next hitting the Place des Artes, a complex of peformance spaces and the Museum of Contemporary Art. But I didn't feel like going in, and it was about time for lunch, so I went back into the underground network and found a food court. There I found a certain Italian place and enjoyed a small dish of their spaghettini bolonaise, and also the food court's free wifi, since my iPhone's ability to catch a sprint signal was out for the count for multiple reasons(I had to take it to the Apple store today for one of them, in fact). I texted with a friend of mom's who lives in Toronto and had been trying to get in contact with us to wish us a good trip since we'd left!
I kept on walking, now aiming for the Grande Bibliotheque, first above ground, then tried to go underground again at the nearby college, but the entrances to the buildings were all blocked by students holding signs. I didn't know what the French words on them meant, but from what I've heard about the Montreal government since, I suspect they were probably right to be making a fuss over whatever they were making a fuss over. I finally reached the Bibliotheque mostly walking above ground.
The Grand Bibliotheque is a library that consists of five floors of material, not counting the kid's section, mostly in French, but with some English-language items too. I explored the stacks, read the first paragraph of one French work, some more of two more English ones, and watched a scene from Giselle and parts of two more from a Cendrillon that were playing on a display about ballet. Then I went down to the basement where they have an exhibition hall, and there was a very creatively done and mostly bilingual exhibit detailing the life and works of French-Canadian playwright Michel Tremblay. There were films of him talking about his life, from hiding under the table to observe his family as a kid to delighting in seeing how his plays are now translated and performed all over the world today.
At this point my legs were burning, but I had wanted all day to go the Museum of Fine Arts. So I got onto the metro, which had a stop just below the Bibliotheque, and took a short ride mostly back the way I had come and then a little further, and from there tracked the museum down. There I discovered that those who are 30 and under got to see the general collection for free! So even with my legs continuing to ache and protest, I first explored a collection of Napoleonic objects, including objects owned by him or his relations, paintings, statues, and a couple of British cartoons. Also a medallion with a lock of his hair owned by George Sand, which I told mom about later. Then I went up a floor to explore galleries tracing the history of art from the early Middle Ages to the belle epoque. It was quite amazing, to start with only a room each of fragile surviving sculpture and stained glass from the medieval and Renaissance periods, then go through a small corridor to the other side of the floor, where suddenly there was room upon room to show all the different forms of painting and sculpture that developed in different parts of Western Europe.
I finally forced myself out of the galleries around 5 PM to go looking for dinner, especially as I did not want to be anywhere near any bars or other places for viewing hockey come 7, when my home team were scheduled to play the beloved local guys. When I found a larger restaurant version of the same Italian place I'd gotten my lunch from earlier in the day, I decided to hell with it, and sat down to a larger version of the exact same dish(with garlic bread), watching pregame coverage complete with glimpses of the Caps on the place's TV. Around six I got back to the hotel, and there was unexpectedly joined by my mother, who had gotten burned out trying to deal with her fellow members of the Fanny Burney Society and had decided to skip their dinner. She ended up going downstairs for soup while I watched the first part of the Caps-Habs game, the part where the Caps played well.
Once again I had exhausted myself early, and this was a problem, because that evening there was our first JASNA event to go to: a presentation by a pair of people on the history of the "Fanny Wars," the critical debates and internet flamewars that have been raging over the character of Fanny Price since Mansfield Park was published. They did well enough in giving a general account of it, but for the most part I was too sleepy to seriously analyze what they were saying. Except when, among all the other things they cited indicating Mansfield Park's relatively low popularity compared to the other Austen novels, they tried to make a nod to the world of fanfiction, which would've been nice, except that they seemed to believe fanfiction.net is still a go-to place, as they cited how many pages its Pride and Prejudice category had and how many pages its Mansfield Park category had.
Got back upstairs to see the Caps and Habs had gone into overtime, and we watched the shootout as I tried to explain to mom what was going on. Not sure she got it, and wasn't in the mood to explain further when the Caps lost it, so just went to bed right after again.
I first ventured from the hotel looking for food where I could find it, and headed towards a drugstore which I had managed to locate by multiple google searches. Breakfast ended up being a bag of potato chips purchased at a local subway. The drugstore turned out to be a huge one, and I was able to get good sized shampoo and conditioner, toothpaste for mom(except she then put it on *my* toothbrush when I can't stand the taste; I had to get a new one today), and a tiny bottle of deodorant small enough I was even able to take it home on the plane.
After dropping them back at the hotel I decided because of the temperature outside to search for the "underground city" the guide claimed was easily accessible from multiple points around the hotel. After a couple of false starts I managed to get in. It consisted of multiple shopping malls linked together, which I spent some time walking through until I got bored, then returned to the surface just in time to see the Christ Cathedral and St. Phillip's Square. There were a lot of homeless people clustered around the former.
I continued walking above ground, next hitting the Place des Artes, a complex of peformance spaces and the Museum of Contemporary Art. But I didn't feel like going in, and it was about time for lunch, so I went back into the underground network and found a food court. There I found a certain Italian place and enjoyed a small dish of their spaghettini bolonaise, and also the food court's free wifi, since my iPhone's ability to catch a sprint signal was out for the count for multiple reasons(I had to take it to the Apple store today for one of them, in fact). I texted with a friend of mom's who lives in Toronto and had been trying to get in contact with us to wish us a good trip since we'd left!
I kept on walking, now aiming for the Grande Bibliotheque, first above ground, then tried to go underground again at the nearby college, but the entrances to the buildings were all blocked by students holding signs. I didn't know what the French words on them meant, but from what I've heard about the Montreal government since, I suspect they were probably right to be making a fuss over whatever they were making a fuss over. I finally reached the Bibliotheque mostly walking above ground.
The Grand Bibliotheque is a library that consists of five floors of material, not counting the kid's section, mostly in French, but with some English-language items too. I explored the stacks, read the first paragraph of one French work, some more of two more English ones, and watched a scene from Giselle and parts of two more from a Cendrillon that were playing on a display about ballet. Then I went down to the basement where they have an exhibition hall, and there was a very creatively done and mostly bilingual exhibit detailing the life and works of French-Canadian playwright Michel Tremblay. There were films of him talking about his life, from hiding under the table to observe his family as a kid to delighting in seeing how his plays are now translated and performed all over the world today.
At this point my legs were burning, but I had wanted all day to go the Museum of Fine Arts. So I got onto the metro, which had a stop just below the Bibliotheque, and took a short ride mostly back the way I had come and then a little further, and from there tracked the museum down. There I discovered that those who are 30 and under got to see the general collection for free! So even with my legs continuing to ache and protest, I first explored a collection of Napoleonic objects, including objects owned by him or his relations, paintings, statues, and a couple of British cartoons. Also a medallion with a lock of his hair owned by George Sand, which I told mom about later. Then I went up a floor to explore galleries tracing the history of art from the early Middle Ages to the belle epoque. It was quite amazing, to start with only a room each of fragile surviving sculpture and stained glass from the medieval and Renaissance periods, then go through a small corridor to the other side of the floor, where suddenly there was room upon room to show all the different forms of painting and sculpture that developed in different parts of Western Europe.
I finally forced myself out of the galleries around 5 PM to go looking for dinner, especially as I did not want to be anywhere near any bars or other places for viewing hockey come 7, when my home team were scheduled to play the beloved local guys. When I found a larger restaurant version of the same Italian place I'd gotten my lunch from earlier in the day, I decided to hell with it, and sat down to a larger version of the exact same dish(with garlic bread), watching pregame coverage complete with glimpses of the Caps on the place's TV. Around six I got back to the hotel, and there was unexpectedly joined by my mother, who had gotten burned out trying to deal with her fellow members of the Fanny Burney Society and had decided to skip their dinner. She ended up going downstairs for soup while I watched the first part of the Caps-Habs game, the part where the Caps played well.
Once again I had exhausted myself early, and this was a problem, because that evening there was our first JASNA event to go to: a presentation by a pair of people on the history of the "Fanny Wars," the critical debates and internet flamewars that have been raging over the character of Fanny Price since Mansfield Park was published. They did well enough in giving a general account of it, but for the most part I was too sleepy to seriously analyze what they were saying. Except when, among all the other things they cited indicating Mansfield Park's relatively low popularity compared to the other Austen novels, they tried to make a nod to the world of fanfiction, which would've been nice, except that they seemed to believe fanfiction.net is still a go-to place, as they cited how many pages its Pride and Prejudice category had and how many pages its Mansfield Park category had.
Got back upstairs to see the Caps and Habs had gone into overtime, and we watched the shootout as I tried to explain to mom what was going on. Not sure she got it, and wasn't in the mood to explain further when the Caps lost it, so just went to bed right after again.
